Miracle of the Gulls

If you’re Mormon, you probably grew up, as I did, hearing the story of the “Miracle of the Gulls,” in which the Mormon pioneers faced starvation as hordes of locusts devoured their crops in June 1848, less than a year after their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. The story has an Old Testament quality to it, with seagulls darkening the skies, descending en masse, devouring locusts (actually a kind of katydid called a “Mormon Cricket”) until they puked (literally), and then going back for more. When the crickets were gone—and the miracle accomplished—the seagulls left. In commemoration of this event, the Utah legislature made the California Gull the State Bird and imposed a criminal fine for anyone caught killing one. The Church also erected a monument on Temple Square that stands today with a pair of gilded gulls atop a tall, granite pillar.

Raised with that image of the event burned into my consciousness, it troubled me to discover, in my late twenties, that the story had grown in the telling. A Mormon scholar and professor of history at Brigham Young University named William G. Hartley did some research and found that only a few of the journals from that period recorded the event at all, and those that did referenced it in decidedly more mundane terms, recognizing the hand of providence less in the appearance of seagulls in isolation and more as one piece of a broader story of survival and eventual prosperity (something along the lines of “Some seagulls came and they helped, thank the Lord”). So, while the seagulls didn’t wipe out the crickets in one fell swoop, they did—doing what seagulls normally do—play a role in saving the pioneers’ crops and, as a result, helped save the pioneers too. That version, however, lacked the drama to hold much popular appeal, and so, over the years, the story morphed into the Hollywood version I learned growing up.

To my mind, the story and the way it’s evolved over the years raise important questions. For example, if we take Professor Hartley’s version of the story as the correct one, what does it say about God and nature of miracles?

The skeptic will no doubt jump in at this point and say, “Professor Hartley’s research just confirms that religion is a lot of hooey. Things happen according to natural law and these weak minded types, desperate to find God in everything, wildly exaggerate an ordinary occurrence to persuade others to drink the Kool-Aid.” But that’s not the lesson Professor Hartley took from his research, and it’s not the lesson I take from it either.

If the “true” story of the seagulls suggests anything to me, it suggests we need to broaden our sense of the miraculous, to recognize the hand of God in all things, and not merely the inexplicable. As with those early journal writers, the pioneer miracle strikes me as more about survival than seagulls—that a group of people could plunk themselves down in the middle of nowhere with nothing but what they dragged in wagons and handcarts over thousands of miles and survive a series of harsh winters in an unfamiliar land. That they endured says a lot about their own fortitude, sense of purpose, and spirit of cooperation. It also speaks to miracles in the form of help from Native Americans, winter snowpack in the high mountains to the East (providing a source of water during summers hot and dry), sego lilies (an edible bulb), native fish (harvested in great numbers by the early settlers), and, yes, seagulls.

Oh, I believe in the miracle of the gulls alright, and I don’t care whether they blackened the sky with their wings and ate every last cricket. Seagulls are scavengers to be sure, petty thugs of the garbage dump, but they are also beautiful, elegant creatures, white against the sky, embracing the wind with wide outstretched wings. Isn’t it miraculous enough that, in doing ‘what seagulls do,’ they helped the pioneers survive?

And isn’t life itself the greatest miracle of all? Here we sit on a tiny pin prick, one small speck in an infinite universe, pinched in a narrow band—a thin shell—between the fire below and the icy void of space. Our lungs burn oxygen, our cells burn energy from the sun, and we move and breathe and love and laugh. Isn’t it amazing?

Why do we long so for a God who parts the Red Sea or sends seagulls without number to do things seagulls don’t ordinarily do? Why do we have to dress everything up in the mystical? The God I know works in ordinary ways, no less miraculous for being “ordinary.” Shouldn’t we thank God for the countless miracles of our existence, for each day, for each breath? He sends rain, as the scriptures say, on the “just and the unjust,” and the rain is a miracle. He sends friends and family to love us, and that love is a miracle. He gives us strength to endure and that strength is a miracle. Yes, I believe in miracles.

(Photo courtesy of thebugs on Flickr, available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thebugs/529694292/.)