Birds by the Shore by Jennifer Ackerman

Author:Jennifer Ackerman [Ackerman, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Finback whale

I once saw a jar containing a pickled human embryo in the National Museum of Natural History. It had a bulging reptilian head, a tail, and arches like gills just beneath the head. Our own living organs, eyes, backbones, hands, and feet originated in far places and different eras of time. Four hundred million years ago our piscine forebears wiggled over muddy flats, throwing their bodies in an S-curve. As a consequence, our arms swing in opposition to the swing of our legs. Our reflected past and some shadow of the future is paradoxically written in our bodies. We, too, are changelings, made of millions of bits of information strung together from an odd little alphabet and brought into being by an astronomical number of chance events over the long course of evolution. But for this we might be hovering just above the warm mud. As Stephen Jay Gould has written, those stubby, sluggish fins that became weight-bearing limbs—the necessary prerequisite to terrestrial life—evolved in an uncommon group of fishes off the main line. They were a fluke.

In some way all creatures bear traces of their past: ghost crabs their gills, whales their vestigial limbs, humans our liquid cells, the saltwater running in our veins, our feeling for the sea. “Why upon your first voyage as a passenger,” wrote Melville, “did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration when first told that you and your ship were out of sight of land?”

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