Great view

Description

At home on the rubbish heap

"Hey Jonny, are you dreaming? The rubbish truck is coming!" "Oh, uhh... yeah, thanks for waking me up." I must have just dozed off a bit, Jonny thought, and dashed over to the fresh rubbish the rubbish truck had just brought.

Jonny and his parents lived on the rubbish mountain in Boberg. Why that was, Jonny wasn't sure either. He had once heard that seagulls always live by the water and catch fish and that seagulls learn to sail over the waves in a storm. But none of that applied to Jonny, and since he had lived on the rubbish heap all his life, it didn't bother him at all. On the contrary, Jonny knew exactly in which corner of the rubbish mountain the canned fish were lying around, had many friends on the rubbish mountain and his whole family was doing very well where they lived. There was everything they needed on the rubbish heap.

The only thing that was a bit annoying was that since a few years people had started to put their rubbish in rubbish bags in their bins. They did this so that it didn't stink so much in their rubbish bins. But at Jonny's dump, the rubbish bags made a terrible stench. Not at all when the bags were lying around like that, but Jonny had to pick them open to find out what was inside. And after picking them up, there was always a terrible smell coming out of the bags before Jonny could smell whether there was anything tasty inside besides the stench. That's why he didn't like the bags so much. Besides, they often stuck to his beak.

One day Jonny had an idea. He took a big nail and an old loaf of bread. He tapped the nail through the bread with his beak so that the tip of the nail came out of the bread on the underside. It was a lot of work and when he was done, Jonny had a real headache from all the tapping.

The other seagulls thought he was crazy: "Jonny, what are you doing? You're going to break your beak. You're not a woodpecker, you're a seagull" "Haha", of course Jonny knew he was a seagull. Even if he didn't live by the water. But he didn't say a word about why he needed the bread with the nail.

The next morning, when the rubbish truck had just brought new bags of rubbish and all the seagulls started to pick up the stinking bags, Jonny took his bread with nails, flew over one of the rubbish bags and dropped it. It fell onto the bin bag in such a way that the nail first made a hole in the bag and then the bread pushed all the stinking air out of the bag.

By the time Jonny got to the bin bag, all the smell was gone and he could smell inside the bag to see if there was anything good to eat inside. The other seagulls were amazed. After Jonny had picked up seven bags this way in no time and wanted to eat his prey in peace, there was applause from all the gulls sitting around Jonny.

"Where did you get that idea?" they asked him.
Then even his friend Sven came up to him and asked if he would mind if Sven copied his idea. "Of course I don't mind if you copy my idea. On the contrary. If you all like my idea so much that you copy it, that's the greatest praise I can imagine," Jonny said.

All the dumping gulls congratulated Jonny on his great idea and made their own sandwiches with nails inside. Since that day, life at the dump was even more pleasant and when Jonny had another idea, the dump gulls listened to him attentively. After all, no one wanted to miss Jonny's next good idea.

And Jonny had many ideas

Jonny makes a plan

When Jonny was very small, his grandpa, who was also called Jonny by the way, had told him stories about the sea.

Jonny's grandpa had grown up by the sea and only became a dumping gull much later by chance, but we'll get to that story later. He had told Jonny how salty the air smelled by the sea, had told him how the sun was reflected in a thousand little stars on the sea and had also told him how he could fly so well as a young man that he glided close over the waves during storms and got really soaked by the spray of the waves. And whenever Grandpa started telling stories and Jonny listened to him breathlessly, Mum would come and tell Grandpa to stop putting ideas into the boy's head. Jonny didn't know what fluff was, but he was quite sure that grandpa hadn't put anything in his head. After all, grandpa had only told stories.

But since then, there was this feeling in Jonny that somehow he had to see the sea.

Unfortunately, Jonny couldn't fly as well as his grandpa, because after all, he didn't really have to fly much at his rubbish dump. Twice a day the rubbish truck came. Then he had to fly up to avoid being hit by the new rubbish bags, but as soon as the rubbish truck was gone, he could waddle around comfortably between the rubbish bags. But since his invention with the bread and the nail, Jonny flew more and more.

Sometimes he even tried to stay in the air for hours, looking for a place where the air was rising. In this rising air, Jonny then let himself be carried higher and higher to sail down afterwards in large circles. This was fun, but sailing down was also quite exhausting, as Jonny had to keep his wings stretched out all the time. But with each day it became easier, so that by now Jonny could even stay in the air until he got bored.

One day, when Jonny had once again soared really high and the sun was shining, Jonny saw a long blue streak of glitter in the distance between the fields. His first thought was to fly over and have a look, but then he remembered that the afternoon garbage truck would be coming soon and that the other seagulls would pick out the best bits if he wasn't there on time. So he flew back and told the other gulls what he had seen.