Fifteen-pound box of dodgeballs. Check.
Hiking boots. Check.
Inflatable swimming pool. Check.
Second (heavier) box of dodgeballs. Double check.
We get the car trunk closed by brute force, rearing up and landing on the packed bags like whales. There are five of us crammed into the little sedan (one, unfortunately, requiring the leg room of a baby giraffe), on our way to Thanksgiving at a community organic farm in the hill and dale of Somewhere Upstate Massachusetts.
A typical college road trip, save our final passenger: a live goose.
Its capture, engineered and executed by two of our gang, was a delicate procedure involving a trail of cornflakes bagged from the dining hall, a bed sheet taken from their dorm room and the kind of wild chutzpah toward interactions with potentially savage wildlife that can only be expected of Crocodile Dundee and — if the forces of boredom, public dares or bold curiosity are at play — college students. The reason for packing dodgeballs and a portable pool remain murky to everyone but the chief goose wrangler. He does, however, explain the presence of our sixth passenger: Thanksgiving dinner.
We drive, trailblazers of the New Jersey Turnpike with Google Maps and surly gas-station attendants as our Sacajaweas. All goes smoothly until hour number four, eating sandwiches at a pit stop. We ask the deli man how much longer we should expect to be en route, and upon naming our destination, an oracular shadow passes over his face as he carves the block of provolone: “Ohh. Well then, it’ll be ’bout three more hours, or …” Slice. Slice. Slice. “Or ’bout seven.”
Ah. Well, good we cleared that up. It will take, speaking definitively, anywhere between two totally arbitrary estimations of time, either the first guess, or exactly more than double it. Magellan, Cortes, Lewis and Clark, the Pilgrims — really, anyone with a particularly good reason to ask the “Are we there yet?” question — would have punched this guy in the face. But we are comparative literature majors with certificates in introspection, not conquistadors or wrathful Puritans, so we just nod, eat our BLTs and get back on the road.
As the drive continues, our restlessness grows. It’s not so much the inability to fully extend any limb, nor that the radio seems to have selective reception (static, Cher’s greatest hits and a sprinkling of Lady Gaga). It’s not the feeling that the muscle tissue of our asses is being compacted, slowly and steadily, from igneous to metamorphic rock. It’s the goose box. Sitting on our laps in the backseat, ominously silent, its air holes eye us beadily, plotting a dark vengeance. At first, the logistics of cooking the goose are talked over openly. But as the hours stretch on, the box’ silence becomes curious instead of portentous and, eventually, rather … endearing. Finally one of the huntsmen cracks and admits he’d rather keep it as a pet. Slaughter-talk gives way to contemplation of what to name it (Helga is the top suggestion); the goose is seeming less like a complacent hostage and more like an adorably mute Disney animal-sidekick with each passing mile.
At the farm, we open the box and sequester it behind a baby-gate. Fun Fact of the Week: When apologetically nudged by brooms, geese hiss in a way that is unnervingly similar to the call of the deceptively cute raptor in “Jurassic Park” moments before it kills a man with projectile tar poison. It will stay there until its release in the morning. (“Why in the morning? How about right now?” “It’s kind of cold to sleep outside tonight.” “It sleeps outside every night. It’s a goose.” Pause. “Whatever, man.”)
Throughout the rest of the holiday, we wonder about Helga (perhaps Helgaar, if it was male … the jury is still out). Did she join the geese at the lake by the farm, or could she find her way back to Princeton, how long would the flight take? During one of these ponderings, someone recalls that when a member of the flying formation is lost, the gaggle will maintain the empty place left behind, permanently. The “V” of geese continues to take wing and move forward intact, missing pieces carefully kept missing.
Thanksgiving dinner: We stand around a table of 20-some students, nearly all of us with homes outside the United States, or at least far from Massachusetts. Every seat is full. It appears we’ve flocked together, temporarily and largely by chance, each bringing along his missing piece to fill the makeshift “V.” But for each full seat at our table, there is a tableful of people elsewhere, eating a different meal and keeping an empty place intact. We are a host of solo geese — not snared or misplaced or meandering, but also not flying home — sitting together as the most momentary of families, to fill ourselves up.
Becca Foresman is a French and Italian major from San Diego. She can be reached at foresman@princeton.edu.
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