Obsession: Of Pelicans and Cones

A week after I moved to Florida I was invited to a lovely beach party. I was enjoying the sun and the sea breeze when somebody did something horrible to me.

He sidled up to me, knowing I was a foreigner, and put his arm around me. Then he pointed to the sky.

"You see those pelicans?" he asked.

I did, a squadron of them. They were flying low over the breaking waves, like fighter planes strifing enemy territory.

"The odd thing about pelicans," he said intoning like an old shaman, a truth speaker, "is that they always fly in odd-numbered groups."

The bastard.

For six years - still to this day, in fact - everytime I saw a brief of pelicans (yeah, dude, it's a brief, not a group) I had to count them. I found out very soon, within days, in fact, that what the shaman had told me was untrue. But I still can not see pelicans without counting them. Whenever there's an even number of them, I curse him, though he's been dead three years now.

I’m glad to say I’ve been able to begin repaying the debt of ingratitude here in New Zealand.

I seem to have noticed something here that most Kiwis are not aware of. There is an over-abundance of traffic cones in this country. A plague of them, actually. And a rather irrational reverence for the orange blighters. They are everywhere. Forget all the expected times when cones are really needed. No, it's the truly bizarre usage of cones that obsesses me. And an obsession it is. One, I'm glad to say, that I've passed on to a lot of Kiwi friends and colleagues.

"You know where I saw cones today?" they will ask, sometimes proferring photographic evidence.

Paybacks are hell. I smile the smile of a pusher who has hooked another junkie into an unhealthy lifestyle. Hey, nobody likes to suffer alone.

I have written about the abuse these cones suffer at the hands of Kiwis. Since doing so, I must have taken photographs of a hundred oddly placed cones. The other day a guy outside my office was painting over some graffiti that had been sprayed onto a billboard. Now, the billboard was at the corner of a parking lot. The graffiti rectifier was safely ensconced on the sidewalk, far from any danger. Yet he saw fit to surround himself with four orange cones. As if someone might walk into him and be harmed.

Or does this one make sense?



This not insubstantial boulder was dislodged by the recent quake in Christchurch, rolled down a hill, through a house, and come to rest beside the street. Why the hell would someone place a single orange cone beside a 15-ton boulder? Can you truly imagine someone running a long at a good clip straight towards a chunk of mountain and come to a stop only because a 1 1/2-foot cone caught his attention? Thank God for the cone.

Here's an artist in a public park - during a festival, no less - creating a mural. Why the cones? Did organizers fear that small children could run up to the wall and be whiplashed by sticky tape? Be blinded by paint spatter? Something worse?

Or was it the ladder that was a danger? Or in need of protection? What is it with painters in public in New Zealand? Do they fear their critics? Is it some sort of weird status symbol?

As you can tell, I have more questions than answers. Secretly I'm just hoping for some Pelican payback.

It's not just human creatures in New Zealand that need to have conal order enforced upon them. No, the fishes in the sea too, apparently.

Forget, for a moment - if you can - why there's a cone underwater. How the hell does it stay down there? I mean, it should float, right? This leads me to believe it's actually been attached down there somehow. For some reason.

I know, obsession makes you see life differently. Taggers understand this. The graffiti we blithely ignore, speaks to them. Junkies know this. They see life as one big scavenger hunt between scores.

And I am beginning to understand this. Most of you don't really see orange traffic cones. They are part of the scenery to be ignored. By normal people.

Most of you would probably not even notice this cone randomly placed behind this perfectly functioning car. I not only wonder why it's there, I have to stop and take a picture of it. Since coming to New Zealand I think about these things. I'm hoping there are answers out there, because this country sure has a lot of cones. They're everywhere, and I'd like to get back to something more productive. Like counting pelicans.