My mother was a substitute school teacher and avid reader. As soon as we could walk and talk, she took us to the library to get our first books. She had us reading early and she taught a generation of school kids to read. One of those books was “Mr. Popper’s Penguins”, about a rather hapless but adventurous main character who finds himself with too many penguins.
Our family has a running joke about penguins. it started when my husband looked at me across the kitchen one day early in our marriage and said “Penguins”. ” Huh?” I replied, holding the refrigerator door open. “Penguins” he said again, a little more emphatically. My husband does not say a lot unless he has to. “I don’t understand”, I said, rearranging the items in the fridge so I could see better. Finally he explained, “By Penguins I mean you are letting all the cold air out of the refrigerator, holding the door open too long. Our kitchen will become a rookery”.
Enter two energetic kids into our lives. The kitchen starts to really look and sometimes smell, like a rookery. Their friends come over, and the scout troop, and the triplets from down the street. Every one of them walks into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, and stands there. “Penguins!” shouts my husband. Over the next twenty years “Penguins” was like a mantra, a true reflection of our parenting style. Recently our daughter and her husband bought their first refrigerator. She was so excited and group texted all of us with pictures. “Penguins”, “penguins”, “❄️❄️🐧🐧”, said the group texts back.
Unlike the children’s book, most penguins reside not in iceboxes but in Antacrtica. The “Crystal Continent” however, is a little like the refrigerator after you close the door. Like a freezer, the ice accumulates and settles, and breaks off and no one really thinks about it until they hear the sound of the ice chunks falling from the other room. We were all watching the Larson Ice Shelf as it was supposed to break off sometime soon. That was when the pamphlet arrived.
It was a hot and humid day and my internal cooling system was running at a more frenetic pace than the AC. The pamphlet was long and folded in triplicate with an aquamarine cover. There were pictures of ice and a sleek boat in the foreground. Just looking at it made me stop sweating. I opened it and the pictures got better. There were penguins, whales, fine dining, naturalist lectures, and a celebration commemorating the Byrd expedition, and the first geologist to map Antarctica. I felt called. “Let’s Go”, I said.
The first things you need to go to Antarctica are an expedition to join, and money. The second thing you need is time. One can either have Money or Time, but its hard to have both. I had come to appreciate that Time is more valuable than Money, and was ready to retire. Over the twenty plus years we’d been working, my husband and I had become experts at scrimping and saving, and stretching our limited supply of vacation days. For me, it was easy – the trip would coincide with my retirement, allowing me to use vacation days I had earned. It was a unique situation and for a short while, I would have both Time and Money. My husband saved an extra week of vacation from the previous year and we had our two weeks required for the trip.
Next we needed equipment: boots, long underwear, waterproof camera bags, collapsable walking sticks and lots of socks were recommended. “My muck boots arrived!” I phoned my husband to tell him. “I love them!” Walking sticks in hand, I waddled awkwardly around the house. I even felt like a penguin.
I was very excited about the trip. Then I started getting nervous. Then I started to panic. What had I done? Antarctica is a long way from home. First there’s a ten hour flight to Buenos Aires, then a four hour flight to Ushuaia, Then a two day boat ride across the treacherous Drake Passage, followed by daily treks in zodiaks alongside killer whales. You cannot get home easily. We were empty nesters but I could still envision several scenarios where I would want to get home in a hurry. Getting airlifted home in an emergency costs thousands of dollars. We bought the overpriced insurance and it bought me peace of mind.
Approaching retirement, I was wound a little tight already. I had been going through a lot of emotional and financial transition planning. The ledge I was on felt more like a precipice. I was looking at leaving a career I had worked my tail off for, sacrificed for, and fought very hard to build. I had guilt over the times I had made this demanding lifestyle a priority over my now grown and launched family. My little penguin nest was empty and I missed having them as my inspiration, my reason to be the best I could be. Work hours were creeping up and I was parked in my last assignment, in a rather crowded and boisterous workroom. “What’s your spirit animal?” a typical conversation from a day in the workrooms where banter, teamwork, and comaradery rule. People shouted out things like eagles, and gazelles. I said “mine must be a seal or a dolphin, I love swimming”. I went back to my task, leaving the dolphin behind and a geologic problem staring at me instead.
Landing a job as a geologist is not at all easy. Keeping that job is even harder. It had taken me six years in college and graduate school and more than twenty years of proving myself to land and keep my job. The competitive industry and tight economy means you have to fit your life around the job and not the other way around. The motto is “as long as the work gets done” you can have all the flexibility you need to “manage” your life outside of work. Over the years we had worked out how to juggle the demands. The reality is, if you can’t do that well or quickly, someone else gets to be the geologist, making maps and flying around the world, being wined and dined at business events. Its a heady lifestyle and everyone wants it, but it comes at a cost. The highs are high – cool technology, travel, field trips in the mountains, meeting dynamic people, and contributing to the world economy. But the lows can be very low. If I stayed too long I knew it could take a toll on my health and wellness and more importantly, my self esteem. I liked my job, and had made it to a pinacle in my career a couple of years prior to this. I was proud of my accomplishments. As a senior advisor I was no dummy, but the system and the snarky comments that come with being in a competitive work place were suddenly making me feel like one. Like a penguin on an ice flow approaching the Drake Passage, I was watching the crack in the Larson Ice shelf get bigger and bigger. It was time for me to hop aboard a different boat, one with my husband and fellow sojourners, all gingerly sipping Gluwein after our excursion to Penguin land. I was ready to leave the safety of the dynamic nest I’d been a part of for so long.
The expedition to Antarctica was the trip of a lifetime. We’d awake in the morning and look out at the icebergs floating by. We’d meet great people, hear wonderful lectures, and take fantastic treks on the zodiaks. Best of all, for the first time in a long time, I had stopped sweating. I was no longer sweating physically and no longer sweating the next deadline or review. Like Mr. Popper, I saw my dream come true and saw so many penguins, up close and personal, watching them walk in their funny, uncoordinated way, back to their pushy, boisterous, and sometimes smelly, rookeries. I stood one day donned in my parka and muck boots, walking sticks in hand, and watched one brave little penguin as it left the nest, running awkwardly down the hill. It stopped at the shore and looked back, once, before making a beautiful little swan dive into the icy cold water. It dove under and swam gracefully away, a pure picture of happiness. I decided then and there that brave little Penguin would be my spirit animal from now on.
(lwr 10/12/2017)