by Richard Bach
Fletcher passed away last of all. It happened during a long lonely session of the purest and most beautiful flying he had ever done. His body vanished in the midst of a long vertical slow roll, something he had practiced since he first met Jonathan Seagull, and when he vanished he was not setting pebbles or meditating over slogans of Oneness. He was lost in the perfection of his own flight.
When Fletcher didn’t show up on the beach in the next week, when he vanished without leaving a note, the Flock was in brief consternation.
But then they gathered together, and thought, and decided what must have happened. It was announced that Gull Fletcher had been seen, surrounded by the other Seven First Students, standing on what would henceforth be known as the Rock of Oneness, and then the clouds had parted and the Great Gull Jonathan Livingston Seagull himself, clad in royal plumes and golden shells, with a crown of precious pebbles upon his brow, pointing symbolically to sky and sea and wind and earth, had called him up to the Beach of Oneness and Fletcher had magically risen, surrounded by holy rays, and the clouds had closed again over the scene to a great chorus of gull-voices singing.
And so the pile of pebbles on the Rock of Oneness, in sacred memory of Gull Fletcher, was the biggest pile of pebbles on any coastline anywhere on earth. Other piles were built everywhere in replica, and each Tuesday afternoon the Flock walked over to stand around the pebbles and hear the miracles of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his Gifted Divine Students. Nobody did any more flying than was absolutely necessary, and when it was necessary they grew strange customs about it. As a kind of status symbol, the more affluent birds began carrying branches from trees in their beaks. The larger and heavier the branch a gull carried, the more attention he earned in the Flock. The larger the branch, the more progressive a flyer he was considered.
A few in gull society noticed that by carrying the weight and drag of the branches around with them, the most faithful seagulls became disturbing flyers.
The symbol for Jonathan’s teaching became a smooth pebble. Then later, any old rock would do. It was the worst possible symbol for a bird who had come to teach the joy of flight, but nobody seemed to notice. At least, nobody who mattered in the Flock.
On Tuesdays all flying stopped and a listless crowd gathered to stand and hear the Official Flock Student recite. In a matter of only a few years the recitations stratified and hardened into granite dogma. “Ho-Jonathak-Gullak-Great Gullak-Oneak-have-pity-on-we-who-are-lower-than-sandfleas . . .” On and on, for hours, come Tuesday. It was a mark of excellence for the Official to run the sounds together rapid fire, so they couldn’t be recognized as words at all. A few insolent birds whispered that the sound meant nothing anyway, even if one could eventually figure out that there was in fact a word or two buried within it.
Images of Jonathan, pecked from sandstone, set with great sad purple-shell eyes, sprung up all along the coastline, at every cairn and replica cairn, centers to a worship heavier even than rocks could symbolize.
In less than two hundred years nearly every element of Jonathan’s teaching was taken out of daily practice by the simple pronouncement that it was Holy, and beyond the aspiration of common gulls, lower-than-sandfleas. In time, the rites and ceremonies that were planted around the name of Jonathan Seagull became obsessive. Any thinking gull altered course in the air so as not to even fly in sight of the cairns, built as they were on the ceremony and superstition of those who preferred excuses for failure instead of hard work and greatness. The thinking gulls, paradoxically, closed their minds at the sound of certain words: “Flight,” “Cairn,” “Great Gull,” “Jonathan.” On all other matters they were the most lucid, honest birds since Jonathan himself, but at the mention of his name, or any of the other terms so badly mauled by the Official Local Students, their minds snapped shut with the sound of trap doors closing.
Because they were curious, they began experimenting with flight, though they never used that word. “It’s not flight,” they’d assure themselves over and again, “It’s just a way of finding what’s true.” So, in rejecting the “Students” they became students themselves. In rejecting the name of Jonathan Seagull, they practiced the message he had brought to the Flock.
This was no noisy revolution; there was no shouting, no waving of banners. But individuals like Anthony Seagull, for instance, not fully grown into the feathers of adulthood, began asking questions.
“Now look,” he had told his Official Local Student, “the birds who come to hear you every Tuesday come for three reasons, don’t they? Because they think they’re learning something; because they think that putting another pebble on the Cairn is going to make them holy; or because everybody else expects them to be there. Right?”
“And you have nothing to learn, my nestling?”
“No. There’s something to learn, but I don’t know what it is. A million pebbles can’t make me holy if I don’t deserve it, and I don’t care what the other gulls think about me.”
“And what is your answer, nestling?” ever so slightly shaken by this heresy. “How do you call the miracle of life? The Great-Gull-Jonathan-Holy-Be-His-Name said that flight . . .”
“Life isn’t a miracle, Official, it’s a bore. Your Great Gull Jonathan is a myth somebody made up a long time ago, a fairy tale that the weak believe because they can’t stand to face the world as it is. Imagine! A seagull who could fly two hundred miles per hour! I’ve tried it, and the fastest I can go is fifty, diving, and even then I’m mostly out of control. There are laws of flight that cannot be broken, and if you don’t think so, you go out there and try it! Do you honestly believe—truly, now—that your great Jonathan Seagull flew two hundred miles per hour?”
“And faster,” the Official said in perfect blind faith. “And taught others to do so.”
“So goes your fairy tale. But when you can show me that you can fly that fast, Official, then I’ll begin listening to what you have to say.”
There was the key and Anthony Seagull knew it the instant he said the words. He didn’t have answers, but he knew that he would gratefully, gladly lay down his life to follow any bird who could demonstrate what he was talking about, show him just a few answers in life that worked, that brought excellence and joy into everyday living. Until he found that bird, life would remain gray and bleak, illogical, without purpose; every seagull would remain a coincidental collection of blood and feathers pointed toward oblivion.
