Why did the possum cross the road?

Driving up Bay Street into Ocean Park the other morning, I came upon a heart-rending sight.

I slowed up, swung around, put on the gloves I keep for this purpose in the back of the car, and returned to the scene of a horrendous family tragedy.

Mama possum and six babies were stretched out on Bay Street in the space of fifteen feet.

The tiny possum babies were perfect. Five inches long with slightly curved, bare and pink ratty-tails. Tiny pointed teeth, pointed snouts, pink lips, grey furry bodies and miniature very human-looking hands and feet.

Mama had a pocket on her belly with her teats neatly tucked inside, although this is undoubtedly not the correct term, as a friend of mine points out that “possums are not mammals—they are marsupials,” and teats are “the protuberances on the breast or udder of a female mammal through which milk is excreted for the nourishment of the young.”

The point is, these babies were just starting out in the world, they weren’t quite weaned.

And if that weren’t enough, as I moved their bodies off the road, one fur ball silently wriggled off into the bushes to what fate we can only guess.

I thought if I piled their bodies together, perhaps this lone ranger would return to a familiar smell and I could somehow pounce and take him/her to the Wildlife Refuge Center just outside of Astoria.

I drove by slowly going both directions throughout the day on various errands. But no creature returned to the scene of the crime.

Years ago, driving from Yakima through Naches to our family cabin on the Chinook Pass highway, I spotted a similar scene.

Mama skunk dead and several babies clinging to her, also dead on the side of the road. But this time I managed to snag one fat male and his little sister, still alive, and spent the fall reading up on how to feed baby skunks.

I tried to be a good mother.

I took them out for walks and pointed out good things to eat (this could have been all in my imagination) like wild strawberries and.  .  .beetles?

But then my biggest worry became that they had bonded with me so deeply that they would thereafter be defenseless in the wild against others of my kind. (Immeasurable, the folly of humans.)

Until one day, the inevitable.  I approached to feed them and startled them—they lifted their beautiful striped tails and hind quarters, stamped their front feet and sprayed.

Ten minutes later, my neighbors from downriver arrived to find out if I was OK. The scent, of course, had just wafted down to them.

That afternoon—our bond forever broken—I took them out to one of my favorite spots by the river.

(I still have a strange fondness for that sicky sweet smell of skunk.)

So, clearly, I was either a four-legged mammal in another life (I really think I’m on the wrong continent to have been a marsupial) or simply have an extra dose of ‘biophilia,’ the word coined by E. O. Wilson for the human propensity to affiliate with other life forms.

Wilson explains that biophilia, in his book by the same name, is actually stronger than a propensity, it is an essential feature of what it is to be human. It is what we crave when we go out into the natural world.

We want animals and plants around us. We want bird song and smells and fish on our lines. We need biodiversity, perhaps even crave it; and this is aside from the pragmatism of what we learn from nature (biomimicry and its science for another conversation).

Wilson is a noted biologist and entomologist specializing in ants, but in the last decade or so he has turned his extraordinary insight and energy to saving the earth and its exquisite biodiversity.

As Wilson puts it, “Biodiversity is the most information-rich part of the known universe. More organization and complexity exists in a handful of soil than on the surfaces of all the other planets combined.”

Yet many of us do not—choose one—value, see, understand, feel a personal connection to the biodiversity on our planet.

It’s not news that we are living during one of the most dramatic extinctions on earth, and the only one caused solely by us.

In Wilson’s impassioned and eloquent book, Creation, “a call for help and an invitation to visit the embattled natural world in the company of a biologist,” Edward O. discusses the twenty-five most critically endangered hotspots.

These are places with the highest level of biodiversity that are at the same time the most threatened.

Islands are hit hardest because, by virtue of their isolation, they have developed the most biodiversity: places like Hawaii and the Central Pacific Archipelagos. But there are other territories closer to home like the California coastal sage region.

These spots cover a “mere 2.3 percent of earth’s land surface, yet they are the exclusive homes of 42 percent of the planet’s mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.”

But again look how quickly I fall into data points when what I really want to say is—how can we wake ourselves to this crisis, to our deep connection to the living network of beings on our planet earth?

Last week, in the aftermath of the possum incident, I purchased a small blue-grey rabbit now named Memo (for an Amazonia flower), maybe to have a bit of wildness in the house, maybe just to have the feeling that I could rescue something.

As a French-bred rex rabbit, his fur is silky soft. His breed is noted for its fur.

My mother is horrified. Last year for Christmas I gave her a scarf that I purchased in Paris—it’s a stylish little thing of rabbit fur balls to wear around the neck—the exact color of Memo.

She has suddenly realized what went into that scarf.

We seem only able to feel our connection to the natural world when a crisis hits us close to home—when the bees begin to die and farmers have to pay for pollination, when a cruel and thoughtless driver mows down gulls on our beach.

(How far we are from thinking down to the waste-recycling, air producing, and water-purifying microbes we take for granted.)

As Dorian Sagan and Lynn Margulis quaintly note in God, Gaia, and Biophilia, “All life on earth is a unified spatiotemporal system with no clear-cut boundaries. Encouraging our biophilia, preserving blocks of biodiversity before they are converted to concrete skyscrapers and asphalt parking lots, is a way of enhancing the possibility that human beings will persist into the future.”

Which is to say, killing the possum family on the road is a kind of suicide.

We just don’t see it yet.

Wilson says, “'It is time to invent moral reasoning of a new and more powerful kind.  .  . Biodiversity of a country is part of its national inheritance—the product of the deep history of the territory extending long back before the coming of man.”

“Patriotism, the name we give to the love of one's country, must be redefined to include those things which contribute to the real health, beauty and ecological stability of our homeplaces and to exclude those which do not.”

I think the possum crossed the road because she feels she belongs here, even if she came from another continent (many of us did too).

I think we should let her stay.