Endearing, On the Edge
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The boat rocks gently, but that’s the only gentle thing out here.
Because the water is so clear you can feel it crackling behind your eyes. The wind is so strong it can drive you behind any available shelter. The ice is so dense even the waves don’t break it down quickly.
Penguins have twenty two different kinds of feathers to survive this environment. It takes that many configurations to stay warm in a place like this.
They jump into water that measures below freezing so regularly that they are elegantly adapted to it. This is water I would survive no more than 10 minutes.
Then, when they are done with their first, second, or tenth feeding sojourn of the day, they hop up on land to walk on snowfields in bare feet where they are slightly less graceful but no less cold. They waddle up the hills to their nests and then slide on their bellies down to the shore again. They survive, they call to their friends.
They walk like toddlers, they swim like experts, and they are pitted against the biggest predator out here: the weather.
Perhaps it is because they seem so vulnerable (particularly on land) in the context of all the wicked conditions that they hit our hearts just so. The way they use their thin flippers for balance and they hop back and forth is a form of locomotion we humans use on slip-n-slides and in playgrounds. The way they pick up a rock from the ground and offer it gently to their mate in the building of a nest is so opposed to the sound of the wind curling its fingers around exposed rock and cracking it in half.
They fall often when they’re on land which has a kind of charm that we reserve for children just learning to walk or speak. For the fumbling performed by the young when they are just beginning to become human. Maybe that’s why I had to tuck my hands in my pockets while they wrestled themselves up, to keep from putting my hands under their layers of feathers and lifting. Then send them on their way with a smile.
That’s the story I tell myself, but they don’t need my help. The way they look and move is opposite the objective truth that they live in one of the harshest places on earth. They exist where nothing really should, certainly nothing with warm blood and the need to keep it that way.
Is it an intimate understanding of the vulnerability that makes us see them with such an eye? That brings out their resemblance to our own youth, whose survival is historically and evolutionarily just as difficult?
Maybe. But they are out here, under our observation or not, waddling through fierce conditions, existing on the edge.
