When I was a little boy back in the 1950s one of the best things in life, easily beating birthdays and Christmas morning was when an adult would bundle me up and we would head out to one of the city beaches to watch the Harbor Seals.
You could see seals at the Bronx Zoo and at the Coney Island Aquarium, but absolutely nothing beat seeing them in the wild, if you can call a New York City beach "the wild." But there they would be barking and splashing, climbing the big rocks that broke the surf and chasing each other on the wet sand.
My grandmother would always buy a bucket of something, I don't remember what, and she would allow me to toss food to the seals as long as I kept a safe distance. I couldn't imagine what harm these animals could do, but my grandmother believed that you could catch all kinds of diseases from anything living that wasn't Jewish. So I obeyed. It was enough to watch them.
And then they stopped coming. No more seals. The spread of city, pollution, exploding human population, increased boating traffic in the bay...who knows...they went away.
Another New York City childhood memory lost to the mists of time?
Almost, but not quite! The seals have started to return! Harbor Seals were first spotted exploring Lower New York Bay in 2001, after decades of absence. Today, they are back in force and just seeing the photographs from the New York Times made me feel like a 5 year old boy. I can still smell the salt and the fish and I can hear them barking happily as we approach with that bucket of something.
great memory, and I just love how it is a "bucket of something"
Posted by: justin | Wednesday, 29 March 2006 at 07:43 PM