Not My Party

Yesterday was July 4, my dear sister's birthday. Coincidentally, it also happens to be Independence Day in a country some of you may know as the United States. Woods Hole, the village that I'm in for this summer, has a charming little parade down the two blocks of streets that constitute the center of the Hole. It has some of the trappings that you'd expect from a Fourth of July parade - the Stars and Stripes, a marching band (drum and fife, and a random trumpeter who later got attacked by a giant mosquito, but more on that later), and watermelon - but the highlights are the floats and displays put on by the students and faculty of the various courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory. They're biology-themed, very campy, and very nerdy, as one would expect (a video of last year's parade to prove my point).

The Embryology course did their classic gastrulation dance, dressed up in three colors to represent the three embryonic germ layers. The neurobiologists had big floats of their favorite organisms, which this year were a blue lobster and a three-eyed mutant frog. More diverse were the favorite microbes represented by the microbiologists, who to a large extent had a different costume each (giant Vibrio and a giant host squid, two really cute kids who were tottering along in bacteriophage costumes with big capsid caps, a very fetching anaerobic methane oxidizing consortium, etc.) though there were some symbiotes in the crowd, too. Several giant parasites (including two huge mosquitoes) hovered around while immunoglobulins and other components of the host immunity swatted them away, and the cell physiologists did something too arcane for me to interpret, though it involved aggressive popping of balloons and lots of water bombs. And those same water bombs (and water guns, which are the only weapons that Massachusetts doesn't strictly regulate) were involved in warfare between the different contingents - the mutant frog got totally spattered, the microbes and parasites fought back with high-powered squirt guns, and general chaos ensued in the streets. Aside from the courses, there were other groups too: local residents, the Children's School of Science group which went as Darwins and the Finches, and assorted independents, including myself as a (hastily assembled) sea squirt, the result of a (similarly hasty) commitment made the night before.

That was all great fun. Later in the evening, as the sun set, I walked around hoping to see fireworks. The town of Falmouth, I knew, has a great display every year at the beach, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse from the shore here. Eventually I followed the sounds of explosions and found my way to the private neighborhood just some way off from my dorm. They were having their own small fireworks party at their shared beach. Not being a resident, I could not go in after dusk, but walking down a side-road to find a better vantage point, I ended up standing in front of someone's driveway, joining a Slavic family that was there also to watch the show from the opposite side of the cove. It was brilliant, to see the pyrotechnics from so close. Each of the sparkles and whizzles was clear and sharp, and the noise was thrilling. Being downwind on a gusty evening, I imagined that I could smell the peppery spent gunpowder. It was also a lonely experience. There were children shouting and running about - the glowing dots of their sparklers gave away their positions in the darkness. Out to sea on the horizon, there was an even bigger show of fireworks on the mainland, but from the distance it was reduced to minuscule sprays of silent, glittering pixels. It was then that I knew that this was not my party. It was mine to watch but not to revel in, looking on from across the bay as someone else sets the charges off to light up the sky, briefly.