This is an adorable little book about a young man who, on a short vacation from Argentina to Uruguay¹, rescues a penguin from an oil slick on the beach. But after he cleans up the penguin, it refuses to leave him, and he takes it back to Argentina with him, where he was working at a boarding school. The penguin becomes the belle of the ball² – he’s so adorable that everyone wants to be around him. Penguins are very social creatures and this one (“Juan Salvador”) takes to the attention well, and the young man finds his social engagement scores improving, which is good because he was kind of at loose ends. In fact, he learns quite a bit about life from this penguin, hence the title.

But it is the 1970s, not a good time to be in Argentina, and the young man needs to return home to England. Also, penguins make terrible pets. They have long scratchy nails and their poop reeks. I mean, reeks, you can smell your approach to a penguin colony from a distance. The man finds a penguin rescue center on a remote stretch of coast where he learns that penguins are so social that, when the rescuers are releasing penguins back into the wild, they can only release penguins in pairs or small groups: one penguin by themselves will refuse to be released.

I received this book as a gift from Leif, who I had met at a professional networking event. As I entered the room, the consultant facilitating the event welcomed me and asked how my recent trip had been. My eyes lit up and I replied that it had been awesome but that I wouldn’t take up his time while he was greeting people and I’d find time to tell him about it later. As I entered the room, Leif – whose company was sponsoring the event – introduced himself and said politely that he had overheard that I had just returned from a great vacation and where had it been?

Antarctica, I replied, and he blinked.

He remarked that he had thought I had just been to Disneyworld or Paris or something, and asked about Antarctica.

Whoa, Nellie, my friends, if you think I cannot shut about my 2016 trip now, you can only imagine what I was like a mere two weeks after returning!

“Well,” I said, “The thing about Antarctica…”

And was off to the races. 20 minutes later, I realized that half the networking event was gathered around me listening and asking questions as I described the flora, fauna, and geology of a land (and ocean) that I had visited for less than 10 days but had been obsessed with since 3rd grade. When I realized how carried away I had gotten, I quickly wound down and returned the evening to its intended purpose which was discussing retail information systems³.

Before the group dispersed, Leif asked about penguins.

The thing about penguins⁴ is that, in the wild, they are nothing like they are in the zoo. First of all, they are extremely noisy in the wild. When they are together, they are constantly talking, calling, yelling – they are never silent. The penguins I was around the most were Gentoo and they sound something like the combination of a goose, a donkey, and a large squeaky mechanism of some sort, kind of a honk-bray-creank. Someone in your way? Honk-bray-creank! Someone encroaching on your space? Honk-bray-creank! Someone steal a rock from your nest? Honk-bray-creank! Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya! When they’re together, they do not shut up.

But it is not unusual to come across them outside of the colony, if you are disembarking from a cruise ship and climbing up from the beach. They regularly return to the water to feed and, on the way from the colony to the shore, they create what are called Penguin Highways. One penguin breaks the snow with a path, another follows in their footsteps, followed by another, someone belly slides down hill on the same trail – pretty soon the snow gets compacted and becomes a Penguin Highway. We were warned not to walk on the Penguin Highways, because we shouldn’t interfere with the wildlife.⁵

But, the thing about penguins is that they are opportunistic: if a bunch of humans are going to break snow on what will eventually be a perfectly good Penguin Highway, they see no reason not to put it into operation even while the humans are still using it. The guides warned us, if you pause to take a picture, don’t back up without looking behind you because you may step on a penguin. And, indeed, my husband and I spent a good deal of time warning each other that there was a penguin just behind him/me, and we would literally step on it if we weren’t careful. Whilst they are on the Penguin Highways, away from the colony, penguins are silent.

Another thing about penguins is that they don’t approach humans for food, like birds in the park. They are just on their way somewhere and there are all these silly humans in their way. The humans walk funny and don’t honk-bray-creank like normal penguins, and they all look exactly alike in the red parkas (provided by the cruise line) and black waterproof pants. And they stop at inopportune times when a penguin is just trying to get down to feed or get back to the colony, and they’re so big they block the whole f*ing Penguin Highway and a penguin can’t get past until the human gets out of the way.

