Kids t-shirt
What this arctic tern t-shirt carries is the portrait of Hakon: black cap, white cheeks, coral-red bill and three layers at the neck, the top one a teal bomber jacket. He is one of the characters in Animal Kinhood, my series of animals who dress and live like people.
Foto: Peter Pearsall / USFWS (dominio público)Sterna paradisaea
In August the wood moves more.
Breeds on Arctic and subarctic coasts, islets and coastal tundra — Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, northern Scandinavia and Russia, the British Isles, the Canadian Arctic and Alaska — on shingle beaches and predator-free islets. Winters in the Southern Ocean, tied to the sea ice and to the most productive waters of the southern hemisphere.
His little brother is named Aksel and he is nineteen. Last year he made the whole journey on his own, with nobody ahead of him marking the way, and he came back telling it to anyone who would listen: the departure, the days, the return, all of it in order. Hakon listened to the end. Then he asked him one single question: about the stop in the middle. Nothing else. Aksel spent the rest of the summer telling it on the dock.
He made that same journey at six, tucked in with his own, and out of all that he doesn't remember the sea: he remembers the stop in the middle. Weeks sitting still on water that belonged to nobody, no coast in sight, waiting for the ones ahead to decide to go on. His father told him then that there you eat and you keep quiet. Six years old: about the age of whoever is going to wear this t-shirt.
