CITY ISLAND LINES
When I think about some of the largest creatures I’ve met, I am struck not just by their daunting and incredible enormity but also by the tiny details that make them personal and approachable individuals.
Standing beside an elephant, the earth’s largest land mammal, is both humbling and inspiring. A tall person may reach no higher than an elephant’s elbow. Trying to grasp the full surface area of an elephant, like sizing up an ocean liner from the gangway, really requires several steps back in order to properly appreciate the dimensions. To say that elephants are mammoth is redundant. Yet individual elephants can be recognised by the unique patterns fashioned from veins, arteries and scars on their ears. Additionally, Asian elephants sport singular constellations of freckles on their faces and foreheads, much like Pippi Longstocking, or SpongeBob SquarePants,. In the lizard realm, the Komodo dragon holds the heavyweight title. Their very name suggests mythic magnitude and majesty. Still, each dragon has a distinguishable disposition: some with the temperament of a Labrador puppy and others who live up to their fearsome moniker. It’s best to ascertain which personality type you are dealing with before getting too close. Slipping into the sea, we encounter the most massive mammals of all: Whales. Again, a whale up close is really too gigantic to completely comprehend- like a honeybee on a hippopotamus. And to most people, one enormous aquatic beast looks much like another- particularly when shielding one’s face from the pungent exhalation that often accompanies a whale’s appearance at the surface. Nevertheless, each Humpback whale possesses a unique tail fluke, tattooed by time and travel, a cetacean fingerprint, and biologists can reliably identify individuals this way. Back on terra firm, Redwoods are the mightiest and longest-lived entities on earth. Towering majestically, having seen centuries of world history, they seem like inscrutable colossi. But each titan holds within it a unique pattern of rings that chronicles its entire and particular life. The study of this autobiography is called dendrochronology. Zoom to outer space and ogle our planet from afar. It is the largest organism that we can imagine. Nonetheless, it has features, blue and green swatches, geographic silhouettes, so distinct that they immediately identify it as home. A jolly round face as familiar as that of a friend or family member. Even in the largest lives lie intimate details that make them less formidable and more accessible. Good things come in small packages that are sometimes wrapped up in large packages. 6 March 2018
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