In the early morning, pretty early, 6 o’clock, I go down my back stairs and next door to the clinic to start weighing and feeding baby wild orphans. This year the wild orphan work began on April 3. The two years preceding it began on April 2nd. I can’t remember what day in ’23 we started but maybe you remember that Spring of ’23 was turmoil for the wildlife care center as our sudden need to relocate had us building the facility as we used it. The start of wild baby season coincided with the work of removing our old facility from the leased property and the beginning of construction of our new place. Years in oil spill response had prepared me for the realities of building out a workspace while using it to do the work. Learning and knowing how to do a very difficult thing is about the only way to make that difficult thing easier. And of course, we’ve prevailed thanks to the generosity of our local community who we serve directly and a broader community of supporters who support our work from afa
I’ve interrupted the story I started telling to mention our supporters and maybe it seems pandering, but it is not. Our financial supporters make our work possible, and they keep our work alive. Living work grows. The advancements in our field would not be possible without material support. I deeply appreciate the means our supporter provide for the work that somehow, for some reason, against all predictions and life dreams before I knew this work was real, I’ve ended up committed to and engaging for 27 years.
That’s a pretty big plank in the platform here. The people who keep our doors open keep out doors open and keep our work alive. It’s hard not to insist that such support is the iron work that makes our building stand. No matter what we face, we are always aware that it is a privilege to be in the game at all. But none of that is why I’m writing this.
I want to tell about something that happens in the early morning during the feeding and weighing of the baby wild orphans. Orphan, here is a word of convenience. We don’t know if the parent is dead. Or we do. Cases differ of course. But in either case what we have here is a who who is lost without us. And lost with us too. It’s the nature of the business of loving the Wild. So we provide care, and we love our patients, as we must, but we love from behind a wall that protects them from our love, as if they’d been brought aboard our vessel in an alien atmosphere. Except of course, that we are mammals and we are warm-blooded and we even make eggs. And so a tiny raccoon will try to find solace there in the warmth of my hand as I gently slip a feeding tube along their esophagus to fill their belly with warm milk replacer and I will avoid eye contact – once their eyes open – and I will proceed as quickly as safety allows because infant eyes meet care providers eyes, and for a moment too long, and the baby is lost in the provider’s errant bond. These babies are wild. They are not triflings. They are greater than all of our discoveries combined. They are exactly as building blocks to worlds and they are more real than any worlds – empires, board games, cities, myths – that we’ve built. Maybe if I am resilient, my own rehabilitation will release me into the wild too. But for now, I am a dutiful participant in the world that destroys the Wild. And I have the wounds in verse to prove it, be it good verse or not.
In the morning here on the foggy Northcoast out on the peninsula, as they say, a marine layer often keeps mornings gray, damp and cool. It is delicious. Like everyone else in the world I wake up a few to several minutes before my alarm no matter what time it’s been set. And also like the rest of us, I often wish there were a few more hours of night which there never are. I get up and start the coffee and get dressed and play wordle with the first hot sips and then toddle down the stairs to see about things. Mix up some formula. Organize the tasks. Back when playing wordle I was also running through our caseload and thinking about who would be fed first (hint: youngest babies first).
One morning a few years ago in the kitchen where no patients could hear, I tried playing music while I worked, as I used to in the olden times of working in restaurants in the early to mid 80s at the freakin’ South Jersey shore of all places. Wildwood to be precise. But I couldn’t do it. I mean, you know music. It tends to amplify things; it encourages sensitivity and this is a job that demands the senses, demands acute awareness, can’t be done without being sensitive – and also you do have to cut up thawed rats with scissors, as an example of something that maybe is a little nicer to be able to tone down the empathic response during and believe you me, music isn’t the medicine for me during such times. I love music more than the water, but staying hydrated during my 3 hour rush from 6 to 9 o’clock is much more conducive to forward motion than three chords and the truth can ever be. You can’t stop to reflect on the nature of the sorrow when making breakfast for the 30 youngest babies of the hundred you have in care. But if you don’t stop to reflect, you die. It’s a bit of a dilemma.
Anyone who helps out animals – human or otherwise – who’ve been smashed up on the highway has seen too many bits of wet bone poking out into the cool morning air. Opossum babies, you know, are zooming around on their mom like a carnival ride according to some of our best cartoon movies and of course we understand they’re the only extant marsupial native to North America, but what we don’t really think about is that everywhere mom goes they go and when she’s hit by a car, they’re with her. Admitting a barely living opossum mom with a litter in her pouch is an ordinary thing. Some studies have shown that about five percent of us will swerve to hit an animal seen on the side of the road. We pull out her babies from her pouch and we give them case numbers and an examination and none, or a few, or many might be injured as well. The mother is almost always too badly hurt for more than humanely ending (that is, as quickly and painlessly as we can) her suffering. And those babies change our lives. It’s how late winter become early spring. It’s what starts the early morning and what carries us into the late evening. It’s a commonplace known the world over that babies are work.
