There’s been no creature set aside for the old mountains and hollows, for scrappy mountaineers to claim as our own. I propose the opossum.
In Harlan, Kentucky, an artist designed a city mural depicting a flowing green pokeweed and a baby opossum. Ripening berries dot the plant’s purple stem and the opossum hangs by its feet, reaching for the fruit. She chose pokeweed, a local species, in honor of the town’s annual Poke Sallet Festival; she chose an opossum because she thought they were cool animals and installed the mural on an aging brick wall in 2019.
The community complained. Loudly. About the opossum. Letters to the editor bemoaned the implied association with a roadkill-prone, rodent-like garbage thief. A local Appalachian studies professor said his students had “a lot of feelings” about the image.
Opossums tend to do that. Perhaps it’s because, for all our modern conveniences and technology, we still identify with animals. Each state has an official bird, an official mammal, an official fish. We feel warmly about them and imagine we share their best qualities. It’s true on a regional scale, too: bison symbolize the American West, moose represent the Northern Woods, and the South claims the alligator, among others. But Appalachia doesn’t have an animal. There’s been no creature set aside for the old mountains and hollows, for scrappy mountaineers to claim as our own.
I propose the opossum. Focused, adaptable, and persistent, the opossum makes a fitting Appalachian symbol, though they may not get much support as candidates. Much like Benjamin Franklin’s unsuccessful attempt to make the turkey our national bird, opossums don’t have that distinguished look you want in a representative species. They lack the bulk and power of the black bear, the mystery of the bobcat, and the jewel tones of the wily brook trout. Indeed, opossums are odd, a creature an exhausted God might have thrown together with parts leftover from a busy week of creation. Whatever He had lying around the shop (grippy hands, snaky tail, crippling anxiety), He chucked into the opossum and sent it down to the Garden of Eden to tip over Adam’s garbage cans and eat the cat food off Eve’s back porch. It’s an animal so weird, so remarkable, and so frequently maligned that they’ve earned a notable place in our culture simply by being themselves.
Sound familiar, West Virginia? Kentucky?
The Virginia opossum is the only marsupial endemic to the U.S. and Canada. The fossil record indicates that the ancestors of all marsupials began to appear and evolve in what would become North America around the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction. It’s a lot of history for a little garbage eater.
They live solitary lives, coming together only to breed. Joeys are born almost neonatal and must make their way to their mother’s pouch to finish their gestation. After two and a half months, they emerge, all ears and eyes and fur. For the rest of their short childhoods, their mother cares for them and teaches them how to be proper opossums. And how does a dedicated mom shuttle up to 20 long-tailed toddlers around in a busy world? On her back. She meanders along, like an overcrowded bus riding low on its frame, and will have up to three annual litters over the course of her brief lifespan, which may be only a year or two.
Opossums are almost universally immune to rabies, impervious to snake venom, and they eat up to 5,000 ticks per year, making them vital to curbing the spread of Lyme Disease. As scavengers, they do their part to keep things tidy; they’ll eat most anything, including but not limited to vegetation, fish, carrion, insects, and rodents. It’s why they’re drawn to humans and our lazy leavings—they’re opportunists and we’re slobs. Perhaps because they’re a Miocene epoch throwback—a living fossil that has changed little over the eons—they seem foreign and weird. It’s no wonder they fascinated early European settlers.
Captain John Smith, founder of the colony of Jamestown in 1607, wrote to England about the bizarre creatures populating the new world. “An opossum had a head like a swine, and a tail like a rat and the Bignes of a cat,” he told the folks back home. During his tenure as president, George Washington attempted several times to send a pair of opossums to a friend in Ireland, but it’s unlikely they survived the journey. Thomas Jefferson requested opossums be sent to France as gifts when he served as minister and admitted to tormenting them as a child. President Benjamin Harrison is said to have owned two opossums named Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection, though evidence points to their presence for culinary purposes rather than cuddle buddies.
Theodore Roosevelt went with a different mammal. His emblem, the “Teddy” bear, came about when he refused to shoot a bear tied to a tree. By the time William Howard Taft succeeded him, teddy bears were as popular as TR himself.
