The Last Word On Nothing

I took this photo in the veterinary lab at the Duke Lemur Center in October, on a tour at the National Association of Science Writers meeting. The bin sat next to a sterile operating room where, according to the scientist who was showing us around, they mostly do emergency caesareans for lemur mothers in distress. (None of the center’s research involves harming lemurs, I was relieved to learn.)

What caught my eye about the bin was not the stuff inside it, but the label on its outer edge. “Needs reprocessed” is a grammatical construction that will be familiar to anyone from Indiana, Ohio or Pennsylvania, but I’d never heard it until I met my husband, who grew up in central PA and says things like “the dishes need washed,” “my brakes need fixed” and “the dog needs fed.”

If you were raised to be a stickler about traditional English usage, like I was, this may make you grind your teeth. Most people in the northeastern US, the upper Midwest, and much of the West reject the construction, but there are pockets of people in Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana who think it’s ok, according to this fascinating study from the Yale University Grammatical Diversity Project, which recently surveyed its use.

In regions where “needs washed” is most accepted, more than dozen other verbs can also get wedged in: “he deserves fired,” or “the paperwork requires completed” (gah!). It’s also commonly used for gestures of affection, like “the baby wants cuddled.” (I’m hearing a lot of that this week, since we brought our 5-month old baby to spend Thanksgiving with Pete’s family.)

“Needs washed” and phrases like it probably traveled to the United States with settlers from Scotland and Northern Ireland, according to the Yale researchers. When I saw the “Needs reprocessed” label at Duke, I was immediately intrigued — and also tickled by the odd juxtaposition of informal grammar against such a prestigious research setting.

It made me wonder who printed it out, and if it was meant to be funny or not. If not, I wondered further, was this research center a place where a person could just talk the way that came naturally to them? Where anyone could feel at home in science, no matter their backgound?

It was a nice thought — almost as pleasant as contemplating this pair of ring-tailed lemurs from Madagascar improbably perched in the woods of North Carolina. May we all feel this at ease, somewhere.

For the past month or so I have been in Argentina at Punta Tombo, a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Punta Tombo is not without its pleasures–how could one fail to enjoy spending hours a day with penguins?–but hanging over everything we do is the grim fact that the colony is declining. Since 1987, when researchers started to keep track, the number of active nests has decreased by about 60%.

It might be tempting then to think the Magellanic penguin is doomed. In fact it is not, or does not seem to be. Colonies north of Punta Tombo are growing at astonishing rates. Colonies south of Punta Tombo appear to be stable. It is just Punta Tombo and a few nearby smaller colonies–Punta Clara, Cabo Dos Bahias, others–that are experiencing such steady drops. The working hypothesis for these drops is that when penguins started to breed at Punta Tombo in the early 1900s, they were close to fish at a crucial time of year, when they have to feed their chicks. Now, owing to climate change or human fisheries or some combination of those factors or something else, the fish are no longer quite so close to Punta Tombo.

Sometimes when I walk back to our field house at the end of the day, I wonder why the penguins here don’t just leave and go to one of those colonies that is doing better. It’s not like they would have to travel so very far; and they’re quite good at swimming.

I was on one such walk when I came upon this fellow standing outside his nest. He happened to have a flipper band, so I know a little more about him than I do about the average penguin. I know, for instance, that he is twenty-one years of age. I know he hatched at Punta Tombo and came back to breed when he was four years of age. (Penguins have a high degree of site fidelity.) I know he had a mate for a few years and raised some chicks with her, but then she moved on or died. I know that since then he has been alone. Given how male-biased the sex ratio is at Punta Tombo, I know he will most likely never have a mate again.

I dropped down to my knees and took a few pictures of him. He opened his eyes a touch and gave me the once over before closing them again. The wind blew and he rocked a little. He looked perfectly contented, while all around him other penguins carried on. I left him to it. No matter the vagaries and uncertainties of the world, every year he comes back to his little patch of earth. This is his home place. This is what he knows, and for him it is enough.

My father and I spent many of my childhood summers canoeing Ontario’s lake systems, counting moose and camping under the stars. Then I got into my teenage years and he saw my brain go into risk-seeking mode; We switched to whitewater. We paddled Northern rivers in areas where there were so many mosquitoes that, statistically, they could not all land at once. We saw caribou and muskoxen and the sorbet-coloured Smoking Hills. We wrapped our canoe around rocks and paddled to the Arctic Ocean.

So when The Canadian Canoe Museum announced it had opened a grand new facility, that little three-and-a-half hour drive from Ottawa to Peterborough, Ontario wasn’t going to get in our way. It was enough advertising for us to hear that you can walk in the front of the museum and canoe out the back.