Yesterday I was standing with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosefox on the Battery Park City Esplanade, watching the Hudson rock scale-green and swarming with light from the wakes of the ferries; I said that it wasn't the sea, but it was the right color and it moved the right way, and Rose pointed out that it was a tidal river, so there was a lot of sea in it, and then suddenly the wind shifted and came up from the harbor and smelled enough like salt and I was very happy.
This morning I accompanied my mother and my niece to the New England Aquarium. We had last taken her two years ago, which is geologic epochs in terms of child development; she still loves sharks. She held out her hands again and again for the cownose rays to slide their soft silt-grey wings under and crooned over the epaulette shark pups sleeping in a sand-dappled tangle under the shelter of artificial coral; she let me hold her so that she could reach far out over the water and gently stroke the tail of an adult shark chilling in the shadow of mangrove roots. (I touched it after her. Its skin was cool and superfine as sandpaper, colored like mangrove bark and shadows. It didn't flick a fin.) She saw the goliath grouper louring like a gap-mouthed boulder in the blue hole exhibit and shouted to me, "It's as long as your hair!" I boosted her so that she could see the poison dart frogs and the piranhas and the electric eel which crackled several times into the prey-searching range, nosing at the surface of the water so that its peach-colored throat was visible instead of just the mud-grey of its back. She still loves the tidepool touch tank even though it's as cold as real Atlantic, full of starfish and anemones and horseshoe crabs and sea cucumbers with the flowerets of their oral tentacles extended to filter the tide; she brushed carelessly past the leafy and weedy sea dragons, then watched the tiny darting pan flags of the royal gramma for a long time. She insisted on going all the way to the top of the four-story ocean tank and then all the way down again, from the green sea turtle to the long-jawed moray eel. She seemed enthused by lobsters of whatever species we passed. Ocassionally she emitted clicks and squeaks à la dolphin, but she left the gift shop with a rubber hammerhead shark which she made press all the buttons on the garage elevator. I got her a copy of Jess Keating's Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean's Most Fearless Scientist (2017) because it seemed like a no-brainer. We walked a little bit of the harborwalk before she went home.
Most of this was on technically our second entry to the aquarium, since the first time we had just gotten to the goliath grouper when the PA system let out a high-pitched staccato blare like a car alarm, followed by a recorded voice explaining that the sound we were hearing meant the aquarium was experiencing an emergency and all visitors should immediately evacuate the building by the nearest exit. My mother had been sitting on a nearby bench with her cane. My niece started to run down the ramp, but I picked her up and explained that I know she can walk quite well herself, but I want to stay near my mother who can't move as fast as we can and not lose anyone in the crowd; everyone around us is funneling down toward the exits, the alarm and the recorded voice are still bouncing off all the blue-lit concrete walls and ramps and water and glass; I am carrying my niece and keeping pace with my mother and thinking that I don't hear shots, I don't hear screams, I don't smell smoke—I don't hear air-raid sirens—there is a limit to the degree of emergency which can have precipitated this exodus, but I still feel way too much like Aeneas out of Troy until we get outside, at which point the scene resembles nothing so much as the disorganized milling of a college dorm whose fire alarm got pulled at three a.m., give or take a few pajamas. The fire trucks do in fact arrive. The schoolbuses get the hell out of the way. The aquarium staff who are directing the flow of chaos explain apologetically that they cannot tell us the nature of the emergency, but there will be notification when and if it is safe for us to return inside. It's after noon, so I walk back out onto Milk Street where I have seen a couple of food trucks and return with a bottle of water and a three-cheese grilled cheese from Roxy's Grilled Cheese and a shaved ice with strawberry syrup from Boston SnoMobile and we have lunch at one of the tables behind the IMAX theater, because standing around fretting in the plaza seems stupid and also my niece is distracted by discovering that the strawberry shaved ice has vanilla ice cream under it. (I really recommend Boston SnoMobile.) After maybe another half-hour the fire trucks begin to depart, the crowd starts to vortex back into the aquarium, we spend the rest of the afternoon looking at fish and seaweed and crustaceans and seals as planned. We saw no ambulances. Doesn't mean it was a false alarm, though that doesn't mean I have any idea what it was. I can't help but wonder if four years ago I would just have assumed someone vaped under the wrong sensor and been much more blasé.
