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My Year With the Opossums
By Nancy K. Plant, Wildlife Steward
In the twenty-two years that I spent practicing law and teaching law students, I conquered many of my most desperate fears. A naturally shy person, I learned to speak up in meetings, usually to tell an entire room full of men older and taller than me that they couldn’t possibly do what they had just proposed. I taught classes of over one hundred anxious law students, determined to pin me down on every elusive nuance of Torts or Administrative Law. I advised the senior management of Fortune 500 companies, shouted down obnoxious opposing lawyers, and gave PowerPoint presentations to rooms filled with hostile, glowering sales representatives. I was proud of my professional achievements and the ability I’d developed to wing it with confidence when unexpected problems arose. I was sure, accomplished as I had become, that the next phase of my life outside the home would be much smoother sailing.
That was before I came face to face with the opossums.
Having reached my forties and finally had a baby, I knew almost immediately that I had to find a different sort of life. I cut back on my law practice gradually, until the denouement fizzled to nothing. Around the time that my daughter began kindergarten, I had finally created enough time and space in my life to do something other than lawyering or mothering, and I was abuzz with the possibilities. I had this sense that I had lost—perhaps abandoned—the person I was long ago before I went to law school, the girl with passions and hobbies, who loved to try new things, who didn’t even mind spending time unproductively (gasp!) once in a while. Now was my chance to recapture the adventurous spirit that had gotten buried under the papers of my law practice.
So when I spotted a small ad seeking volunteers for the local wildlife shelter, I heard it call my name. This is perfect, I thought: I love animals! Well, dogs, anyway—I’m not really a cat person. Bunnies are cute, but I don’t believe in keeping them in small cages at home. And OK, under my tutelage my daughter had just managed to kill off her first three goldfish in rapid succession, and the few times that I had seen cows and pigs at the state fair, I had found them strangely menacing. But I had a way with animals—I knew I did! This was just the thing to help me escape the trap of my left-brained, analytical world and enter the magical, intuitive, right-brained consciousness that I knew would make me whole. I could see myself now, talking quietly to the animals, who would approach, cautiously at first, and then rest with me in the warm aura that we created together.
As I skipped down the well-worn path of mid-life self-discovery, it never occurred to me that perhaps I had spent twenty-plus years inside an office because I was better suited to do that than to be the St. Francis of Assisi of Bainbridge Island, Washington. I began by spending a four-hour shift with an enthusiastic volunteer who explained that the mission of the shelter was to care for sick, injured, or orphaned wildlife—over 800 animals a year—and then release them back into the wild whenever possible. She showed me how to clean out animal enclosures, refill water bowls, and prepare daily food for the various animals, and then she turned me loose. The jarring panic that I felt as I began fumbling through my duties reminded me acutely of when I was a trembling 25-year-old right out of law school and a partner would throw a file on my desk and stalk briskly out, wishing me luck. I was horrified to discover that, not only were the animals not basking in the beaming glow of my presence, but I felt no intuitive connection with them whatsoever.
The first time I had to walk into a small shed occupied by a red-tail hawk with an injured foot, the tremor of fear ricocheted around inside my brain like a trapped firework. Never mind that the hawk didn’t move a muscle while I was there, or that I barely inched my way into the enclosure, scooping up only the poop that I could reach while kneeling in the doorway, I was confident that the bird was waiting for the right moment to lunge at me and viciously peck my eyes out a la Tippi Hedren. Give me a rampaging vice-president furious that I nixed his latest marketing campaign any day, just don’t make me do the shed holding the four orphaned young squirrels, whom I envisioned running up my pant legs, jumping onto my head, and chattering loudly (so charmingly Wild Kingdom when they’re in a tree outside your sunroom) into my ear as they chewed it off.
Inexplicably (but what, after all, about irrational, craven fears can be explained?), my most intense fear was reserved for the opossums. A family of opossums—mother and six babies—was resident in mew #7. The mother had been hit by a car when she still had babies in her pouch and had been brought to the shelter, where she and her babies took up residence for the winter. Nocturnal animals, the opossums were usually asleep in a huge mound on top of one another in the back of their pen when I arrived mid-morning to attend to them. I would tiptoe into the enclosure, barely breathing, scooping their malodorous droppings into a plastic bag as quickly as my trembling hands could manage.
