Octopuses

In the book, octopuses are more than striking animals glimpsed in online videos: their escape and tool use become a compact image of resourcefulness under constraint. Linda May first connects them to the idea of resisting confinement, recalling an experimental octopus that repeatedly got out; later, she shares footage of one carrying coconut shells that serve as both transportation and protection. Together, the episodes turn animal behavior into a vivid parallel for finding room to move and a makeshift place of safety.

First Encounter and the Escape Artist

A few days after Linda May and the narrator first met, she noticed an octopus-shaped ring on the narrator’s right hand. The small object prompted her to talk about laboratory octopuses and their intelligence. She called them “escape artists!”—a description the book then develops through her account of a video she had seen online.

In that video, an octopus begins alone in one tank while food waits in another. It compresses itself to pass through a tube and reach the food. The experimenters make the route harder, Linda May explains: the animal must open a hatch before entering the tube. The escalating obstacles give the anecdote its shape. The octopus is not simply shown in motion; each new barrier tests its ability to find a way through, and each attempt ends with its escape. The narration distills the outcome plainly: no matter what, the octopus got out.

From Animal Behavior to Human Constraint

The laboratory story turns into a brief exchange about people. The narrator suggests that people can sometimes be like the octopus, and Linda May agrees: “Yeah, if you try to keep us in a box,” she says, laughing. Her wording makes the comparison collective rather than narrowly personal. The box stands for imposed confinement, while the octopus’s repeated escapes supply the image of refusing to remain within limits set by others.

The comparison is suggestive without making the animal a simple stand-in for a human character. The octopus’s behavior comes first: it works its way through a tube, then through a more demanding arrangement involving a hatch. Linda May draws on that observed ingenuity to express something about people. The force of the parallel lies in the practical act of getting out, not in a claim that the animal and human experience are identical.

Coconut Shells as Transport and Shelter

Much later, Linda May posts another octopus video on Facebook. This footage, captured by a scuba diver in Indonesia, shows an octopus crossing the ocean floor with an awkward, shuffling gait. The caption identifies the reason: it is carrying two empty coconut halves. The movement changes when the octopus suddenly climbs inside them, draws the shells close to its body, and continues on its way, rolling like a tentacled bowling ball.

The scene makes the shells’ usefulness visible in sequence. First they travel with the animal; then the octopus occupies them and carries them along. The book describes the result as a tool for transportation and protection, a kind of coconut mobile home. Rather than finding shelter fixed in place, this octopus carries material it can use while moving. The shells are not decorative or incidental cargo: the animal’s shift into them reveals a practical purpose that the footage’s caption alone does not convey.

Recurrence and Significance

The later video recalls the earlier conversation: both portray an octopus meeting a constraint with an improvised solution. In the laboratory account, the problem is a series of increasingly difficult barriers between the animal and food. In the ocean-floor footage, the animal carries the means of shelter with it. One episode emphasizes escape from an enclosure; the other joins movement to portable protection. The repeated image is not merely of cleverness, but of cleverness put to use in securing passage or safety.

Linda May calls the animal in the second video “the cutest, smartest octopus ever.” Her comment registers affection as well as admiration, while the book’s description gives that admiration concrete grounds: the shells become a mobile refuge. The image sits alongside Linda May’s own mobile life on the road, where she travels towing the Squeeze Inn. The parallel does not make her circumstances equivalent to an octopus’s, but it gives the coconut-carrying animal particular resonance in a narrative concerned with movement and the search for a livable place. Across both appearances, octopuses embody a small, memorable proposition: confinement need not be the end of movement, and a home can sometimes be made from what can be carried.