Sandra's Choice

For my mother, who has always supported even my wildest, most impractical dreams.

Sandra the solitary sandpiper watched her chicks totter in and out of the shallow water, at the edge of the deep Amazon River. She looked down at her long scaly toes in the sand, then she closed her eyes, letting the sun soak into the feathers on her back. She let out a small sigh of contentment. Not a day went by when she wasn't thankful to have found this place, so different from the one she came from, yet which felt so very much like home. Her mind wandered then back to her homeland, Alaska, and the first time her mother had talked to her of faraway places:

‘You don't have to stay by this muskeg bog forever, under this heavy sky. There are places where the water dances. It sparkles in the sunlight as it scrambles over the pebbles.’

‘Water moves, Ma?’ asked Sandra, captivated.

Until then she had only known the stagnant bog.

‘Why, yes. Sometimes it moves in small, lively streams, scintillating in the sunlight, and sometimes it advances as a dark mass, heaving its way towards the ocean. If you fly all the way to the Amazon, you will find a formidable river. And when this bog hardens into an inhospitable block of ice, and the hearts of all the sleeping animals around it slow down so much they almost stop, the Amazon is alive, and its water warmed by a generous sun.’

Sandra remembered how she had stretched her wings then, and felt the beating pulse of adventure spread like fire till their tips. She had never seen the Amazon River, but her mind was filled with images of a powerful flow of water, nurturing teeming aquatic and jungle life.  

‘You can go there,’ went on her mother. ‘That's why humans call us solitary sandpipers. Because that's what we do. We soar above mountains and over oceans, alone. We are free, independent, insatiable explorers.’

Sandra did leave, soon after that, on her first adventure.

She had not flown very far when she spotted water moving like her mother had described, flowing like a thin stream of liquid silver through the spruce trees. She alighted on a pebble and marvelled as the water bubbled and splashed around her.

A saw-whet owl watched her, bemused, from a tree. He was an independently minded fellow, on his way north even as the winter flexed her bony hands, threatening all creatures with her deadly grip and sending most birds south.

Sandra gave him a message: ‘If you see my mother, please tell her the water dances just as she said it would.’

The owl did as he was bid. A few days later, her mother's whispered reply swept through the loftiest boughs of the trees, who bent in the wind and murmured to the reeds, who in turn confided in the salmon that darted between their stems. Sandra was startled as the shimmering fish jumped out of the stream:

‘Your mother is proud of you,’ they proclaimed in chorus.

Sandra liked the sparkling, gurgling stream very much, yet still the impulse to see greater things, to soar higher, and to fly further throbbed in her heart. Her wings would not stay quietly folded.

And so, she flew. She flew over green hills and white mountains, through the smog above the cities and the sand clouds of the desert. The spruce forests were replaced by mangroves, and the heavy northern clouds by clear blue skies. Then one day she saw it. From afar it looked like a mighty, infinite snake winding its way through an immense field of grass. The Amazon Basin stretched out before her.

Soon she landed on the warm sand, and murmured to the soft breeze that caressed her feathers:

‘I'm here, Ma. It's as alive as you said it would be, and my feathers as warm. I feel I have reached my journey's end, the land where I belong. I will stay here forever and raise my chicks in the sunshine.’

And her mother, with her feet in the muddy peat, heard the murmur from afar. She lifted her eyes to the clouds that floated south, to reply. The clouds travelled over mountains and valleys. They did not stop to quench the desert's thirst but carried their message to the great river, where they packaged it carefully in a single raindrop. It fell from the sky onto the space between an alligator's nostrils just as they broke the surface of the river. Their owner heaved his heavy body onto the sand and said to Sandra, who stood on the riverbank:

‘Your mother is exceedingly happy to know that you have escaped the humdrum existence by the bog.’

That was a year before Sandra stood contentedly in the sand watching her tottering babies.

‘Mummy, Mummy! I have sand in my feathers!’ cried a chick, bringing her attention back to the present. Sandra began to fuss over her child, then paused as a shadow spread at their feet. She looked up towards the river. The sand was no longer golden but a dull yellow, and the deep water seemed deeper and darker than usual. She raised her eyes to the sky, where a dark, purplish-grey cloud seemed to have stalled above their heads.

‘We must find some shelter,’ she cried to her children.

But as she turned to run, a friend landed in the sand in front of her. It was Annabelle, a solitary sandpiper who had just arrived for the winter. She would go back to Alaska in the spring, like most people did. Sandra forgot the cloud above her for a moment in her excitement.

‘Annabelle! You made it!’ and she hopped from one thin leg to another, flapping her wings yet going nowhere. Her movements quickly slowed though when she saw the look on her friend's face. Annabelle did not hop and did not flap her wings. Instead, she stood solemnly on the sand opposite her friend.

‘What is it?’ asked Sandra.

‘It's your mother,’ replied Annabelle, as the sky above them broke into heavy rain. ‘Her wing is broken. She's quite helpless.’

The news swept in shock waves through Sandra's consciousness, curling its icy fingers around her heart.

‘Then I must go to her at once,’ she said, through the pelting water.

But a sound distracted her then, and she looked around to see her chicks dancing and laughing in the tropical rain.