Sometimes just the mother would lift her head when I came in, drawing her lips back and baring her teeth silently. She never moved an inch except to make her meanie face at me, but she didn’t need to—that tiny little face all by itself scared the living daylights out of me. On occasions when I had to remove a small pet carrier from the shed, which the opossums had inconveniently begun using as their bathroom, my shaky hand was simply unable to pick it up smoothly; instead, I would jerk it suddenly, jostling the nest. Then seven little opossum faces would pop up, their mouths open and teeth flashing, a mute Greek chorus foreshadowing tragedy (my own, I was convinced). Perhaps it was the narrow, black and white faces with the long snouts and visible teeth, or that they looked like large, ungainly rats, or just that they were silent and mysterious—whatever, the opossums had my number.
But it wasn’t just the animals that I had no feel for; the whole daily management of the shelter befuddled me. After we had taken care of the animals for the day, our job was to clean the small building where we prepared food and that housed the shelter’s administrative offices. This required sweeping, mopping, and similar domestic skills that (if I ever had them) I had long since lost after hiring my first house cleaning service years ago. When I mopped the floors (“I’ll do it!”, I would exclaim), they would end up sopping wet and slightly muddy, as I never could figure out how to wring out the mop effectively or avoid tramping with my dirty boots over areas I had just finished mopping.
The volunteers on my shift—some long-term, some with even shorter tenures than I—were helpful, funny, and as generous as they could be about my shortcomings. If they were amused that I, the former corporate lawyer, was the most clueless and fearful of the bunch, they never let on. And the two wildlife rehabilitation specialists who ran the whole show were, I soon realized, some of the most competent professionals I had ever met in my life. They would regularly announce blithely that they were going to examine an injured animal and arrive back a moment later with an injured bald eagle hanging upside down from their hand or a sick seagull in their arms. They were extremely knowledgeable across a range of species, respectful and admiring of the wildlife, yet realistic enough to make difficult life-and-death decisions about the animals in their charge. And to top it off, they would calmly answer twenty-five of my dumbest questions in rapid succession (“Sorry—where do we keep the pine nuts again?”, “How do I measure 1 cc in this syringe?”) without a flicker of impatience.
And why did I return, week after week, to a place where I regularly embarrassed myself, absorbed violent shots of adrenalin into my overworked nervous system, and often couldn’t tell whether I was doing more good than harm? Because despite my blazing incompetence, despite my regularly mixing up the food and the water bowls and then sloshing the fresh water all over the shed floor, despite my hasty retreats and slamming doors when an animal glanced at me sideways, I loved my time at the shelter. I loved the careful, methodical work of measuring and chopping food, the quiet wariness of the animals, the sense of accomplishment I felt at the end of a shift. I even loved the fact that I wasn’t any good at this, that I was at the bottom of the pack this time—here was something I couldn’t master by sitting down and analyzing it a hundred different ways. After six months, I noticed that I was thinking about the shelter when I wasn’t there, wondering about this animal or that, and recalling the peaceful energy of the place.
And as slowly as the mist in Seattle floats to the ground day after day, or a bald eagle’s gunshot wound gradually closes up and heals over several months, or the closed doors of a life drift open after years of being shut, so did I slowly learn to feel a calm companionship with the wildlife at the shelter. I learned that the animals didn’t care much about me, but were simply hurt, scared, and in an unfamiliar place. I learned to observe them in their sheds first, to talk quietly to let them know I was there, to walk slowly close to the walls so as not to scare either of us. By the end of my first year of volunteering, I was bottle-feeding rambunctious, nipping baby raccoons, scooping birds into my hands to weigh them without (usually) letting them escape, and sneaking quietly underneath a great-horned owl sitting on its perch to clean its pen thoroughly.
And finally, one day, I even got to participate in the release of an opossum into the wild. He was an older animal whom a dog had attacked, an opossum I had cared for early on (and nearly dropped when I tried to weigh him) and watched slowly improve as he was moved from an inside cage to live in an outside shed, until he was finally fully healed. I drove with Amy, one of my fellow volunteers, half an hour to an undeveloped area near where he had been rescued, where we found a forested thicket. We set down his traveling crate and opened the front door. The opossum had been inside an enclosure for so many months that he didn’t seem to know what to do—he just sat still, uncertain what we were up to. Then Amy unlatched the top off the crate, pulling off the roof, and he finally got the idea. He stuck his head through the top, looked around, climbed out, and took off into the woods without looking back at us, no nod of thanks (imagine!) or last toothy attempt to frighten us. Within a mere moment, he had completely disappeared. I felt a strange mixture of pride and loss, as though my baby had grown up and graduated from college. As we walked back to the car, the sun warm on my back, I looked at the green, lustrous forest around me, where the opossum was already settling in, my own head popping up, my own soul clambering back in the direction where it came from.
Read another opossum story.
