Hello, muskrat

By Jonathan Shipley

We all have a part to play. “O me! O life!” That’s a poem by Walt Whitman. He writes, “That you are here—that life exists and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

Enter stage right, the muskrat, a resident of Cherokee Marsh. The muskrat, the not-often-thought-about rodent. O muskrat! O you, the poor man’s beaver! Ondatra zibethicus is its scientific name, and it is found almost everywhere in Canada and the United States. Yet, how often do we think about it? How often are muskrats championed?

At Cherokee Marsh, for certain, muskrats are everywhere. Their homes are along the shorelines, and from these homes they putter about the waterways.

Humans have relied on the muskrat for food and fur for generations. The name probably derives from the Algonquin word muscascus (“It is red”). Or, maybe, it’s from the Abenaki word mòskwas. The muskrats around Cherokee Marsh were used for food and fur by the Ho Chunk long before Europeans came by. Wicawac is the Ho Chunk word for the muskrat.

Word is that we all belong. I tell myself this often when I’m blue. I repeat it as I watch a wet, portly, disheveled little muskrat ramble across the Cherokee Marsh parking lot. We all belong, I tell it. Go forth. There is nothing living that is undeserving of praise.

“In the forty minutes I watched [the muskrat], he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all,” writes Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions.”

Dillard continues, musing on the muskrat, “My own self-awareness had disappeared…. I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”

Hello, muskrat, bumbling across the parking lot. I try for moment to not say hello to myself. I speak to the muskrat. Keep me here and take all of us there, which is to say the world we all live in. Me and you, and you, little rodent, and us. O life!

Goodbye, muskrat. I watch it toddle off into the marshlands, full of the cattails it eats and near the hidden foxes, coyotes, hawks, and raccoons that would like to eat it. Interconnectivity.

We all have a part. One of Wisconsin’s famous conservationists, John Muir, wrote, “When one tugs on a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

What will you tug on today? Maybe you’re feeling sad. Depressed? Detached? Angry? Do you have anxiety? Doubt? Fear? Trepidation? Do you feel lost? If you’re at Cherokee Marsh, look in the grasses and thickets. Look in the river and parking lots. Look upon the muskrat. Hello.