A Moment for the Virginia Opossum
A pall fell over Circus Warehouse as bitterly cold air wafted under the door. The trash can rattled: something (or maybe someone—this was a circus, after all) was in there. Trapezes stopped swinging. Acrobats knelt mid-tumble. An instructor gingerly approached the trash can and lifted the lid. It was an opossum.
Who knows how long the opossum was in there? I mean no disrespect to the managers of the now-defunct Warehouse, but I’ve rarely encountered an airtight circus operation. The instructor who found the opossum hastily released it, I presume, into the parking lot in the semi-industrial part of Queens where a warehouse was cheap enough to host dozens of circus artists. Hopefully it went on its way. I’m not sure what an opossum finds hospitable amid brutalist architecture and a bunch of leg warmer-clad children, but if the rats and squirrels can adapt, why not opossums?
This story looms strangely large in my mind, despite the fact that it was probably a two-minute interlude in a day full of handstands, juggling, and contortion. I’m not even sure what year it was—I think I was eleven or twelve—but there was a period of time when I attended these gatherings every year and they became a bit of a blur. My recollection of these events is probably a little more dramatic than how they played out. The opossum may not have even been the only rodent to make an appearance that day, and it definitely wasn’t the strangest thing to happen in a room full of circus performers. But for some reason, that story lives on, at least for me.
Fast-forward six years or so. I had quit the circus a few years earlier (a story for another time). The opossum incident had receded into the past. I arrived at a behemoth of a freshman dorm, resplendent in its neogothic grandeur. A few months into living there, I heard a rumor: there was an opossum that lived under the stairs in one of the building’s many towers. A friend and I jokingly set out to look for it but came up empty.
But the opossum continued to live in my mind. Two years later, grasping for a topic for a “presentation night” with a group of friends, I ended up settling on opossums. Suffice it to say, after that presentation, people kept telling me opossum anecdotes. It turns out that everyone seems to have an opossum story. I distinctly recall being at a formal and having multiple people come up to me and tell me opossum stories—that wasn’t exactly the vision I had for myself, but I had underestimated the ubiquity of opossums.
The species of opossum I’ve been discussing is called the Virginia opossum. I certainly didn’t anticipate this when I came to UVA. When I gave that presentation in college, I did not even realize that the opossum was the Virginia opossum. And yet, here I am.
The Virginia opossum is the only marsupial found north of Mexico.[1] It is found in all Virginia counties, according to the Virginia Department of Wildlife resources. We’re particularly lucky to have such an abundance of opossums here, seeing as the growing deer population in Virginia fosters growth of our local tick population.[2] Opossums, because of their low body temperatures, can tolerate tick-borne diseases. Just one opossum can eat thousands of ticks per year.[3]
The funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve seen an opossum out in the wild, not since that day in New York—if a warehouse counts as the wild. And yet, they keep popping up. Maybe they’re my Roman Empire.
[1] Virginia Opossum, Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/virginia-opossum.
[2] Q&A: With a rare tick-borne disease now in Virginia, what do you need to know?: https://news.virginia.edu/content/qa-rare-tick-borne-disease-now-virginia-what-do-you-need-know
[3] Virginia Opossum - Big Thicket National Preserve (U.S. National Park Service): https://www.nps.gov/bith/learn/nature/virginia-opossum.htm
