A reason to hope

Yesterday I found hope in the intestines of an opossum.

My friend Sam and I spied the casualty lying on the gutter on Friendly Avenue. Its whiskers were gray, its expression bleak. There was no obvious sign of injury, other than a small trickle of blood by its mouth. The body was soft and cool.

Sam squealed to a stop, propped his bike on the curb. “Y’all go ahead!” he called, and pulled out a plastic bag. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

An hour later the two of us crouched in the back yard, sporting one purple latex glove apiece. We opened the plastic bag and carefully lifted out the possum. His paws looked like little monkey feet, clenched in fists. His eyes were closed. We tied a piece of twine around each of the possum’s ankles, and hung it upside down on the chain link fence. Its soft white belly faced us. I thought of medieval torture scenes. Although, of course, our victim was already dead.

I shuddered as Sam confidently sank his knife into the possum’s chest and began slicing a horizontal line to its belly. The tugging of the knife at the stretchy skin made my own stomach writhe in horror. “I’m grossed out by this,” I said weakly. “I’m not even going to pretend like I’m not grossed out." I paused. "But I still want to watch.”

But within minutes, my repulsion began to fade. As Sam peeled skin away from the possum’s belly, I gazed at the sheaths of muscles impassively. It looked like an anatomy lesson. “So this is how you save the pelt, huh?” I said tentatively. Before long, I gave the skin a cautious tug myself. It’s hard work, peeling possum skin. It doesn’t want to come off.

Peeling back the right side, we discovered the cause of death. Judging by the congealed blood and spilling intestines, the animal had been struck by a car on that side and bled to death internally. Unfortunately those spilling guts were our enemy; if they ruptured, they would taint the whole body – including the fur and meat that we wanted to save.

We took turns trying to hold the guts in place and tugging at skin, but it was impossible. They wouldn’t stay. “We’ll have to take them out,” Sam said, and pushed deeper with his knife.

As we cut through the stomach muscles, a rainbow intestines and organs spilled out into my waiting hands. “My god,” I gasped. “It’s beautiful.”

I was holding a mountain of possum guts and all I could think was how beautiful they were. One loop of the intestines was warm pink; another was grayish blue, like the sky on a cloudy day. A third was mossy green, the color of a stormy ocean. Across all the colors spread brilliant veins of mauve, like cracks in a potter’s glaze. The muted colors reminded me of the rocks you pull out of a stream or the ocean – resplendent in their wetness, drying to a faded shadow of their dusky beauty.

We stared at the intestines in silence for a long moment. “Fucking humans,” said Sam in a small voice.

I gazed at the small gray stomach in my hand, full of one last possummy meal, and nodded mutely. The gray soft body we had spotted on the side of the road had been tragic, to me. One small animal doing its best to survive in a cement-covered world full of enemies and indifferent accomplices. That soft face, frozen in its last fearful sprint, had broken my heart. But here, upside down and cut open, the possum was no longer sad to me. “It’s better this way, at least,” I said softly. “At least we’re learning from it.”

My mind was boggled by the unexpected masterpiece before me. We live in a world so resplendent that even a handful of dead guts are as intricate as a work of art. I in my heedless rush would never have known it, had I not been stopped by this one small bloody-mouthed possum.

The natural world is both my hope and my despair. I despair at the damage we humans are inflicting, at our oblivious indifference to the destruction we are causing. But on a chilly January afternoon, crouched by a sad dead bloody possum, I took hope. I can’t save the world. I can’t change the way thoughtless humans neglect the magnificent nexus of wild plants and animals that we live amongst. But one moment of beauty is enough to make me stop and notice the magic that is around me. And those small moments: a hawk swooping overhead, a shiny black beetle lumbering across the sidewalk, a maple tree in a blaze of autumn colors – remind me what it is that I love so passionately in the first place, and why it is so worth protecting.

by Sadie Kneidel

Woods 1, PlayStation 0

The last thing I wanted to do last night was go bat hunting.

I started two new jobs yesterday, and as evening fell, all I wanted to do was face-plant on my pillow.

But I'd made a promise; I had a date with Dr. John Bowles. One of the nation's most renowned bat scientists, he also happens to be my friend. Now that he's retired, the knowledge he's accrued through fifty years of bat research goes largely unappreciated.