Anyway, still a good day out, but I feel I didn't need to know how fast I could go from thinking about very large fish to thinking about keeping my family safe, even if I suppose it's useful that the answer is very and I didn't have to. Have a picture of me and my niece and her hammerhead shark.
rosefox on the Battery Park City Esplanade, watching the Hudson rock scale-green and swarming with light from the wakes of the ferries; I said that it wasn't the sea, but it was the right color and it moved the right way, and Rose pointed out that it was a tidal river, so there was a lot of sea in it, and then suddenly the wind shifted and came up from the harbor and smelled enough like salt and I was very happy.This morning I accompanied my mother and my niece to the New England Aquarium. We had last taken her two years ago, which is geologic epochs in terms of child development; she still loves sharks. She held out her hands again and again for the cownose rays to slide their soft silt-grey wings under and crooned over the epaulette shark pups sleeping in a sand-dappled tangle under the shelter of artificial coral; she let me hold her so that she could reach far out over the water and gently stroke the tail of an adult shark chilling in the shadow of mangrove roots. (I touched it after her. Its skin was cool and superfine as sandpaper, colored like mangrove bark and shadows. It didn't flick a fin.) She saw the goliath grouper louring like a gap-mouthed boulder in the blue hole exhibit and shouted to me, "It's as long as your hair!" I boosted her so that she could see the poison dart frogs and the piranhas and the electric eel which crackled several times into the prey-searching range, nosing at the surface of the water so that its peach-colored throat was visible instead of just the mud-grey of its back. She still loves the tidepool touch tank even though it's as cold as real Atlantic, full of starfish and anemones and horseshoe crabs and sea cucumbers with the flowerets of their oral tentacles extended to filter the tide; she brushed carelessly past the leafy and weedy sea dragons, then watched the tiny darting pan flags of the royal gramma for a long time. She insisted on going all the way to the top of the four-story ocean tank and then all the way down again, from the green sea turtle to the long-jawed moray eel. She seemed enthused by lobsters of whatever species we passed. Ocassionally she emitted clicks and squeaks à la dolphin, but she left the gift shop with a rubber hammerhead shark which she made press all the buttons on the garage elevator. I got her a copy of Jess Keating's Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean's Most Fearless Scientist (2017) because it seemed like a no-brainer. We walked a little bit of the harborwalk before she went home.
Most of this was on technically our second entry to the aquarium, since the first time we had just gotten to the goliath grouper when the PA system let out a high-pitched staccato blare like a car alarm, followed by a recorded voice explaining that the sound we were hearing meant the aquarium was experiencing an emergency and all visitors should immediately evacuate the building by the nearest exit. My mother had been sitting on a nearby bench with her cane. My niece started to run down the ramp, but I picked her up and explained that I know she can walk quite well herself, but I want to stay near my mother who can't move as fast as we can and not lose anyone in the crowd; everyone around us is funneling down toward the exits, the alarm and the recorded voice are still bouncing off all the blue-lit concrete walls and ramps and water and glass; I am carrying my niece and keeping pace with my mother and thinking that I don't hear shots, I don't hear screams, I don't smell smoke—I don't hear air-raid sirens—there is a limit to the degree of emergency which can have precipitated this exodus, but I still feel way too much like Aeneas out of Troy until we get outside, at which point the scene resembles nothing so much as the disorganized milling of a college dorm whose fire alarm got pulled at three a.m., give or take a few pajamas. The fire trucks do in fact arrive. The schoolbuses get the hell out of the way. The aquarium staff who are directing the flow of chaos explain apologetically that they cannot tell us the nature of the emergency, but there will be notification when and if it is safe for us to return inside. It's after noon, so I walk back out onto Milk Street where I have seen a couple of food trucks and return with a bottle of water and a three-cheese grilled cheese from Roxy's Grilled Cheese and a shaved ice with strawberry syrup from Boston SnoMobile and we have lunch at one of the tables behind the IMAX theater, because standing around fretting in the plaza seems stupid and also my niece is distracted by discovering that the strawberry shaved ice has vanilla ice cream under it. (I really recommend Boston SnoMobile.) After maybe another half-hour the fire trucks begin to depart, the crowd starts to vortex back into the aquarium, we spend the rest of the afternoon looking at fish and seaweed and crustaceans and seals as planned. We saw no ambulances. Doesn't mean it was a false alarm, though that doesn't mean I have any idea what it was. I can't help but wonder if four years ago I would just have assumed someone vaped under the wrong sensor and been much more blasé.
Anyway, still a good day out, but I feel I didn't need to know how fast I could go from thinking about very large fish to thinking about keeping my family safe, even if I suppose it's useful that the answer is very and I didn't have to. Have a picture of me and my niece and her hammerhead shark.
