People Lister

There is an entire subculture of bird enthusiasts who visit birding hot spots of Alaska, including St. Paul and St. George, and with them they bring their birding checklists. With sometimes disturbingly giddy excitement, they check off the birds that they see on their travels one by one. I call it Nature Bingo. Just like Ordinary Bingo, I don’t really get the point.

But a surprising number of people do this, and be ye not fooled: listing is no ordinary scavenger hunt. These Listers are out for a challenge and also bragging rights, and consequently their lists are elaborate creations with columns and categories that make inventorying our old kayak shop seem like child’s play. The bird lists may include common, rare, casual, accidental, and vagrant birds – the latter few being the more exciting find because of their rarity. They may be further complicated by seasons – breeding, wintering, migratory, blah, blah. The listers then walk around, from cliff to cliff or island to island, and check off with enthusiasm when they spot a ne’er before seen on their list. Northern Fulmar, check…Brant, check…Northern Pintail, check…Rock Sandpiper, check…The most dedicated of the bunch might do this several times throughout the year in order to see as much as possible, especially the most rare and obscure birds of all.

The Listers have inspired me to make a list of my own: people I hope to meet. On the list could be ordinary or seasonal type folks, like orchard pickers, groupies, and watch salesmen. Others on the list could be the rarer, or perhaps obscure people I might meet. Think and antique wrench collectors, astronauts, or deep-sea treasure seekers.

I’ve met a fair number of these workers extraordinaire during my month out here, like Doug. Doug’s job is to shoo birds off the St. George runway. He has other work, too, which includes collecting swabs and samples from various bird species for avian flu testing. But never mind all that. In bold letters and all caps at the top of his work description it reads SHOOS BIRDS OFF RUNWAY. If you were a pilot flying on to a small island with about 3 million birds on it, you’d know this profession makes perfect sense.

Doug’s job is just one of many that I never realized existed, or at least never thought much about. Aside from people who are hired to clear runways of birds, there are also people who count seals, who work as “living historians” and pretend to be colonial Americans in North Dakota, who repair escalators, who trap foxes, who design toys for Natural Wonders, who plan corporate parties, and who make neon signs. In my month on this tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea, I’ve met all of these people, and I can’t help but wonder who else I may meet and what interesting things they have done.

Living on an island throws everything and everyone under a sharp eyeglass. It is so easy in the streets of Seattle or the slums of Manila look right through people, to pass them over, to not give them a second thought. But when you live in a place where you see a third of the town on your way to work, where newcomer to the island is known by day’s end, where your neighbor asks you the next day why you shut your lights off so early the night before, you learn a lot more about people as individuals, and the term community takes on a whole new meaning – for better or for worse.

I won’t live on an island forever, I’m sure, and I worry that one day, when I return to city streets, I’ll carry on with my day and forget about the other people around me. But maybe if I were a lister of people I would be more inclined to take chances and talk to individuals that I ordinarily pass by. The stubbornly naïve part of me that remains after my Peace Corps service thinks that if we all looked at the world as though it were an island, if we all took a moment to find out just a bit about our neighbors, then maybe we would all come that much closer to understanding and respecting each other.

Girl who started a silly trend of talking to strangers and subsequently caused restless nights for thousands of mothers, including her own…check.