Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
January 9, 2012
Laysan ducks stroll through Midway’s front yards littered with nesting and courting albatrosses. Several houses have albatrosses rather than flowers in their plant boxes.
A film I saw recently, Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” and a book I’m enjoying, Stephen King’s “9/22/63,” are stories about people who visit the past. I’m a time traveler, too. The magic portal I stepped through, however, not only sent me back in time six or seven decades, but also transported me to a parallel universe where wild animals and people live side by side in harmony.
I am once again working as a volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at Midway Atoll. Here crumbling seaplane hangars creak and groan in the wind, and ancient cannons and historical markers stand as memorials to those who fought here during World War II.
Another time trip on Midway is the town, expanded during the Korean, Cold and Vietnam wars to house the radar aircraft and crews of the Distant Early Warning line. The peak number of residents during this era was about 4,000. Today the roughly 65 workers who live here reside in a bygone era of white picket fences and bicycles on dirt roads. The present beams in from space. Inside Midway’s historic structures, people surf the Internet, watch TV and phone home.
Outside, every area possible has been given back to the animals that have bred on these islands, or tried to, for eons. More than a million albatrosses fly here each winter to mate and raise chicks. Single albatrosses 3 to 5 years old arrive on land for the first time since fledging to find, and bond with, a lifelong partner. The boisterous singing and energetic dancing of hundreds of thousands of these young birds turn the islands into an albatross rock concert, 24/7.
Birds already mated meet their partners at the nest site, reunite with quiet bill-touching and preening, and soon get to work fertilizing, laying and tending their egg.
With the three islands here totaling only a few square miles, it’s nearly wall-to-wall albatrosses during the breeding season. Another million or so Bonin petrels nest in “basement apartments,” burrows they dig beneath and around the albatross nests.
A couple dozen other bird species live among the albatrosses and petrels, and Hawaii’s green sea turtles and monk seals share the surrounding waters and beaches. On the turtles’ favorite beach last week, I counted 44 fat, healthy adult turtles nearly piled on top of each other as they napped in the sun.
Because Hawaii’s native animals are unafraid of people, the creatures nest, perch, fly and bask in places where people live, walk, work and play. With its 1950s architecture, fairy terns hovering over your head and albatrosses flip-flopping down the road, life at Midway is as charming as a Jimmy Stewart movie and as much fun as a Dr. Seuss story.
It’s tempting to remember the past as a better time, but the four wars that built Midway, and the slaughter that caused it to become a wildlife refuge, were not exactly good old days. For Midway the best of times is now.
To visit here search “Midway travel.” Brace yourself. All options, including volunteering to work, are expensive. But, then, time portals into alternate realities usually are.
©2012 Susan Scott