Editor’s Note: Penguin Protocol

At the end of my driveway, screwed to a utility pole on the triangle of the war memorial, is a painting of a penguin in a party hat. It stands on a little iceberg against a magenta-streaked blue field, head bowed, calm, mildly ridiculous as per penguin protocol. The painting is smallish—about the size of a copy of Chronogram. It has no obvious message. Except, you know, the obvious penguin tropes: endurance, communal stoicism, an ability to survive hostile conditions while dressed for a formal occasion.

The painting appeared last summer, part of a street art campaign by my friend Joe, a painter, who took several works from his recent penguin series and placed them around Kingston. No permission sought. No QR codes. No artist statements laminated to the lamppost. Just penguins, turning up where you’d least expect them—on poles, on fences, at street corners—watching the city go about its business.

Joe and I have been friends for decades. We’ve spent countless hours cycling the back roads and rail trails, solving nothing, diagnosing everything: our health issues, the baffling moral decline of the world from some earlier moment when it seemed, in retrospect, more manageable and when we ourselves were less degraded. These are conversations men of a certain age are permitted, provided they are undertaken in motion.

When winter arrived in earnest—bitter, dragging, relentless—I began to notice the penguin more. Snow banked up around the pole. The plow trucks made the war memorial triangle a gigantic snow mound. The penguin endured. Each dawn, heading out into the epic, Jack London-cold with sweet Clancy, a 14-year-old mastiff mix with failing hind quarters and snow bewilderment, I found myself checking in on the penguin. I needed it to still be there. If the flightless bird had taken off, I suspect my own cruising altitude would have been hard to maintain.

The winter, as winters do, arrived carrying more than weather. (Wallace Stevens is the OG on weather: “It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow.” Go read “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” now if you don’t know it.) There is the ambient churn of politics, the sense of systems grinding against people, the low-grade exhaustion of paying attention. The penguin did nothing about any of this. It did not offer advice or solutions. It did not urge me to stay hopeful nor suggest that I can’t hate myself through a state of change. It simply stood there, absurd and composed, reminding me that someone had taken the time to make a thing and put it in the world for no instrumental reason at all.

The Czech writer, dissident, and statesman Vaclav Havel once wrote that “the attempt to live in truth” is itself a form of resistance—not through grand gestures, but through small, ordinary acts that refuse to cooperate with the lie that nothing matters. I don’t think he was talking about penguins, but the logic applies. Uncommissioned art, placed where it does not belong, asks very little of us. It does not demand belief. It simply asserts that good things can exist without permission.

The penguin has helped me through this winter, buoyed my brittle spirit. That’s embarrassing to admit, but also true. Art doesn’t fix the world. But on a cold morning, at the end of a long driveway, it can remind you that the world isn’t entirely broken. 

This article appears in March 2026.