Alone on the Ice

Werner Herzog made a wonderful movie about Antarctica, in which he filmed a penguin colony doing their thing. You know, the males sitting on the eggs, losing half their body fat, the females hundreds of miles away shopping at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. At one point in the filming, the penguins are making their long trek across the ice to the ocean, where they will chow down on fish burgers to build up the body weight they lost sitting on their young. From far away, the camera picks up one penguin who is not following billion-year-old instincts. All the other penguins are waddling in a line towards the ocean. This guy is just standing there on the ice. You feel for him immediately, not just because it's twenty below and standing still on the ice has got to be even more painful than waddling on it, but because Werner has just asked one of his random off-the-wall questions of his penguin expert: something like "so, Professor Penguin Expert, do penguins ever go completely crazy?" and you know that this footage is intended to prove that the answer is Yes. Sure enough, Standing Still Penguin suddenly begins moving, but he's not following his buddies to the fish burgers, he's heading off in the wrong direction. He's making a solo bid for the mountains and the 1,500 miles of snow-covered interior beyond. Werner says nothing, just follows him for a bit with the camera. You hope Standing Still Penguin has just lost his thread of thought for a bit, that soon he'll notice he's the only one heading for the mountains and correct course. But he doesn't. Then Werner signs the death certificate. Even if they went down there, he narrates, and picked this penguin up and put him on the right path, it would be no good. He would simply continue on his march towards the mountains.

Some days I feel like that penguin.