Recovery

A true city story of ducklings, storm drains and family

Fellow duckling,

Mother fate has kept you, directed you, safe in moving line. But then one day, crossing from Park A to Park B, you and you alone, though still in family pack, take a step the others don’t and drop. Where? Into a storm drain, thick weathered metal grate above you now, plopping down onto whatever leaves and dirt and litter have lately settled in there. Your mother and your siblings must keep going. What are they to do? They are but a duck and ducklings.

If you didn’t know, or at least suspect, that there is good in the world, and that you may have some say in summoning it, the story would end here. A trapped duckling succumbing eventually to starvation or death by anxiety. Traffic relentlessly above.

But even a duckling, if he wants it, has some say, and you show it: an immediate and persistent quacking of undeveloped quacks. “Shirp shirp shirp shirp” is what it sounds like. This is your form of agency, and it is real agency, and it is what ultimately saves your life. Hopping there in your own sound, not feeling what a pitiful sight you must be.

Something beyond your conception has been made aware of your plight. And she cares. A woman paused on her way to the Boston Public Garden. It was she who held the Boston traffic in the palm of her hands, briefly, to give your family safe passage, and it was she who was then alerted to the existence of the storm drain, and your fall into it.

Mariana is no city employee, and lifting this grate is beyond her. She knows this well, a storm drain within her having trapped a cancer that she is a week’s waiting away from a surgeon finally removing. And she has time for you. You’ve summoned her, and she’s not leaving you until you leave that drain. And this indeed is how the story goes.

And she’s there for an hour, waiting for animal control, and for another hour while the animal control person, a kind older woman, informs Mariana she has no way to move the grate. Mariana waits as the animal control worker calls city employees who do not respond. She waits through the pause of your “shirping,” when the animal control worker says she may have to leave if you are no longer there, or dead, or slipped deeper into this drain which a plaque in the brick next to it says “drains to the Charles River.”

For a time, it seems you are gone. Mariana does not leave you.

And as everything is about to end, most especially for you, the sound from below arises again, hopping and shirping shirping shirping with all your small might, and Mariana hears you, and then the animal control woman hears you, and then she calls the Boston Fire Department.

It’s not immediate. There’s more waiting, Mariana peeking down into the grate in between cars and passersby asking if she’s okay. But after wailing their way to a wrong-way parking spot, five or six firefighters gather. The grate gets lifted, you are saved, the pond is found and a duck family is located, you are dropped into the pond... and the story ends happily?

Not yet.

It’s the wrong family, and you are now an intruder. You’ve dropped into something else, and the not-mother attacks, the not-siblings seek to exclude you, finding drowning to be the most efficient way to do so. But amidst this, you do the same as before: you call out:

SHIRP.

And a new ripple forms.

From the other side of the pond, your mother emerges, and you draw back in line with your family.