Billy Possum was Taft’s answer to his predecessor’s beloved bear. At an Atlanta presidential banquet at which guests were served an opossum dinner (the president was said to have inhaled his and later reported smooth digestion of the cooked critter), Taft was presented with a stuffed opossum (the kind filled with cotton, not breading) to kick off his Teddy Bears Suck campaign, designed to discredit Roosevelt and his signature snuggly toy. Taft went low—presidential propaganda postcards depicted Billy Possum eating poor Teddy. TR had the last laugh, though, because his furry creature had earned him a gentle, merciful reputation, while Taft’s possum served only to remind constituents that he could eat one in under six minutes.
More recently, President Herbert Hoover kept an opossum among his White House pets. Per the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, Billy Possum (yes, a second one) was a wild opossum minding his own business when he stumbled onto the White House lawn. The Hoovers adopted him, and he spent his days in a pen that former President Coolidge had built for his pet raccoon, Rebecca. In a generous display of sportsmanship, Hoover loaned Billy to a Maryland high school whose own marsupial mascot had disappeared. Without their lucky opossum, the school’s various athletic teams endured a string of devastating losses, the course of which was reversed when Billy arrived from Washington.
Clearly, Americans in bygone eras kept opossums as both pets and meals. In our modern vehicular times, however, we’re far more likely to encounter a flat one on the road. Flatties come in the millions: one study indicated that 19 million opossums meet their destiny on the highways of America each year. They’ve got poor vision, travel at night, and scavenge in the road, so it’s bound to end badly.
Every spring, hopeful “pouch pickers” take to the roads. These intrepid souls pull over when they see a victim and check for babies, which can live for several days after their mother has died. Rehabilitators care for them and return the survivors to the wild when they’re old enough. This is usually how people come to have an opossum in their home. A biologist friend rescued one, and just as I was about to invite myself over, the opossum showed herself the door. Or, rather, the window.
I suppose it’s a lesson for all of us: Be humble, because vanity is not a good look. Neither is lying on the ground in a dramatic puddle of drool.
I volunteered as a zoo docent in the early 90s, and the opossums were my favorite animal to showcase. Often, they drew negative reactions, so we had been trained to deflect criticism with education. We recited a host of opossum facts whenever visitors—usually middle-class moms with designer sandals and acrylic nails—squealed in disgust. It was the same complaint, over and over: they’re ugly and they have rat tails.
The opossum’s prehensile tail is a marvel of evolution. They use it for counterbalance, as a fifth limb when climbing, and to carry or grasp things like food, a limb, or a tree trunk. (Their opposable hallux—a clawless toe not unlike a thumb—aids in climbing as well.) Opossums can indeed hang by their tails, but only for short periods. It’s not strong enough to hold them while they sleep, nor do they sleep upside down. Also, it’s not naked; it’s covered in fine hairs.
The Northern Cherokee Nation’s origin story recalls that the opossum’s tail was once covered in soft, lustrous fur. The other animals invited him to a council meeting, and he agreed to go only if he would be given a special seat so everyone could admire it. In secret, the other animals sent the cricket to cut all the tail’s hair off. When the opossum arrived at the council and began to brag, the other animals laughed. He turned to see his naked tail and was too embarrassed to speak, so he lay down and pretended to be dead.
I suppose it’s a lesson for all of us: Be humble, because vanity is not a good look. Neither is lying on the ground in a dramatic puddle of drool.
No matter the opossum’s origin, they’re always among us. Their nocturnal habits mean our paths rarely cross, but it’s not uncommon to find one trapped in a garbage can or lurking under the porch. The opossum is a humble, timid critter; when confronted, it opens its mouth in a hiss and reveals a jaw full of sharp teeth. But that’s about it. The display is nothing more than a bluff—they rarely bite. It may then move on to drooling to convince the predator that it’s sick. The next line of defense is to lie down and die and emit an odor of decay; “playing possum” is their signature move, and it must work, because the comical ability to feign death has kept them going for 65 million years.
Nevertheless, opossum prejudice lingers. They’ve been maligned since someone came up with the idea of weekly garbage collection. They’re master scavengers, which is why they fit right into human society—no animal worth its fleas would pass up a readily available source of stinky sustenance served in a giant silver dish every Monday night at 10 p.m. And while you’ll find them in your garbage cans, you’ll also find them on your porch with a mouth full of pet food. A friend found one in her kitchen. The intruder came through the pet door, and she posted a picture of it atop one of her kitchen shelves. It looks concerned.