It’s a commonplace to look into the eyes of your daughter, say, as she is newborn into this world, and hope that she and her cohorts rise above the despair that has been ours since Gilgamesh slew Humbaba. It’s commonplace to heap upon the younger the failed dreams of the elder. As Emerson says, it’s too late to be helped on that score. Nice thing about kids and kittens and puppies and warm slices of apple pie with crême fraiche on top – you don’t have to keep your distance. Your love can include a kind of possession – my daughter is not your daughter after all – neither is my cat your cat – though to be fair I really tend to share my pie – force it on people even.
If I could hand you that warm pie, or cool marine layer so that you might wrap them into your heart and be nourished by them as I am I would. I would love to. I would be thrilled to know you felt it too. And if you haven’t guessed I can tell you that some of what nourishes me, what nourishes us, what nourishes all who need nourishment, is loss. Sorrow is born in matter just as we are. Matter and sorrow are bound to each other. We don’t know another way because there is no other way.
In a way what I want is just to tell you about a flood of emotion that happens in the morning, reliable yet unpredictable – it rushes up nearly every morning but I never know when until I’m awash in it. It’s not melancholy. It’s too quick, too pointed – it’s a gasp, a stab, a sudden sharp intake and a swoon, at the sum of the suffering, the sum of the despair, the awkward strange bulwarks we build against it – even though we know…
We know. For every bird rescued in an oil spill there are ten who are not. Or so go the calculations of loss at the level of financial responsibility and something like a best guess for science. One thing I like to do against the meanness of the odds is make the information I write in Sharpie on the jars of formula I prepare, with date, time and contents, look like an old label from a bottle of soup. A stanchion against loss. A tourniquet on the hemorrhage. A bridge across an abyss of despair. A way to not look down. Plus the jars look better that way.
You know how a slanting northbound sunset in high latitudes can give the ocean a purple cast that tears at your heart and exposes a longing that has been at the core of your life since the beginning of time – a hunger that is fulfilled by more hunger – the endlessly satisfying thirst to feel more. Yes, it has a place in the ordinary tasks of the day – think of how much we enjoy trading witty remarks with the person who tells you how much your trash weighed at the dump. One of life’s wonderful joys. It’s remarkable – isn’t it? – how noticing the unhappy absence of a long gone friend while waiting for a light to change to green and remembering the way your grandmother always liked her cookies placed just so on the plate enter your heart with a pierce that feels sharp and also deep and also like a loss that somehow fulfills.
It’s how you can suddenly lose your breath while cleaning what might be your 200,000th syringe in hot soapy water 30 minutes after dawn and you are glad you are alone because you feel a little foolish tearing up and not a single cut onion in sight – one of the unadvertised benefits to restaurant work.
An opossum baby around 75 grams in size has four little hands and a strong urge to grasp tightly. An opossum this size has probably figured out how to grab the feeding tube and tug it out. They’re a lot to hang on to. They’re hard to handle, as they say in Redding. You have to look at their teeth when feeding a baby opossum who has teeth. A perk hardly anyone mentions.
Every life is full of exquisite joys and sharp moments of anguish, – strange moments of beauty followed by unexpected stabs of surfacing grief. Maybe it’s a mechanism to handle the circumstance, to look for them, of all flavors, to see them as offering similar if not the same kind of sustenance as joys. The daily war that the people of our time, us, in other words, or word, wage on the Wild is relentless and thorough and futile in some ways – such as against the strength of singularities, black holes, messiahs, Babe Ruth, Charlie Parker and the dawn chorus of birds since the beginning of time – is still and without question going very well. The wild is losing very badly at the local level even if back at corporate 75 million lightyears away the loss isn’t felt.
So I make the formula. I slide the tube over her tongue and down her throat and fill her tiny warm belly with warmth and nutrition and if she gains some comfort in her terrible misfortune and loss from the soft gentle cup of my hand who am I to know – I don’t. I hold her small right hand from grabbing the tube as tenderly as I can. I look at her brand new whiskers, only days old, and feel the ache of every failure, every opossum who didn’t survive my care. I imagine her a year from now, in the river bottom or the backyard, with a pouch full of babies of her own.
The cool morning, the damp soft air against my face, the 30 or so babies I’m going to weigh to make sure they’re growing, gaining weight, advancing, getting stronger, becoming who they were meant to be even in their loss, even in their setback, even in their despair. I do this every morning – such is the privilege of my life. Every morning, like the sunrise, I do too. It’s an astonishing point of view.
Thank you for supporting our work. we have nearly 100 wild orphans in care and its only the middle of May. Please help if you can. Thank you so much for all that you do.
