A Possum's Tale

A POSSUM’S TALE (original version submitted to Chesapeake Bay Magazine and published)

 

Wednesday, August 18, 2004 11:04 AM

 

 

  ...so there we were, having a lunch at the dockside restaurant along the Chesapeake Bay, on Solomon's Island, MD, when Toni looks out toward the dock and asks,

"Do you see that thing on that piling?"

"That 'thing' ? On which piling?" I wonder, knowing I should be used to my wife's non-specific choice of words. Following her typically vague wording and unanswerable (for the moment) question, I turn to look at the fifty-odd pilings within vision until I see one right off the edge that looks as if it's got a growth on one side of the top.

"Oh, look, it's moving!" she says, just as I see the one she's referring to.  We go out on the outside eating deck and realize that it's a baby possum hanging onto the piling, with nothing but water under it.

 

Soon, a small crowd of diners and a couple waitresses join us, as the two of us are trying to figure out how to save it.

"I saw that when we came in in our dingy," a guy behind me tells me, "but we thought they were river rats." 

"They?" I ask myself.

Then a beefy fellow in his late fifties, at least, on one of the many expensive boats docked at the marina yells over to tell us that there're another two swimming below the other one, and sure enough, two more babies are indeed swimming back and forth with no clue how to get out.

 

So one of the waitresses comes back out with a round serving tray, lays her very ample bulk down on the grass-and-wood edge of the dock and manages to get one of them to crawl up onto the tray and then flips it over her shoulder onto the grass, making most of the small crowd jump back as if it were a baby raptor or something. Meanwhile, the other swimmer is still doing the possum-paddle.

 

The guy on the boat asks me if I want to borrow his crabnet and I say sure.  So he brings it and I scoop the other swimmer out of the water, while the boat owner tells us that on another morning, he'd seen the mother (and kids) living under the restaurant's open-air deck.  Sure enough, I take my catch out of the net and put it in the grass by the deck and the little critter crawls back under the deck after my wife carries it most of the way there; Toni and I can hear the mother making some kind of clicking noises to call them.  Meanwhile, the first rescued one looks like the proverbial drowned rat and is totally disoriented and crawling around in circles in the grass, sneezing out water in little bursts, with everyone else scattering when it comes close (these things are maybe five inches long, not counting the tail).  So I pick it up by the back of the neck, lay it down in the grass maybe two feet from the deck overhang;  Toni points it in the direction of the mother; it, too, goes home.  That leaves the one in the photo, still clinging to the piling.

 

So I finally get the metal part of the net under it and practically have to pry it off, since the poor thing's scared to death and desperately trying to crawl into that hole in the top of the piling that might be big enough to harbor an egg...the critter gets tangled in the net, and wraps its tail around the metal part, but I finally get it, too, out of the net (it opens its mouth as if trying to bite me...lots of teeth on those beasts!) and Toni pushes that one home to Mom Possum.

 

I guess the only downside to the whole experience was when other diners asked Toni what was going on and she voiced her concern about the lives of the little buggers, some people looked at her as if she were nuts, or they just couldn't care less.  Okay, I know grown possums are downright ugly things, but jeez, little babies?  If we stop caring about baby critters, who's next?  And it's not as though we're PETA fanatics (we're not) or country hicks; we both grew up in the city before escaping to the rural, central-Virginia county we brought our kids to and still live in. 

 

A memorable lunch adventure and the highlight of our one-night mini-vacation...