The Man With Cheeto Fingers — Behind the Story

I started writing “The Man With Cheeto Fingers” back in early October 2025 after realizing that the ferry trip that Susan and I took to Ocracoke Island in June of that year had all the makings of a story. In fact, there’s not a lot of this piece that is fictionalized, from the young girls and their mother waiting to use the ladies’ room, to the guy with the camera, to Lance (or whatever his real name is) getting a photo feeding Cheetos to seagulls.

Except that Lance never got attacked by the birds. Which seems like a missed opportunity for the gulls in my humble opinion, because I still maintain that feeding them Cheetos for a photo opportunity was a dumb idea. In fact, all that happened was that they got some extremely cool photos. It really was sublime. Is it wrong to wish the birds attacked? Maybe.

Ironically, after deciding to write “Cheeto Fingers,” Liberty Insurance released a commercial vaguely reminiscent of the closing scene in the story. Dude sitting on a bench with the Statue of Liberty behind him feeds a crust of bread to a seagull, only to be mobbed like Tippi Hedron in Hitchcock’s The Birds.

I swear I wrote my piece first.

But I also combined my ferry trip with another incident I witnessed a few years back.

The school I work for, with a focus on environmental science, makes sure the students have field experiences related to scientific research. One of those trips is to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where we spend the better part of three days conducting studies of marine and shore life, ocean processes, and the region's history.

Early one morning, I witnessed a man standing on the balcony of his hotel room, facing the rising sun over the ocean, as many of the vacationers did. Except this guy decided to feed something (he was too far away for me to tell what) to a passing seagull. As you might guess, he got attacked, mobbed by countless birds, before he could pry the sliding glass door open and escape back into his hotel room.

I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

So you see, I simply joined the two stories together to write “The Man With Cheeto Fingers.” I took some additional liberties with the narrative because I thought there was also a point to be made, a sort of moral to the story: the idea that we take nature for granted, even choosing to exploit it, until it turns on us. This can happen in large, catastrophic ways, or—as in this case—in smaller ways.

I also believe that too much of our lives are spent trying to record the perfect moment instead of living in the moment—almost a contradiction. There’s a notion in our culture that if an event didn’t get recorded, it didn’t happen. The camera becomes a way to prove to the world what extraordinary lives we live, while we somehow miss the actual living part.

I love a beautiful photograph as much as the next person, and my daughter has taken some truly amazing photos that I adore. But in her art, she is working to bring the experience to me when I have not been able to be present myself. Her work can expand my world rather than justifying her presence in it. That’s pretty cool, itself.