Anthony Seagull went his own way, as did more and more other young birds, rejecting the ritual and ceremony that encrusted the name of Jonathan Seagull, sad at the futility of life but at least honest with themselves, brave enough to face the fact that it was futile.
Then one afternoon Anthony was flapping along above the sea, thinking blankly that life is pointless and since pointless is by definition meaningless then the only proper act is to dive down into the ocean and drown. Better not to exist at all than to exist like a seaweed, without meaning or joy.
It all made sense. It was pure logic, and Anthony Seagull had all his life tried to abide by honesty and logic. He had to die sooner or later anyway, and he saw no reason to prolong the painful boredom of living.
So he pushed over, from two thousand feet, into a dive straight toward the water, coming down at nearly fifty miles per hour. It was oddly exhilarating, to have made the decision at last. He had found the one answer that made any sense at all.
Along about midway into his death-dive, with the sea tilting and growing huge beneath him, there was a great whistling roar directly past his right wing and he was passed in flight by another seagull . . . passed as though he had been standing on the beach. The other bird was a white streak blazing down, a blurred meteor from space. Anthony, startled, bent his wings into dive-brakes and wondered helplessly at the sight.
The blur dwindled softly toward the sea, flashing down at the wave tops, and then bent into a hard pullup, beak pointing right straight back up into the sky, and rolled. A long vertical slow roll, twisting off into
an impossible full circle in the air.
Anthony stalled, watching; forgot where he was, stalled again. “I swear,” he said out loud, “I swear that was a seagull!” He turned at once toward the other bird, who apparently hadn’t noticed him. “HEY!” he called, as loud as he could. “HEY! WAIT UP!”
The gull pitched immediately up on one wing, moving at tremendous speed, blazed back toward him. Anthony in level flight, pulled hard into a vertical bank, and stopped suddenly in the air, as a racing-skier stops at the end of a downhill run.
“Hey!” Anthony was all out of breath. “What . . . what are you doing?” It was a silly question, but he didn’t know what else to say.
“I’m sorry if I startled you,” the stranger said in a voice as clear and friendly as the wind. “I had you in sight all the time. Just playing . . . I wouldn’t have hit you.”
“No! No, that’s not it.” Anthony was awake and alive for the first time in his life, inspired. “What was that?”
“Oh, some fun-flying, I guess. A dive and a pullup to a slow roll with a rolling loop off the top. Just messing around. If you really want to do it well it takes a bit of practice, but it’s a nice-looking thing, don’t you think?”
“It’s, it’s . . . beautiful, is what it is! But you haven’t been around the Flock at all. Who are you, anyway?”
“You can call me Jon.”
JonathanLivingstonSeagull.com
The last chapter is not an amazing story, though it feels like it.
How do adventures suddenly appear in one’s mind? Writers who love their work say that the mystery is a part of the magic. No explanation.
Imagination is an old soul. Someone whispers in the spirit, speaks softly of a bright world and the creatures there with joys and sorrows and despairs and victories, the tale finished and beautiful except for the words. Writers swirl images to match the action they see, remember the dialogue from beginning to the end. Simply insert letters, periods, and commas, and the story is ready to ski down the slopes of booksellers.
Stories are wrought not with committees and grammar, they spring from a mystery that touches our own silent imagination. Questions hold us puzzled for years, then a storm of answers come sudden from the unknown, arrows from a bow we’ve never seen.
So it was for me. When I stopped writing the fourth part, the story of Jonathan Seagull was done.
I read the fourth part over and again, at the time. It would never be true! Would the seagulls who followed Jonathan’s answers kill the spirit of flight with ritual?
That chapter said it could be. I didn’t believe it. Three parts told the whole of it, I thought, doesn’t need a fourth: a desert sky, dusty words to smother joy, almost. It doesn’t need to be printed.
So, why didn’t I burn it?
Don’t know. I put it away, the last part of the book believed in itself when I didn’t. It knew what I refused: the forces of rulers and ritual slowly, slowly will kill our freedom to live as we choose.
All that time passed; half a century, forgotten.
Sabryna found the story not long ago, ragged and faded, squashed under useless business papers.
“Do you remember this?”
“Remember what?” I said. “No.”
I read some paragraphs. “Oh. I remember, sort of. This was . . .”
“Read it.” A smile for the antique manuscript she’d found, which had touched her.
The typewriter’s letters were faded. The language was an echo of mine, though, way back then, a sense of what I was. It was not my writing; it was his writing, the kid from then.
The manuscript ended, and filled me with his warning and his hope.
“I knew what I was doing!” he said. “In your twenty-first century, hemmed about with authority and ritual, it’s strapped now to strangle freedom. Don’t you see? It’s planning to make your world safe, not free.” He lived his story, last chance. “My time’s gone. Yours isn’t.”
I thought about his voice again, the last chapter. Are we seagulls looking at the end of freedom in our world?
Part Four, printed at last where it belongs, says maybe not. It was written when nobody knew the future. Now we do.
—Richard Bach
Spring 2013
About the Author
RICHARD BACH is the author of twenty other books, including Illusions, One, and The Bridge Across Forever. A former USAF fighter pilot, gypsy barnstormer and airplane mechanic, he flies seaplanes in the Northwest.
His website is www.richardbach.com.
RUSSELL MUNSON began photographing airplanes as a young boy in Denver, Colorado. Photography and flying have been his passions ever since. In addition to his commercial photography career in New York City, Munson has taught Visual Perception at Phillips Andover Academy, Yale University, and the International Center for Photography. He is the author and photographer of the book Skyward: Why Flyers Fly, and authored and produced the DVD Flying Route 66. Munson’s fine art aerial photography is in private and museum collections, and can be seen at www.russellmunson.com. He photographs from his Aviat Husky airplane.
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