Opossums seem to worry a lot. Whereas a raccoon struts around and will snarl and bark when threatened—then saunter off in a huff—the opossum seems embarrassed to be discovered. Like a celebrity caught coming out of a plastic surgeon’s office, the opossum turns away, mortified, in nervous defeat—Oh dear, what do I do now? This is awful.
I met one such marsupial on my back porch, at dawn. I called him Eugene, and while there was no easy way to know if he was male or female (I might have felt around for a bifurcated uterus, but that seemed a little forward since we’d never been formally introduced), his Bignes indicated male. I had just let the dogs out and taken a moment to breathe in the morning stillness. When I turned back toward the door, I came face to face with Eugene, perched on the railing. We stared at each other for a millisecond, as humans and animals do when they take each other by surprise.
Annie Dillard had an encounter like this with a weasel, recounted in her essay, “Living Like Weasels.”
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes.
Annie Dillard is better than me in every way. She’s a better writer, a better dresser, and I have no doubt she can fold a perfect fitted sheet. But I don’t buy it, because I saw a weasel on a dusty Ohio road, and our look was not one of lovers or enemies. It was more like, Look at that funky squirrel! and Holy shit, she’s going to run me down!
Likewise, I imagine Eugene’s mental state in those quick moments before I noticed him. Oh no. This is bad. This is really bad. With no other recourse, he hurled himself off the second-story porch. For a millisecond, his gray fur rippled in the morning breeze. Then, splat. I hurried to the rail, expecting to see his broken body lying in my northern sea oats. But he righted himself, scurried to the edge of the deck, and squeezed under it.
I’m an introvert, so I can relate. The opossum seems nervous. Antisocial. Lately, they’ve been popping up in memes about anxiety and social aversion; I don’t know if social media algorithms are merely delivering what I desire or if the internet has finally discovered the opossum’s cringey relatability. But they’re catching on. Build-a-Bear Workshop just announced a new critter, the “awesome opossum.” And the more opossums I see, the more I hope one will wander into my life. It’s illegal in most states to keep one without a wildlife rehabilitator’s license, and opossum care can be tricky. They’re solitary creatures who need their own space, and they do best out there, in the wild. Nevertheless, the opossum thrives among humans because it’s so adaptable. It eats most anything, reproduces frequently, sleeps wherever, swims, climbs, crawls, and moseys. And whether we like the comparison or not, the opossum reflects our own Appalachian nature to survive by doing whatever it has to.
Wildlife biologist Durward L. Allen once called the opossum “a sluggish, smelly, disreputable critter without a semblance of character or self-respect.” (If basic manners reflect character, then Dr. Allen is no prize petunia, either.) But opossums score higher than dogs on tests of memory and ability to find food. Yet only recently have amazing opossum facts made it past the pages of a scientific study. Their fans are growing in number, and we Appalachians are missing out. A creature that has flourished despite the arrival of man and the complete unwilding of their ecosystem parallels the obstinate tenacity of mountain people, who stare down hardship and adversity. Yet Appalachians are just as likely as anyone to revile the opossum. When Knott County, Kentucky named the opossum its official animal in the 1980s, people lamented its lowly unintelligence as a poor reflection on the state. Anchoring such an animal to a frustrated region desperate for respect was no better than seeing Jed and Granny Clampett boil one up in their Beverly Hills mansion for primetime television laughs.
Or displaying one on a brick wall downtown.
Opossums don’t waste their brief days on irony, though. They’ve seen epochs turn and continents rise and fall. Once, they scurried away from sharp-toothed carnivores and towering terror birds. Now, they weave their way through our neighborhoods and across our highways, living short, quiet lives. The risks and rewards, pickings and predators, have changed. But still, the opossum persists.
Laura Jackson Roberts is an environmental writer and humorist. Her work has appeared in places like Hippocampus, Brevity, Still, and Bayou, and she was listed as a notable essayist in Best American Essays 2021. She works as a research writer for West Virginia University, writes for Wonderful West Virginia and WV Living magazines, and lives in Wheeling.
Read Laura Jackson Roberts’s Letter to America: “Dear West Virginia”.
Header photo of opossum mural by Lacy Hale in Harlan, Kentucky, courtesy Fabulous in Fayette.
