NOVA Student Blogs

Family (1 of 2) of Loudoun Campus Geese

When my father was younger (and by proxy, when I was younger), he would prepare me for the bewildering and real world by telling me that “the geese own these grounds,” referring to the Department of Navy’s David Taylor Model Basin in Carderock, Maryland.  Every so often, when I had the blessing of dropping him off or picking him up or meeting him there, the geese began an often inconvenient trek across some much needed pathway.  Often twenty to thirty geese crossed our paths and delayed our day or mission for up to five or ten minutes.

I never understood what events or attitudes provoked him to form this viewpoint.  I often thought this statement – pertinent to all property-owning geese everywhere – reflected a somewhat cynical viewpoint.  No matter how hard a man tried, his hands were tied.  The owners, the movers and shakers, the statesmen and suits – all of these occupied time in their missions, and our missions seemed insignificant compared to theirs.

I might preface this next paragraph by saying I am not a relativist – one man’s morals are not another man’s murder.

I now believe, after watching two geese families occupy the area surrounding the pond on the Loudoun Campus, that he was speaking more for the sanctity of life in general.  There are times when I must believe this, even as I plan and plot an eventual transition to the University of Virginia Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies program, and all forces of temptation tug and beat at me to grow into a statesman in a suit, pressing and crawling over my ‘competitors’ in a dog-eat-dog game of who-gets-the-glory.  I must submit to his observation that geese, like men, eat, sleep, procreate, and protect their own families.  These values trump any careerism that might overtake me in this life, making resignation to academia that much simpler, peaceful, and necessary.

My father was never a realist.  The wisest decision he ever made (apart from any transaction with Almighty God), was choosing a civilian military career to provide for his family.  He had originally wanted  to design sailing yachts for private firms.  But stability – and perpetuity of his progeny (a word his father used to describe my own) – prompted him to work out a thirty-one year career with the Department of Navy and selflessly eat, sleep, procreate and protect his own family.  In fact, his decision helped my mother – and his four children – continue today following his passing.

Those geese were something else.  They took forever doing the right thing – traveling from one end of Carderock to the other, searching for food, protecting their young.  They inconvenienced us greatly.  After all, if I were to lump myself and my race into the same ideally bio-centric and materialistic viewpoint that my more evolved and advanced contemporaries might, I could say, “I’m more advanced than those geese.  They’re taking far too long, and I have bills to pay and people to see.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, as illustrated by the geese here at Loudoun Campus.  Last spring, I admired one family of geese – two parents, and five fuzzy-yellow goslings following them from one place to another.  This spring, I count two families.

I’m terribly afraid that the same deliberate value of family and progeny cannot be said for my own species, if current trends are any indication.