On a Friday last Spring, after showering away my shaving cream mask and throwing some barbeque-sauced clothes in the washer, I settled down to watch “March of the Penguins”. I have always admired other species for their optimal population sizes and feeding orders, which to me suggest a superhuman level of stability. These waddling birds were no exception. As a procession of identical black-and-white bodies plodded across the screen – an entire community mobilized, flawlessly programmed to follow their ancestors’ claw-steps over the Antarctic – I wondered aloud why humans are never so neat. My friend politely countered that, only moments ago, our whole class of rising seniors had similarly made its way through campus in the Hey Day tradition of our forebearers.

I turned back to the television screen. The penguin procession was continuing its trek toward a region of thick ice for safety.  Over this image, I superimposed a throng of red-shirted students bustling along Locust Walk toward College Green for safety. Wind and snow pelted the poor penguins from all directions; ketchup and maple syrup attacked the unfortunate juniors. When powerful gusts tried to knock the penguins over onto their sides, flashbacks of jeering seniors, wielding squirt-bottle condiment weapons and psychotic grins, flooded me with empathy. It was all too real. My wounds were still so raw. My hair still smelled, and I was coming to grips with the fact that the birds and the Class of 2007 were painfully, undeniably united in experience.

Morgan Freeman’s narration assured me that the penguins take turns being on the outside of the crowd, shielding their inside peers from attack. Again, Hey Day rang true:  behind and between classmates, just like the noble penguin, I had sought refuge from the food storm. That moment provided a double dose of relief. First, it checked my emotions with reality, and I remembered that the walk had not been so bad, thanks to the crowd. Second, any guilty feelings about staying clean dissipated, for it had simply been the natural instinct of my cohort to take some sloppy blows on my behalf. When I expected others to protect me, I guess I was only helping them stay true to themselves – and to their ancestors as well, of course.

Finally, on the thick ice, or on the plush grass of College Green, I watched as two survivor communities settled down. In a scene of penguin flirtation, the more aggressive ones roughhoused around to attract the opposite sex. Tamer individuals wound through the dense crowd of flapping wings, stomping feet, and penguin Tonga lines, to find their mates. Freeman explained, “We don’t really know what they’re looking for in a partner; we only know that they are, in fact, looking. We also know when they’ve found what they’re looking for...” The blind, stumbling love that I had just witnessed on Hill Field and College Green, which had at first struck me as impulsive and foolish, now had organic validation. When informed that these penguin couples would stay together for a year – through pregnancy and birth, ice storms and starvation, blustering windy miles in search of food and sunless days in wait of the Spring – I dismissed my hook-up cynicism. Hey Day Love will last forever.

I confess that I underestimated the class of our Class, and here I stand corrected. Nature, even human nature, is a beautiful thing.*

*The reflections in this essay do not express an opinion on senior hazing rituals, except to say that they elicit human coping strategies with striking similarities to those of the Emperor penguins in Antarctic blizzards. It is a wild, savage, and in some ways natural interaction. Putting a stop to it, therefore, will require some serious intervention.