Coelacanth

My oldest friend at Harvard isn’t great at staying in contact. I’m not perfect, either, but really: Sometimes, I do feel as if I’m making more of an effort than he is. We go way back—since before college—yet now I’m starting to wonder if we really connect on the same level we used to. It’s time I paid him a visit and got this all sorted out.

I go on a Tuesday, following my blockmates as they make their way to Northwest Labs for sections or lab work or other things that seem vaguely more productive. Halfway there, I break off and take a right towards the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

He’s three flights up. Inside, I flash my Harvard ID to the guy behind the counter. He asks me if I’ve been to the MCZ before. He also asks if I need a map. We haven’t met before, but he’ll soon learn the answer to both of those questions.

It’s been a while—practically all summer—but I haven’t forgotten the way. These rooms don’t change much, after all, aside from the occasional gallery renovation. The cases are still dusty; the floorboards still crackle and chatter under your feet. There’s the usual lacy hint of formaldehyde hanging in the air.

He’s waiting for me, as always, in the paleontology room: afloat in a bath of amber liquid. His dark oblong silhouette edged against the bleached mosasaur fossil on the opposite wall. It’s not awkward, I think. It’s been a while, but we just have that kind of relationship: We’re able to pick things up right where we left off. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself as I match his snaggletoothed grin with an awkward smile. If he had hands instead of fins, I’d be giving him a slightly-too-slow fist pound.

The specimen is a coelacanth, caught and embalmed in 1965 before being transferred to Harvard’s collections. My oldest friend at Harvard is a dead, preserved fish.

Let me provide a little context, before you quit reading, or send a concerned email to my parents and/or The Crimson’s managing editor asking if I’m doing OK. I first encountered the coelacanth two years ago, on my final stop in a way-too-long string of college visits. Walking around Harvard in the July heat isn’t fun, and neither is listening to yet another tour guide’s shrink-wrapped spiel. I needed a break, and some A/C—and, would you look at that, who knew that Harvard had a museum? So it was that my mother and I found ourselves wandering the MCZ’s dim corridors.

I’ve always loved museums, but I knew there was something special about this one. The crotchety wooden cases and dry, pasty taxidermied animals— several stuffed by Harvard’s own Louis Agassiz, famous 19th-century biologist and founder of the MCZ—felt antiquated in the best way, full of character and subtle history.

Granted, Agassiz was a hardcore scientific racist. Sometimes, change is necessary. But walking through the MCZ, admiring its rows of elderly specimens in their bell jars, I felt the weight of Harvard’s legacy settle into me. This was a place that had found glory long ago; it would keep it long after I left.

The coelacanth—I’d only ever seen them in books before then—was no different. He belonged to a line of fishes thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs, until someone pulled one out of a fishing net in 1938. He was a leftover, a silent witness to millennia of change and evolution—a living fossil. I remembered him on the flight home, resting one palm against a plane window that felt cool and dark like ocean water.

It’s been two years since that visit. I applied to Harvard and got in (wrote one of my essays about you-know-who, in fact); stumbled through freshman year; spent a summer working at a museum in D.C. Now, here I am, back in the room where it all started.

Last year, this was my refuge: I’d visit once a month, or more. Here, I could escape from the outside world of p-sets and parties, a world that felt as alien as if I’d been dredged up from the sea’s unlit depths and left flapping in the cold air. I could limit my world, partition it into a series of quiet, dusty rooms. Just another specimen in the collection, archived with the rest: Homo freshmanus.

Of course, I tell myself, I’ve evolved since then. It’s been a year. I’m grown up now, living outside of the Yard, ready to push the envelope and create something beautiful in the three years I have left.

Which I guess contradicts the fact that here I am once again, leaning against my old pal’s glass tank, reeling against the future. I’m turning 20 in a few days: my last few as a teenager. It’s not a birthday I’m looking forward to.

I don’t think that, standing in this room as a high schooler, I expected I’d be here again two years down the road. I don’t remember where I thought I would be. The MCZ is old: Its menagerie will still be here, pickled and ghostly, after I’m gone. But I don’t have that luxury. I can’t remain static, preserve myself behind glass.

Absorbed in all of this, I suddenly realize I’ve lost track of time. It’s almost five; the museum will close in a few minutes. I look around, see no one else in the gallery, bend over until the coelacanth and I are eye-level. “Any advice?” I whisper.

And wait a moment. He’s still grinning at me. His expression hasn’t moved an inch.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “I didn’t think so.”