Answer: a brick!
Ha ha!
No matter how often I hear it, I find this joke perennially funny.
It sprang to mind because the color red has figured in my adventures lately.
Not long ago I went to an event that involved a lot of people walking across a bridge. A boat zoomed past below with rainbows in its spray. A small airplane zoomed past above in festive mode. Someone exclaimed, “A nest!” and I looked up and saw a circular bulk of sticks on some intersecting girders overhead. Nearby, someone else spotted a dead fish on a support beam, possibly dropped by an osprey. As I walked along, I noticed a few small car-related thing-a-ma-bobbules in various cracks and crannies, as if they had sprung mischievously from their moorings as their vehicle jounced and rumbled across the bridge. Most people just walked fast and looked straight ahead, or engaged in loud conversation with their companions, but I noticed one young person whose pockets were bulging with obviously heavy objects and who was scanning the bridge deck, as well as everything around themself, with intense interest. Just as I drew level with them, they spied a huge bolt, likely from a truck, it was so big.
“Wow, look what I found!” they exclaimed to nobody in particular as they extracted it from under a grating and added it to the other trophies clinking in their pocket. Just then another small airplane circled close overhead, riveting their attention. The entire plane was a solid bright stop-sign red.
“Why is it red?” they cried, shading their eyes and staring upward. “Why is it tilting? What is it doing up there?”
I was charmed by this spontaneous expression of the vital element of curiosity, so flame-like in children but so sadly lacking in so many adults, but before I could gain the person’s attention and show them the similar bolt I had found, and perhaps even proffer some kind of answer to at least one of their questions, inadequate though it might be, they were off, resuming their avid hunt for more treasure.
Why is it red, indeed? For that matter, why isn’t every airplane red? It reminds me of another red airplane I met long ago. I was at a boat launch looking for birds, and someone had parked a large red van with its back doors to the water and had set up a red cart on which they were working on starting up a red gas-powered model airplane equipped with pontoons. They were even wearing a red jacket. I stopped to watch. Someone else stopped to take pictures. The person got their plane started and launched, and it buzzed gaily out over the inlet, then swooped down and crashed awkwardly on the surface, where it floated helplessly. Its operator sighed with vexation, remarked on how their model-airplane friends would laugh if they saw the resulting picture, put down their control box, pulled a red canoe from the roof of the van, and paddled out to retrieve their errant craft. I have a vivid memory of them lifting the plane from the water, all that bright red against the blue.
Once they were back on shore, I commented, “You must really love red.”
“Why do you say that?” The tone was surprised. Incredulous. Suspicious, even.
“Your van is red, your plane is red, your canoe is red—”
“Oh, no, those things just happen to be red!”
Sometimes people can be so unaccountable!
I didn’t say anything more at the time, but I was and remain skeptical. Surely some kind of choice must have been operating, even if only subliminally, for so much red to have happened.
Then on my walk this morning I was so fortunate as to encounter a pileated woodpecker. This large bird is uncommon in my neck of the woods, and wary, so I was very pleased to actually see it. The whole top of its head is composed of a brilliant flaming red pointy crest, and it was calling loudly and had lifted its crest straight up, and the sun shone through it and made it glow as if it were lit from within, and I felt like it was the reddest thing I had ever seen. A veritable epiphany of red!
In nature, red is not a warning color. Quite the reverse. Black and white, or black and yellow, are the warning colors: think skunk, wasp, Gila monster. Red is the color of attraction. Plants turn their fruits red to grab the attention of hungry mobile creatures who will in turn grab the fruit and become the agents of seed dispersal. Evidently, for us naked apes, the color works even when it is not on the outside of a luscious sweet juicy strawberry or crunchy apple. We have plastered red on so many of our manufactured objects that it no longer stands out in a human-made setting the way it does in nature, surrounded by gentle green leaves, brown and gray stems, soft blue shadows.
“Red is a verb,” writes Joy Sullivan in her poem Red (from her recent book Instructions for Traveling West). Yes, I agree. That is it exactly. Red strides forth, hands outstretched, mouth stained with juice, ready to pluck the moment and savor to the full whatever it is that makes it bright.
Jane Gibson 