Digital Extra

The bird won.

But the contest was close, and the oil-soaked creature, a loon, survived only because an Adirondack man wouldn't let it die.

South Kingstown's John Waterman, 48, says that once you've floated across a mountain pond in early morning, and you've heard the invisible loons laughing and crooning behind a curtain of rising mist, you never forget.

An outdoorsman who fell in love with our seashore during his Seabee days at Davisville, Waterman lives in a log house that he built with his own hands in '82.

It's up on Gravelly Hill, in among the oaks where you can see deer from the back porch.

As the loon flies, it's less than a mile from where the hulking oil barge North Cape lay beached in the surf yesterday.

It was 6 a.m. when Waterman flipped on the TV news and saw the bedraggled loon, a once-graceful creature reduced to scuttling like a crab through the sand.

"I said to myself, `Go get that bird,' " Waterman recalls.

So he grabbed an armful of blankets and towels, jarred the ice loose from the doors of his pickup, and headed for Moonstone Beach.

He found the bird cuddled limply in the arms of a woman who had discovered it and pitied it. She had wrapped it in her scarf.

He offered to care for it and she handed it over, but by the time Waterman got home, he says, "I thought it was dead."

Waterman, now in management training but once a nurse's aide, happens to own a stethoscope. He pressed it to the loon's breast and a heartbeat thumped in his ear.

Later, when Waterman's daughter, Jodie, awoke, she couldn't believe what she saw and heard: A loon was in the tub. Her father was giving it a bath.

Then he fluffed and dried the bird and snuggled it into an electric heating pad near the fireplace. A few hours later he drove it to the state biology station in Wickford for eventual release.

"This bird's going to make it," said Waterman.

During our last spill, in 1989, some scientists, trying to estimate the monetary damages, assigned dollar figures to the wildlife that the oil had killed.

Using measures such as potential value to hunters, bird watchers, and others who might spend money enjoying wildlife, they proposed that each loon, and other waterfowl, be assigned a value of $7.88 for every year of their lives.

So if John Waterford's loon was, say, 6 years old, we might assign to it a value of $47.28.

Let's remember that figure as the barge North Cape lies this weekend like a giant, toxin-filled eggshell on our pleasant shores.

Let's contemplate with sorrow the idea that we are forced to put dollar values on the fluid grace and sonorous whoop of the loon. But, such is the obscenity that the fouling of our shores puts upon us.

Think of it: For this vigorous, streamlined creature that flies 62 miles an hour; that dives 200 feet true as a waterborne arrow; that with haunting cries in the mist raises the hackles on John Waterman's neck: $42.78.

Gerry Goldstein is the Journal-Bulletin's regional editor for South County.