“the self is a creature
and it lives in a burrow/under the hillside of history…rarely seen/resourceful
neither beautiful nor ugly but merely alive”
—Tony Hoagland, “Still Life”
The wombat’s tunnels are under the desert-like terrain of southern Australia. The tunnels can be up to one-hundred feet long and almost twelve feet deep. The wombat would measure in meters; that’s up to 30.5 meters long and almost four meters deep. The tunnels are linked together by borrows, chambers where the stocky quadruped sleeps or eats. As marsupials, wombats are born about the size of a jelly bean or M&M, and can only continue to grow and develop in their mother’s pouch, holding on to the inside of the pouch with long claws (the only body part that is close to full development at the time of birth). While the wombat spends most of its time tunneling—for protection, lodging, and perhaps even for fun—its pouch faces backwards, well, diagonally so, so that the flying earth won’t intrude upon and suffocate their young during digging. Wombat –filled tunnels are under the Australian earth, somewhere on the side of the road, right past the yellow “Wombat Crossing” sign.
The wombat’s paw is strangely similar to a human palm, except for the shortened and far-too-opposed thumbs, and the jutting, sharp claws poking through the finger-like digits. The pads look like old worn carpenter’s hands, wrinkles and lines filled with dirt and sawdust. It is a hand that never holds anything alive; it is unlike a kangaroo’s or koala’s, a bit closer to looking like a chimpanzee’s or orangutan’s, it is lonely.
Australia is a place I’ve never been, a wombat a creature I have (until recently) never seen, except for the pictures of a wombat’s dirty paw and a wombat’s sad face that like looks like a hairy, large-nosed uncle. Mom wrote me off when I rattled off the wingspan of an albatross, and when I talked about the breeding tendencies of the blue-footed booby. My knowledge of the approximate lifespan of the Siberian tiger, the specific seas and coasts that barracuda call home, were things I was willing to let go as facts that no one else would ever care about. As a child, I would recite them to anyone who would listen. But the wombat was different. I had to make them know, the wombat exists.
When it is crawling around at night, out of its magical tunnels that loop under the Australian landscape like constellations in the sky, it finds a dusty, black-top road, and hears a groaning engine rolling closer and closer. The headlights burst out from the top of the hill, and the wombat’s face is like a koala’s, like a rodent’s, like a rhinoceros’s, like the face of the man that you gawked at in the Wendy’s dining area because all he could afford was a cup of coffee. Please heed the yellow “Wombat Crossing” sign. I have never seen the sign in person, but I know it’s there. It has to be there.
Alex is an Australian au pair I met in Germany when I was 18. I was far too nervous to ask her about the wombat situation: if she had ever seen one, if they really were Australia’s most common road kill. She seemed more content to talk to me about Australia’s snakes and spiders, which were commonly found in her backyard, front steps, kitchen sink, windowsill. We took the bus from Giesenkirchen into town, hungover and missing the loud, relentless friendship that had existed the night before. She smoked cigarettes and told stories at the same time. It was always like that: “Let’s step out and have a smoke; I’ve got a store-roy.” I asked her if she liked learning German, if it was very hard, and instead of really answering, she smiled and began bartering with the sales clerk for a discount on a wrinkled scarf in perfect, flawless German.
“She says she couldn’t even tell I had an accent,” Alex tells me after she bought the scarf for 10 Euros. I had learned only a few words and phrases: “please,” “thank you,” “I have goosebumps,” and of course, “no.” I felt like I had lost all connection; I was usually well-adjusted, easy-going, and likeable. But I wasn’t myself when I was with Alex. I was “Die –an nur,” Karina was “Kah reen- nur,” Kim and Trish were “Keem” and “Treesh,” and she was Alex, the same in any dialect.
She bought herself pommes mit mayo, saying that she only ever ate them after a long night of drinking. I cringed at the sight of “tomato sauce,” the ketchup alternative served as an alternative to mayonnaise. “ I’m from the city that makes Heinz Ketchup,” I told her, “the real deal ketchup.” She only spoke of America as it’s painted up in Las Vegas.
