March 12, 1999

Journal of a Sabbatical

March 12, 1999

do penguins get headaches?

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I got about 150 pages into Waiting to Fly and decided I couldn't go another day without seeing penguins. Fortunately, three species of penguin (African, rockhopper, and little blue) live at the New England Aquarium so I didn't have to drive to Antarctica (hmm, how would one do that? I suppose I could drive to Chile and hitch a ride.) Driving to Boston is always an adventure, but with the snow and the Big Dig, it was a bit more so today.

There was an accident or something on the lower deck of 93 so traffic was backed up a long long way even in mid afternoon, that is, not rush hour. I stared for a long time at the billboard proclaiming "soon the road you are on won't be a road". How totally Zen. First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain, Then there is. Actually the billboard is reminding us all that the Big Dig will be over some day and there'll be a nice green park where we're currently sitting in traffic. And we'll be sitting in traffic deep in the bowels of the earth under that nice green park. How totally Zen.

The exits are all screwed up and all the ways I used to know to get places are wrong. I drove around the financial district in circles following detours, wondering if I'd live long enough to see the road not be a road, and feeling the weight of all the tall buildings closing in on me and making my headache worse. Oh, yeah, did I mention I still have the headache from yesterday? And did I mention it's still snowing?

But finally there I am at the aquarium and there are the penguins and I spend an hour and a half staring at them. The rockhoppers are mostly standing stock still by their little piles of pebbles, letting out an occasional braying sound. The chinstraps are swimming around or preening. The little blues are in their own separate section. They crawl into their burrows head first and then back out. Repeatedly. They are in fact little and blue. None of these creatures look like they could possibly have had an ancestor 5 1/2 feet tall weighing 300 pounds.

It occurs to me that it's getting late in the afternoon and I have not had any coffee, which could explain the continued headache. The aquarium cafe proudly serves Starbucks coffee. I sip it and watch the water shuttle ply back and forth between the harbor and the airport. I sip the coffee and watch ghostly planes descend from the white skies toward the white airport. I sip the coffee and watch a ring-billed gull fly directly into the wind, every muscle and feather vibrating and going nowhere fast. Clearly it has not occurred to the gull to land on the Discovery and wait 'til the wind changes.

Maybe I can beat the rush hour traffic if I leave before 4:00.

I get to sit in the parking garage watching a crane lift a truck into the air, turn it 180 degrees and move it about 20 feet down the street. This takes what seems like eons. I don't actually look at the clock in the car. I try to remember what you call this particular crane thing. It's not really a crane, more like a crane arm attached to something that looks like an articulated road grader type machine. It has the Caterpillar logo on the side. I once thought it would be a very cool idea to write a field guide to construction equipment for kids. Both kids outgrew the fascinated with construction phase before I got around to it. Now I wish I had such a field guide. What the heck do you call that thing? Does it have to lift the truck that high just to clear the curb? What's wrong with the truck anyway?

On the way home on 93, the snow intensifies and it's a little hard to see. But heck, at least I saw penguins. Now I can turn my thoughts to how in the heck it can have been snowing all day without accumulating? Where does the snow go? Does it melt? Sublime? And how much more are we supposed to get?