If God gives you lemons, you make lemonaide, if God gives you roadkill 'possum....

So the day of my birthday, June 14th, was a very exciting day! First, I went to another pedalpalooza event which was sponsored by Trackers Northwest and was a tour by bike of local wild edibles....we road approximately ten miles together, down this trail called the Springwater Cordour...that was really fun, we talked about the uses of everything from mullein (which makes good toilet paper,) to yarrow (good for stopping bleeding, plus it smells great,) to cedar (fibers, bow drills, canoes, etc,) to cottonwood, wild carrot and many others...

The dude doing the tour stopped in the middle of it to show off his spindle fire making techniques...most of the folks on the tour where really impressed, I was thinking "yeah, yeah Patrick does it quicker..." but I thought it might be really rude to yell that out. Anyway, it was fun and it got me thinking with a sort of rewilding, foraging mindset; so when I pedaled back down the trail and turned onto SE 122 and saw a giant, freshly hit possum on the side of the road, my brain yelled "free food!"

Now I've eaten road kill quite a few times in my life; I grew up with pretty rad parents who occasionally butchered roadkill deer on our kitchen table, but I myself have never picked up roadkill or butchered anything...and especially, not in the city. So I felt a little sketched out that I was so excited about getting this possum, but I couldn't help myself..it looked so big and juicy and waiting for someone to come along and pick me up...plus I was hungry after all that biking and right before spotting the possum, I'd been thinking about buying some Thai food for my birthday, but suddenly, my brain was yelling "fuck Thai food...make roadkill possum stew for your birthday! What kinda wannabe wild lady are you anyway? You tell people you're a hillbilly...so start fucking acting like one!"

So I went across the street to this roadside veggie/flower place and asked for some string; the dude working didn't even ask any questions, he just shrugged and handed me some. I went back to the possum and knelt beside it; it had fresh blood coming from some of it's wounds and fleas leaping around on it's skin, so part of my head was yelling "don't touch it, it is probably still alive and the moment you touch it, it is gonna wake the fuck up and bite your hand off..." So I kicked it a few times...it was obviously dead. I flipped it over with my foot and could see that one of it's hips was completely shattered; besides that, it had some nasty gashes on it's head. But it's body didn't seem that stiff yet and the live fleas and fresh blood all told me it had been hit pretty recently and that it would be foolish to let this big, beautiful animal go to a landfill someplace, or to a rendering plant to get made into dog food. I was gonna make a stew, so I gathered my courage and picked it up. It was a good ten pounds I'd say...a big, older (I could tell this later, when I looked at the teeth, which where worn down to almost nothing,) male possum..probably a garbage scavenger. Several things where going through my mind as I lashed the possum to my bike rack, one was a quote by either Derrick Jensen or Susun Weed, or maybe they both have something similar in their books "Now I eat you, now you eat me..." That possum had been living on human trash probably all of it's life, so it seemed only fitting that a human would eat him after his death. The other thing I was thinking about was this book I loved as a kid called Wanted: Mud Blossom which included a character called Mad Mary who lived in a cave and walked around all day picking up roadkill and filling her bloody sack and then cooking the roadkill in her fire at night...as a kid, I dreamed about being Mad Mary when I grew up. Of course, I had all sorts of crazy dreams as a kid; when someone asked me at seven what I would be when I grew up, I replied "I'm gonna live in a tree..." I had just read a National Geographic about these people in Bali or someplace who lived in these tree houses 200 feet off of the forest floor..I was so impressed with that article, I had decided I would do the same.

Anyway, back in the present, the practical implications of getting a possum home when all you have is a bike and you live at 50th in the NE and, at the moment, you are at 122 in the deep SE...well, I knew in the heat of the day, the best thing to do would be to take public transit, but how to manage that with a huge, dead possum?

TO BE CONTINUED...

Love ya,
Carrot