So, while we gawp and snap like tourists, the penguin waits for us to move with the same thinly veiled contempt that New Yorkers show tourists on Fifth Avenue during rush hour or lunch hour or any other time.⁶

I wasn’t planning to like penguins as much as I did. Like everyone else, I thought penguins were cute, and had a couple of penguin stuffed animals when I was a teen.⁷ But penguins are, quite honestly, overexposed. There are the Madagascar penguins and that penguin made by the Hello Kitty people and all those movies, and the Nat Geo documentaries and, well, I was over penguins. Until I saw them in the wild, and then I fell back in love with them. In the orientation on the cruise, a sweet old lady⁸ asked if she would be allowed to hug a penguin. No, the guide patiently replied, they are wild animals⁹, and besides penguins have lice about the size of quarters.¹⁰

When I returned home, I missed penguins and luckily had a membership to the zoo and could drop by the Central Park branch and see penguins any time I wanted to. But the thing about zoo penguins is that they are silent. They look bored and slightly depressed, huddled around the shores of their tiny swimming pool, waiting for the next feeding. Give those penguins some stimulation, would you?

Anyhow, my answer to Leif went on about as long as this post has now. A couple of days after that event, I received a package at my office containing this book, and a packing slip with a little note saying he had read this book recently and loved it and he hoped I enjoyed it, too.

So thank you for the recommendation, Leif! I did enjoy it.

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1. Apparently, I learned whilst in Buenos Aires in January (which is like Manhattan in August), when it gets hot, everyone leaves Buenos Aires and goes to Uruguay, the way that Manhattanites go to the Hamptons. I suspect Uruguay is different from the Hamptons otherwise. If you’ve been to both, let me know. ↩︎
2. Or I should say the beau of the ball, since the penguin was male. ↩︎
3. Information systems for retailers, that is. Not the retailing of information systems. ↩︎
4. Here we go again. ↩︎
5. And I think interfering with the wildlife is against the Antarctic treaty. ↩︎
6. It isn’t that we’re rude. It’s that we’re late. New Yorkers are always late. Or else we have timed our arrival exactly, and any pause caused by tourists who are just being tourists after all, will delay us and make us late. It’s not our fault that we’re late. Everything takes so much time. And everything we have to say is so dang important that we just can’t shut up. So every meeting we’re in lasts far too long and then we have to get to the next meeting’s location, and we probably haven’t had a bathroom break yet this morning, and could really use some more caffeine and maybe some breakfast. Even in my tiny office, I’ve taken to scheduling meetings to start at :05 or :25 after, just to give people time between meetings. They often remark how grateful they are and what a good idea it is, and continue to schedule meetings to start on the hour or half-hour – or worse, to end five minutes early, which you know is never happening, you’re lucky if meetings end on time. Or worse yet, look at the time in their previous meeting and say, “Oh, it’s okay, my next meeting is with Libby and she schedules her meetings to start at :05 after so we can keep talking” and then show up late and what was I talking about before this footnote turned into a rant…? Oh yes, penguins. ↩︎
7. One with a black bowtie and one with a red bowtie, like my cousins Chris and Kenny wore with their tuxedos when they escorted me to the debutante ball. And that’s a story for another day. ↩︎
8. At the time that we went, the cruises were still mostly filled with old people. Except for one young Chinese couple who were there, I suspect, with their grandparents, my husband and I were the youngest guests on the cruise. ↩︎
9. Although, based on recent news reports, that doesn’t seem to be stopping anyone with Bison or Bears. ↩︎
10. Perhaps national park rangers need to start rumors that bison have lice the size of quarters. Although then the tourists would demand that the rangers remove those lousy bison from their [human’s] nice clean parks. And, by the way, if you do not follow the national park twitter feed, you are missing something special. (I don’t participate in the blue bird, but every now and then I stumble across a compendium of their best tweets.) Their social media manager is a genius. Check it out. ↩︎