Okay, so I may be dating myself just a little bit here, but have you ever seen the movie Princess Bride? If you didn’t, its no big deal, except if you’re like me and took nearly all of your college courses on the cinematography campus of an art school and all your friends are classic movie buffs. If you’re Nina, who didn’t grow up with a lot of film culture (read: had claimed to have hardly watched anything ever that wasn’t family friendly and newer than the 90’s) and was attending classes at the same campus with all the same friends, it’s apparently a big enough deal to set off a frenzy of cult-classic movie nights for the uninitiated.
The 1987 film (which is less than a year younger than I am and was already a classic by the time I first saw it) is a satirical love story about an ordinary farmgirl named Buttercup who falls in love with an ordinary farmhand named Westley shortly before being claimed as the bride to the royal not-very-nice-person Prince Humperdink, thus becoming a princess bride, who is then rescued(-ish) by a masked figure who, through a convoluted set of circumstances, can rightfully claim to be The Dread Pirate Roberts, but turns out to be her dear Westley. Yes, I am leaving out a lot of plot-critical details. This post is about opossums, not princesses or pirates. I’m getting there. Anyways, there’s this scene where Dread Pirate Westley leads Princess Buttercup through the incredibly dangerous and actually fiery Fire Swamp, which is infested with R.O.U.S.’s, which are nearly man-sized rat-like creatures made of matted fur and ugliness, one of which Westley is attacked by and has to wrestle dramatically to the death on the floor of the Fire Swamp.
The opossum I found myself having a 1:00 AM staring contest with in failing lantern light was not quite as man-sized nor as matted as the R.O.U.S. from the movie, but it was easily twice the size of most of the raccoons we’d met so far. That, and although calling a random woodland creature “ugly” unless it’s insulted you first seems rude, this particular one really wasn’t going to win any beauty pageants. In fact, it looked like it had quite possibly won the loud dear-god-what-kind-of-creatures-are-those fight that had kept me up through the vanishingly thin walls of our tent for the past hour or so.
It had been another long, arduous night of trying to write term papers at Denny’s, and despite the fact that our waitress had long since stopped refilling our coffee it was the fear of being locked out of our campground that finally got us to leave. (Is there an unwritten rule there that refillable beverages should only be refilled once-or-so after the check has been dropped off? Maybe someone can comment below…) We arrived at the campsite just before the park closed, but it was still late enough that we had to start setting up camp in the pitch-black darkness and finger-numbing cold of our first of many off-season Lake Casitas nights. By the time Nina finished her last paper of the night, I had somehow managed to get a miniature yet just-warm-enough fire built to thaw us out a bit before bed.
For the next hour or so, we were awakened periodically by strange noises and fascinating shadow-puppet shows on our tent walls in the flickering light of our dying campfire. At one point we were surrounded by loud snarling noises from animals we’d never heard snarl before, crashes of leaves and twigs being tossed clear of a scuffle, and a spirited albeit low-budget shadow-puppet reenactment of the last sword fight as the castle burns down from Disney’s Robin Hood (the ancient one with the animated woodland creatures). It was an exciting but restless night, during which Nina expressed concern for our apparent safety. I immediately quoted Westley’s line from Princess Bride right after Buttercup expresses concern about the R.O.U.S.’s and right before one actually attacks him: “Rodents of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.” Groaning, (she was too tired to go for the full groan-and-eyeroll combo) she made me light the lantern (which had started sputtering out just before bed, so I couldn’t turn it up very far) to go outside and check while she fell asleep.
I froze. A mere handful of feet from me on the stone park table just outside the tent, sat the largest, most wrestling-ready opossum I’d ever seen. The sleek, slicked-back, surprisingly un-matted fur on the opossum’s head and its beady eyes glinting in the lantern light gave me the impression that it was either going to stab me in a dark alleyway or make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I couldn’t tell which in the failing light. The fact that I couldn’t perfectly make out the details in what I was seeing and the fact that by now it had locked gaze with me and was now staring me down ominously made the opossum look all the more menacing.
In reality, it did neither. It just… stared. Truthfully, it was probably waiting to see what kind of move I’d make first before making up its mind whether or not it could continue checking the camp table for food scraps. Either that, or it was trying to remember which pocket it’d stashed its switchblade in. Low light, man.
Time stood still; I can’t tell you how long we stood there frozen in place. It could have been seconds… tens of seconds… minutes… It was long enough for Nina to notice I was still missing from bed and mumble tiredly that I should just come back because it was too cold not to be cuddling something. This caused just enough of a shift in the atmosphere for the opossum to turn its head as if to say “well, this just got awkward… I’ll just… leave? I guess?” and slowly slink back into the night.
Join us next week as Nina learns how to make cyanotype prints in the mountains of Ojai, Ca.