Filberg Park

• Fiction

								
The park is a leisurely walk from the town centre and just fifty metres from the Pacific Ocean. It’s named after the logging Baron Robert Filberg. The park's remaining Douglas Firs bear silent witness to its forested past that dominated the area before the arrival of the logging gangs. In the course of a few decades those majestic marvels of nature were chopped, hewn and floated down seas and rivers to satiate a market devouring
wood - mainly for construction.
Today Henry, now in his eighties, enters the park as he has done all his life -first
with his parents, then with his friends and now with a coterie of people he does not know and never met. The old park trails of his youth have been replaced with guided walkways designed to end with merchandising or restaurants, the latter popular with many offering fresh seafood brought to the town by the small flotilla of fishing boats that still ply their trade from the town's small marina.
But there is still one path, or rather a ‘route’ off to the left of the main walkway, hidden amongst trees and bushes left to grow wild that Henry knows well. Wearing his well worn hiking boots, a tweed jacket, mustard coloured trousers tucked into long knee length socks he looks left, then right, and ducks into the foliage. With arms swinging like windmills he clears his path to arrive at an outcrop of rock that looks out at the sea currently at high tide. He has arrived at ‘the spot.’ Henry removes two or three camouflage branches to open a full view of a stretch of sea water overflown by Eagles that provide the fish highways for spawning. And at this time of year the salmon begin to run ... and the eagles know it .
Douglas Street is a twenty minute walk from the park. The street, a dog leg cul-de-sac , ends with a dirt track edged with a column of ancient trees. The careful observer will see one of these wooden sentinels is different - the bark is bleached in parts and the trunk sparsely foliated. But at the summit a large nest is hosting, as it has each year, an eagle and one chick. Peering out from the eyrie, scanning in all directions and paying attention to any movement and detail that might signal a threat, the eagle maintains a constancy of care that ensures her chick remains safe from predators and any other challengers. But safety does not feed hungry chicks, so this adult raptor

 spreads her wings and lifts herself into the sky, climbing effortlessly on the thermal. Circling and climbing this winged wonder banks and turns setting a seaward direction. A zero sum game has begun, and the clock is running.
Henry sits quietly scanning the seascape and, sure enough, high in the blue sky he sees an eagle circling. The wings are at full span and this predator scans the land and sea. Henry waits. The eagle enlarges her circuit, turns and , as if air traffic control has given her permission to land, she lowers her head and identifies a landing point. What was once metres up in the sky is now a metre or so above the sea with wings acting as air brakes. Henry has a ringside seat and watches the eagle approach from right to left - a perfect viewing.The bird's talons extend and with inch perfect judgement this hunter gets closer and closer to the surface of the sea. Her silent approach is deadly - and, with a final extension of her legs and talons, she snatches from the sea a large fish vigorously resisting its capture, perhaps knowing that no amount of thrashing and writhing will undo its fate. Distance does not allow Henry to identify the type of fish, but that does not diminish the joy he feels as he watches the aerial hunting aerobatics of the eagle. Yes, the demise of such a splendid and beautifully marked fish seems shocking ... but, as we say, ‘there are many more fish in the sea.’ Henry sits back in his lair and smiles.
Some time later, and replacing the camouflage branches, Henry works his way back to the main park. No one pays any attention to the sudden appearance of an eighty year old lightly covered with leaves and brambles ... teenagers maybe - what have they been up to? but age brings with it its own invisibility and anonymity.
Sitting in his apartment Henry takes the black diary that sits under the coffee table. He has kept a diary since his grandfather suggested he did to capture those unique moments at Summer Camps. “‘Use your imagination ... just write ...’ It was as if his grandfather was sitting there with him. ‘Better,’ said Grandfather, ‘when in bed, prior to lights out, to just write. Write what you saw, who you met, what you did.’ The suggestion became a task, the task became a habit and the habit became a joy. The

 diaries span so many years and, from time to time, Henry’s contemporaries wrote in the diaries, Franky and Spud did, as did Jonah - all gone now, though their thoughts and musings are still there to be read. But nobody reads the diaries carefully stacked on the living room bookcase ... Henry runs his finger over the spine of his current diary, and opens it where his last thought had concluded ... the humming bird on his feeder on the terrace.
Henry charges his pen, enters today's date, and the place-Filberg Park - and writes.
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