There is a place that fills your body with sound and your memory with movement. That place is Baily Head, and it called us across the seas this morning.
We landed in swells of surf upon black sand covered in chinstrap penguins. In waves they arrived, leaping, porpoising, belly-flopping through the foam, to be met by a gathered gang of ocean-facing siblings ready for the sea.
A whole river of them moved from the high tide mark to the tops of the hills two kilometers high and as far away. They marched in both directions, like squat men in business suits, all with private schedules but collective meeting points, crossing in front of one another to create a tapestry of blurred black and white threads in my eyes.
At first it seemed a thriving metropolis of symmetry and sameness. But then one character would suddenly stand out. Detouring to peck a boot. Carrying aloft a pebble souvenir. Picking a fight with a fellow pedestrian. Snoozing in the middle of the traffic.
I stood near the river of penguins and listened to their soft feet padding over wet volcanic earth, penguins otherwise beak-bobbing silent. As the sea fell away behind them, the center of the valley was filled with just this sound of a thousand soles, this music of momentum.
But as I climbed higher up the hill, the voices of the nesting neighborhoods gathered strength. By the time I mounted the first balcony of nests, the entire earth seemed to vibrate with their calls. All around me a landscape awash with black and white bodies and pink stained nests and hunched grey chicks. Countless conversations and wing-flapping speeches in over 100,000 voices.
Below, the river continued to flow as it had done for thousands of years, connecting the sea to the sky. Amidst it, I was motionless. Drowning in this liquid march that ebbed and flowed around our river-stone red parkas.
We landed in swells of surf upon black sand covered in chinstrap penguins. In waves they arrived, leaping, porpoising, belly-flopping through the foam, to be met by a gathered gang of ocean-facing siblings ready for the sea.
A whole river of them moved from the high tide mark to the tops of the hills two kilometers high and as far away. They marched in both directions, like squat men in business suits, all with private schedules but collective meeting points, crossing in front of one another to create a tapestry of blurred black and white threads in my eyes.
At first it seemed a thriving metropolis of symmetry and sameness. But then one character would suddenly stand out. Detouring to peck a boot. Carrying aloft a pebble souvenir. Picking a fight with a fellow pedestrian. Snoozing in the middle of the traffic.
I stood near the river of penguins and listened to their soft feet padding over wet volcanic earth, penguins otherwise beak-bobbing silent. As the sea fell away behind them, the center of the valley was filled with just this sound of a thousand soles, this music of momentum.
But as I climbed higher up the hill, the voices of the nesting neighborhoods gathered strength. By the time I mounted the first balcony of nests, the entire earth seemed to vibrate with their calls. All around me a landscape awash with black and white bodies and pink stained nests and hunched grey chicks. Countless conversations and wing-flapping speeches in over 100,000 voices.
Below, the river continued to flow as it had done for thousands of years, connecting the sea to the sky. Amidst it, I was motionless. Drowning in this liquid march that ebbed and flowed around our river-stone red parkas.