“I should probably go just to say I’ve gone,” she tells me, as we walked past more shops in Monchengladbach. She then gave me a history lesson on the WWII bombings that took place on the very soil we were walking on. She is a person that doesn’t belong anywhere: I don’t want her by the “Wombat Crossing” sign, tending the heavily grazed grasses that the wombats depend on; I don’t want her giving me a tour of Hitler’s henchmen’s hometowns; I don’t even want her sitting in a Las Vegas smoke-filled casino touching a filthy slot machine. I was saddened after meeting my first Australian. But there’s a wombat reservation out there, I know it; where an aging Australian couple hand-feed the wombats whose mothers have perished. They wear collared denim shirts and brightly colored sweatshirts.
“Once the kids moved away the house got pretty empty,” the wife says into a reporter’s camera. “These little ones just love to cuddle.”
I grew out of my wombat obsession as quickly as I had grown into it. Outwardly, it got hard to express my passion for a creature that no one believed was real. It got hard to draw an image of what, exactly, I was obsessed with. Every image of a wombat I looked at looked at least a little different than the last. Alas, when I decided against pursuing a career in exotic veterinary medicine, it was easy and almost relieving to remove wombats from their high seat in my mind. But I can grow back into it again, every now and then when I want, like their burrowing—surrounded, concealed, and comfortable. It’s dark in the tunnels, but the wombats can’t see well anywhere, so it doesn’t really matter.
Despite how heart-warming it might be to bottle feed a baby wombat, adult wombat fur is thick and coarse. Their lower back is covered by a large plate of cartilage, strong enough to crush predators to death on the roof of its tunnels. They are not warm and cuddly. I have, on numerous occasions, found myself touching the elephant bar stools as Joe’s Bar and imagining I’m petting my own wombat. Whoever I’m with gets extremely disturbed.
“Ew. Why are you touching it like that?” Then they reach down and feel the stool, it’s wrinkled, rough skin and crude hairs filling the cracks in-between their fingers. “This is gross,” they say. I’m smiling and rubbing though, eyes closed.
“Do you know what a wombat is?”
I finally had the chance to see a wombat when I went to the San Diego Zoo with my boyfriend and his family. The day had been hot, of course, and long because Grandpa Jack woke us all up at 7:00 a.m. in order to be there before the zoo opened. I was determined. I hadn’t thought about wombats in a long, long time, but there I was, covered head-first in dirt and Australian tussock grass, patrolling my “Wombat Crossing” sign. They needed me. All of these years had passed, and their surrogate parents, who needed some money to pay for the expenses of the reservation, had sold them off to zoos: “Come on Charcoal, you know I love you, but Sprout here has just lost is momma and weighs about 20 kilos less than you; they’ve got pre-made tunnels and burrows there Charcoal! Glory will be yours!”
And so I embarked, silently though, as to not alarm my significant other or his family in anyway, on my journey to save the saved wombats, on my pilgrimage to at last meet my cause in person to shout, “I am here now, and I know you; I have known you for a long time.”
The zoo map was, however, keeping the wombat elusive. On our zoo map, the wombat was labeled to be in the children’s park—a section of the zoo that was significantly more shady and cool than the rest. We strolled through, past an ocelot, numerous brightly colored parrots, a porcupine leashed and being followed by a young zookeeper, and a sleeping binturong. I felt like the wombat would have been under-appreciated there, anyway. “It should be on a hillside,” I said, “with a bronzed fence that can catch the sun. Yes, this is definitely too dark for a wombat.” We asked for help, pulling aside a man dressed in green cargo shorts with a matching shirt and cap.
“The wombats are in the children’s park,” he told us. We were standing by the exit of the children’s park, holding on to our zoo maps and half-gone sodas from lunch, Grandpa Jack sitting in his electric scooter and looking at a bird in a palm tree, and we informed him that they were indeed not in the children’s park; maybe he should keep a better eye on his wombats. He began to use a walk-e talkie to find out where the wombats were. “Hey Jim, yeah this is Steve. Where did we put the wombats?”
So, past the koalas, on the edge of the corner where the meerkats were standing guard, lay my wombats sleeping belly-up, arms outstretched in front of their faces, their man-like paws lethargically pointing to the earth. I was there for them, at last, and they slept while I looked on, familiarizing myself with what I already knew so well. I had trekked roughly six miles that entire day, but my journey to them seemed much longer. I wanted to sit down against the glass that allowed me to view their burrow and wait until they woke from their slumber. I wanted to smell like them when I went home. But it was late for Grandpa Jack, and my boyfriend’s little brother was antsy for McDonalds. We stayed long enough for me to snap just one photograph of a sleeping, wrinkly, brown wombat and left the zoo ten minutes later.
Generation © 