sjsprWriting

A normal teenage boy would usually spend his summer in camps. Or with family up in the Northeast. Maybe even touring Europe with his parents and siblings. Not me.

Well, for starters, I’m an only child. Have been for 18 years. And my parents aren’t exactly normal per say. They’re bird researchers, and yes, it is as boring as it seems. Every summer, my parents take me somewhere ‘exotic’ for two months to look at different bird species as part of their research. This may sound fun, but when you have to spend hours of the day scouting out the same twenty endangered birds, and your clothes somehow always gets tainted with bird species, it’s not really as ‘cool’ and ‘memorable’ as my parents make it out to be. That is, until this summer…

My parents recently heard about a large bird refuge just off the coast of New York, near The Bronx. It’s a small island, called North Brother Island, evidently north of South Brother Island, which was taken over by some brewery factory I forgot the name of. North Brother Island, however, has a pretty different history than that of its neighbor. It seems before the island became the 7th bird refuge I’ve visited in my lifetime, it was an eerie, bacteria infested asylum. Let me explain myself.

The island was founded by the Duth West India Company in the mid-1500s. You know, the usual colonialism. The island, however, wasn’t used until the 1800s, when it became a hospital housing isolated patients of really infectious, and at that time really incurable, diseases. It even house Typhoid Mary, the first American patient to ever develop Typhoid fever. She was a runaway from the law, and in this case lots of doctors, until she was finally caught and sent off to North Brother Island. She was forced into three decades of isolation in that hospital…until she died of pneumonia. Creepy woman if you ask me. The island was also the site of some freak ship wreckage that killed over a thousand people due to a mysterious fire. If that wasn’t weird enough, the island then became a housing for war veteran who couldn’t find jobs…until it closed soon after because of an economic recession. For some time after that, the island became an asylum for adolescent heroin users. Yes you read that right. Many of which were held in solitary confinement against their will. And low and behold, the asylum shut down and the island became…tun tun tun…a bird sanctuary. Pretty anti-climactic ending if you ask me.

I don’t know, I have a strange feeling about this place. Something tells me I’ll find a lot more than just a couple of fulvous whistling ducks and pink footed geese. I have a feeling I’ll discover something bigger…something…a little more rare…and please lord don’t let it be a mute swan.