But not last night. At precisely 7:30, my boyfriend Matt and I rolled into John's driveway. With our honored passenger in tow, we drove just a few minutes to a small nearby lake. At the junction of the pond and the neighboring woods, we set up John's stool and settled ourselves carefully amongst the goose poop, gazing out over the lake.

I rested my aching head on one knee. No bats. Over the field beside the lake, the clouds were burning purple and blazing pink as the sun settled over the horizon. Effusive beams of scarlet light streaked across the sky. Above my head, chimney swifts darted and twirled against the fading shades of blue. I sighed, and felt a wave of tension escape from my tight muscles.

"Cigars with wings," chuckled John. "That's what my students called them. Even when the bats don't come, there're always the chimney swifts."

"Did your students like coming out to look for bats?" I asked, watching a particularly deft swift spiral skyward.

"Oh, yes," smiled John. "I tried to teach them to want to learn. I tried to get them to ask the question before I gave them an answer. Too much teaching these days is just giving students answers to questions they didn't ask. And never think to ask."

John continued telling me about the long-term questions he had encouraged his students to ask. One student studied screech owls for three summers in a row. Another observed the effects of dropping lake levels on the nearby mammal species. Rather pertinent, I thought, to the rain-hungry pond before us, whose surface was at least two feet lower than usual.

As John spoke, I pondered his comments. Why don't more of our students ask questions about the natural world? Perhaps it's because we need more teachers like John to teach them how to care, how to wonder.

This weekend I went camping with my young cousins, Lily and Jack. At ages five and three, it was their first time on our annual family camping trip. We spent hours in the forest, looking for salamanders under rocks and rotting logs.

We picked mushrooms, examined deer droppings, walked on fallen tree trunks. We crouched by an ant colony, watching the workers frantically carry eggs away from our peering eyes. "That was sooo cool!" Lily breathed as we clambered back to our feet.

Despite their enthusiasm, I couldn't help but notice how new all of this was to them. When we found a centipede curled under a rock, Jack exclaimed, "It's a slug!" Climbing trees was a new experience for both of them. I wonder if they'd ever done anything like this before.

If not, they're not the only ones. My father, like John, is a dedicated teacher of biology. This spring, he accompanied an environmental science class at his school to the campus woods, to look at birds. In the course of the outing, he discovered that three of the students in the class had never before set foot in the forest. And these are not underprivileged children. These are kids who vacation in the Alps, who go to the Caribbean over school holidays. And yet they've never been exposed to the greatest treasure right under their noses.

But for my biology loving parents, I might have turned out the same. Without teachers like John and my father, who took the time to show me woods and ants and bats and deer, I too might never have come to value these treasures.

I remember camping at the very same state park when I was Lily's age. I can still feel my childish amazement at the giant stone boulders scattered through the woods, the thrill of excitement at scrambling up their lichen-covered surface. I think it was those early days of exploration that kindled the love of the woods that I am now desperate to share with Lily and Jack. The same love that dragged me off my bed on an exhausted Monday evening to go look for bats.

My mental meanderings were suddenly cut short by a loud, fast clicking noise from the bat-tracking device that Matt held in his hand. Our three heads swiveled skyward, and sure enough, the fluttering outline of a bat hurtled past us, silhouetted against the darkening sky. A moment later, a second one followed. Then five, ten, twenty bats were dipping and diving over the lake. I gasped in delight.

Our tracking device was going wild. Bats emit high frequency calls that help them ecolocate insects or obstacles in their paths. Our "bat-meter" captures these sounds and plays them back at a frequency low enough for our ears to detect. As John explained to us, you can determine the species of bat by the frequency of its calls. At 28 kHz, we heard red bats. At 32, one of three species of Myotis, or mouse-eared bats. And at 40, the lovely Pipistrelle bat. My heart pounded as the clicks, chirps, and clucks narrated the delicate bat ballet above our heads.

As darkness fell, we rose to our feet and shuffled back to the car, still smiling and breathless. Although I was even more tired than when I left home, I was no longer sorry I'd come. Not only had I just seen the best bat show of my life, but I'd realized another value to my presence there that evening. As teachers like John retire, it's up to younguns like me and Matt to carry on the torch of compassion for the natural world to another generation. If there is any hope for the protection and salvation of our wild spaces, it depends on our young people being taught to value these treasures. As I have been taught, so I must also teach, so that Lily, Jack and I myself are not the last children left in the woods.

by Sadie Kneidel