naming again all the animals

A great post from Our Father's World and Lowell Bliss, who wasn't alone in not knowing that 'woodchuck' and 'groundhog' are two names for the same animal, or in feeling too old for roller coasters ...

As part of our summer vacation this year, we found ourselves at Canada’s Wonderland, a colossal amusement park near Toronto.  My teenage son has discovered roller coasters as a passion, and so we strapped ourselves into the Behemoth, riding up to a height of 230 feet and then plunging down at 77 mph.  The Behemoth cost $26 million to build.  But all day it was like that: we were surrounded by acres of ingenious and costly technologies engineered with the sole purpose to amuse and thrill.

As my old body began to wane in the late afternoon, I plopped down on a park bench and waited out my kids who were on another ride.  A young teenage girl was standing nearby.  Suddenly, I heard her utter a short squeak and I felt something rustling on the ground between my ankles.  I looked down.  A chubby woodchuck wandered out from under my bench.  Behind us was a small wooded lot between paths in the amusement park.  A little stream flowed into a pool there and it was hard to tell whether this patch of nature among the tarmac was original or manufactured.  Nonetheless, it was apparently where the woodchuck lived.  I suspect it was “suppertime,” if that’s what you can call his daily allotment of popcorn and funnel cake. 

The woodchuck boldly walked out into the path of the crowd.  At first, people were as unsuspecting and jumpy as those of us at the bench, but soon the crowd, which had been moving from one multi-million dollar thrill ride to another, stopped and formed around the woodchuck.  This little creature had momentarily become the foremost attraction at Canada’s foremost amusement park.  Soon, young men who had apparently been unable to win a kewpie doll for their dates at the carnival games were demonstrating their manly prowess by petting the woodchuck and feeding it by hand.  I cringed.  I wanted to say something harsh to them.

The teenage girl next to me interrupted my self-righteousness.  “What kind of animal is that?” she asked me.

“A woodchuck,” I said.

I was surprised at the tenderness in my answer.  While I wanted to be pedantic with the crowd; with her, I had a longing to teach, in the best sense of that urge.  This was partly a wave of humility, since I was unsure whether there was any difference between a woodchuck and a groundhog and maybe if I should have called it a groundhog instead.  (I’ve subsequently learned that they are two names for the same rodent whose scientific name is Marmota monax.)  But mostly I felt sympathy for her.  Woodchucks might not be the most common of animals, but this girl didn’t know what they were.

“Did you ever hear the rhyme, ‘How much wood would a woodchuck chuck’?” I asked her.

“Yeah.”

“That’s it.”

“Cool.”

I told this story last Sunday night when I spoke to a group of docents who volunteer at our local zoo.  I wanted to thank them for their service.  In a world of technological attractions, a simple woodchuck still has the power to draw a crowd.  I told the docents that our world needs animals.  We need zoos.  But as our world moves further and further away from Nature, we also need docents and interpreters.  We need them to share their knowledge about animals.  We need them to share their passion for animals.  We need to be tenderly re-taught about wild things, even to their very names.

And of course, this little event allows me to write another verse to Bob Dylan’s song Man Gave Names to All the Animals:

He saw an animal come from under a bench
It gave respite from the techno-stench
It waddled around with courage and pluck
“Ah, think I’ll call him woodchuck”

(. . . or is that, groundhog?)

(many thanks to Lowell, director of Eden Vigil and publisher of the Environmental Missions Prayer Digest, for sharing "Naming Again All the Animals," which was originally posted at Our Father's World, a blog from Ed Brown and Care of Creation; photo credit smileus/123rf.com)

Comments

[Sybil Wieners]

That was a great experience! I just starting to miss my childhood when I read this line "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck’?".