Visiting the oily, noisy shores of Newark, New Jersey, author Dan North discovers that mergansers are oblivious to--or know how to transcend--their conditions:  

vacationing aristocracy swam and sailed from the 200-room colonnaded, turreted, flag-bedecked La Tourette Hotel on Bayonne's Newark Bay shoreline. Mergansers wintered here long before the Native Americans, Dutch and English discovered this then-pristine bay. Now, as our carbon emissions begin to further transform the planet in unimaginable ways, mergansers still dive together here. Seeing them is a gift that no amount of plastic bags flapping in the stunted bayside willows can spoil, and I'll take it.