1998: Eat More Possum
Musings on the origins and lore of North America's only marsupials
This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 1998 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project.
My father liked an opossum who once made nightly visits to the dog’s bowl, but I’ve never even felt sympathy for possum corpses littering highways. Too many sleepless nights resulted from possums stupidly bumping into the owner of the coveted bowl who barked all night at the ratty beasts hissing through bared teeth under parked cars. I wasn’t much interested in them until a possum corpse resembling Mississippi possums appeared in the drive of a rented casita in Mexico. We were struck by the prehistoric look of the remains as they diminished day by day to a toothy grin like Alice’s Cheshire; but unlike in Wonderland, the grin was accompanied by a scaly tail.
Our Mexican possum heading to fossilhood in the cobblestones was in fact a replica of fossils from once-upon-a-time ninety million years ago when South America, Australia and Antarctica were joined. Originating in what became North America, the first marsupials (pouched animals) did the marsupial shuffle to South America and the future Australia, where they differentiated into species like kangaroos, koalas and wallabies. Then as Mother Nature played ironic evolutionary games, marsupials became extinct in North America. No problem. South American possums retraced the path north. When no one was looking, Australia had broken away with ‘roos and others on board, so the opossum, least attractive of the bunch, is our only marsupial.
Relocated in America, the opossum and Indians, who believed its tail had medicinal properties, formed a reception committee for colonists. Indians called it “aposoum,” or “apasum,” depending on dialect, meaning white face or white beast. Captain John Smith gets credit for naming the critter the Virginia opossum, an adaptation of Indian vernacular and for writing the following: “An opossum hath an head like a Swine and a tail like a rat, and is the bignesse of a Cat. Under her belly she hath a bagge, wherein she lodgeth, carrieth and sucketh her young.” When Smith met the impossible possum, it lived in the East as far north as Pennsylvania. Snuffling along settlers’ trails, it hit the West Coast in the 1890s and was introduced to the Northwest during the Depression as a food source. At this point, its range extended from Mexico to Canada.
Not a pretty sight, the Virginia opossum is scruffy with coarse, unkempt grayish hair once used by Indians for braiding and weaving and used today for inexpensive “fun fur.” Its pointed, white, beady-eyed face perpetually grinning mouth mimicking Jack Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny!” scene in The Shining. A dentist’s delight, it has fifty teeth, way more than any other North American mammal, which come in all shapes and sizes to accommodate an omnivorous diet. Its mouth opens wider than man’s, allowing it to display its daunting dentures. To the grinning, gaping, toothy, mouth add abundant drool, since possums use saliva to mark territory. Complete the portrait with a graceless body, pink naked ears, a long, hairless tail, and five pink toes on each padded foot. One toe on each hind foot is “opposable,” meaning it resembles and is used as a thumb, giving it a humanism grasp. The tiny versions of human hands with sharp claws are just plain creepy. And there’s more. The little beauty smells bad too, producing a foul odor to repel predators.
A possum is not the sociable, philosophical darling of the Okefenokee Swamp like the cartoon character Pogo with his pack of swampy friends. The real version has nary a buddy. An adult is rarely, if ever, seen in the company of others. Not small wonder, since the surly malcontent seldom shows affection for anything. But sometimes there’s compensation for lack of charm, as is the case of the oddity called opossum. Despite unattractive packaging, it is a remarkable beast with marsupiality the most prominent feature. Unlike the later placental animals nourished through a placental chord while in the womb, marsupials are embryonic when born and develop in the maternal pouch. Resembling bee-sized aliens, thirteen days after conception they are born hairlessly pink without developed eyes and ears. Blind and deaf with useless stubs where hind legs will be, they seek the pouch pronto despite their handicaps. It’s every possum for himself. Only those strong and fast enough to get a chance at the pouch’s dining table have a chance of survival. Litters usually number fifteen but can be as large as fifty-six, while the pouch has but thirteen milk faucets arranged in a circular pattern. Slow siblings are doomed, since the first thirteen hang on and suck for dear life, never releasing their grip until fully developed at two months. As they develop, they often dangle outside the pouch while still clamped on. The pouch has a muscle the mother can contract, closing it like a drawstring purse. Stuffy though it gets, the survivors grow to the size of mice in nine weeks, te size of rats in ten. Now they see the world clinging to their long-suffering mother, grabbing fur, ear, or nose with their fists or wrapping their tails around hers, arranged over her back for the ultimate piggy-back ride. At fourteen weeks, they wander off, and Mom starts a new family, often having a full pouch again in two weeks. Besides pouches, there is another anatomical tidbit: the female has two wombs to better insure procreation; the male accommodates this feminine phenomenon with a “bifurcated” (forked) masculine phenomenon of his own. Oh, possum!
Adding adaptability and a pouch o’tricks to reproductive power, Nature does all she can to insure possum survival despite its teensy brain a fifth the size of a cat’s, giving it the reputation of “the stupidest animals in the American woods'' or on the highway, where is is regularly mowed down while munching road kill. Though it likes Southern woods near rivers, it moves in almost anywhere but deserts, and though it does not hibernate, it has extended its range to northern climates where its naked ears and tail are often ragged from frostbite. It eats anything, including carrion, garbage, fruit, veggies, eggs, chickens, insects and reptiles such as venomous snakes. It’s immune to rattlesnake venom. The only North American animal with a prehensile tail, called a “fifth hand,” the possum uses it for balance, for dropping limb to limb as a safety belt while collecting food like its favorite persimmons. A female uses hers as a noose-shaped rope to drag nest material behind her. The possum also recovers from broken bones and serious injury that would kill other species but heal in the possum. John Lawson wrote the following in A Voyage to Carolina (1709): “If a Cat has nine Lives, the Creature surely has nineteen, for if you break every Bone in their Skin, and mash their Skull, leaving them for Dead, you may come an hour after, and they will be gone quite away, or perhaps you meet them creeping away.” And then there’s the most famous trick in the pouch–playing possum. When a possum is cornered, it bluffs by hissing, growling, and displaying teeth. If that doesn’t work, it keels over on its side with body limp, eyes staring, mouth gaping and limbs stiffening a la rigor mortis. The clue to the ruse is the coiled end of the tail, a legitimate corpse’s tail is relaxed. The possum doesn’t consciously use wiles to fool a bully, but is instead scared to death (almost) and goes into a catatonic state, convincing predators, which often test it by picking it up and slinging it around, that it is no longer worth fooling with. After danger withdraws, the possum revives to waddle off on its solitary journey to garbage cans and chicken coops.
Residing in the South longer than dirt, the possum is featured in legends, hunts and menus. One legend tells of a possum in the Delta who ate all the sweet ‘taters in the stew pot with it and escaped when the oven was opened. Possum hunts rival coon hunts for good ole boy stories, and recipes for the bounty are close to sacred among possum gourmands, who know it must be captured alive and fed stuff other than road kill to purge its system before butchering and that two glands in the back and two under the hind legs must be removed. Even Euell Gibbons, bless his Grapenuts, touted a possum recipe featuring Jerusalem artichokes and hickory nuts. But the possum pom pom goes to a ‘70s Southern cult with forty thousand members spearheaded by the Possum Growers and Breeders Association of America. They issued bumper stickers urging “Eat More Possum” and devised a plan to breed the ultra possum to eliminate world hunger.
We make fun of the possum, invent stories about it, run it down in cars, hunt it, cook it and make plans for it to save the world, but it continues to bumble along as it has for millions of years and as it probably will long after man is extinct. He who has the last laugh may well be that old possum who just keeps on grinning.