About this poem: Otter 841 was raised in captivity and later released into the ocean in Santa Cruz. She made herself a nuisance by climbing aboard surfboards, astonishing and displacing surfers. Now, in August 2023, she is being hunted by officialdom. They’d like to capture her; they may eventually shoot her. Neither option is acceptable to many surfers, even those who’ve had close encounters with her.
Concerning Otter 841…
First off, people,
she’s not The Other
as you might like to think,
not an inspired sentient surprise,
not some revolutionary,
evolutionary, errant, unicornicopic
product of mutation
making a sudden
great leap of consciousness
across the mysterious divide
separating species.
Nope.
Take it from an old farm boy
who’s raised enough sheep
that he never has to count any
to go to sleep,
or wishes to shear their wool,
or trim their feet,
or put out any feed,
or get butted by a ram,
or bury the ones that die,
or lose money on them.
There’s a thing as old as raising sheep
that happens
when one of the mothers dies birthing
or won’t take a newborn;
you have a choice:
let the little one die
or go get a bottle
and resign yourself to
being nursemaid
to a bummer lamb.
The bummer is that you have to prepare that bottle
a minimum of three times a day for three months
until the little one will eat grain and crop enough grass to live,
rain or shine,
in sickness or in health,
and bond with you but not with its wooly brethren.
Be aware,
the flock will ignore the lamb, but the lamb won’t ignore you;
the sight of you and that bottle will be what sends that
poor little ungulate racing across the pasture to you,
bleating like one who knows both manna and momma
and questions nothing about this arrangement,
and that, my anthropomorphizing-tendency-laden friend, is that.
If the lamb is female you may breed her,
and she will usually raise her offspring
but she will never bond with the flock
and will always be glad to see you.
Period.
To the flock and in her own mind,
she is The Other.
So you say,
what does this have to do with Otter 841?
Humans have raised a bummer Otter;
a product of captivity,
endowed with a twisted sense of semi-self-anthropomorphizing sensibility,
raised in an artificial environment,
cared for 24/7 by human beings,
all attired in wetsuits instead of lab coats
ostensibly to unobtrusively
emphasize a swimmingly wateriness,
rather than some dryland primate sensibility.
Yet,
the objective
one desires to teach
may not always
be predictably
learned…
Otter 841 was at long last released
into the modified but somewhat
natural environment of Steamer Lane,
but now separated from the artificiality of the aquarium,
yet still strongly in the presence of
exclusively aquatic,
neoprene-skinned humans,
and ,who
after contemplating
some aquatic associative-equations
born of her own otterness
and one day
putting two and two together
came up with …
Surfboard!
Humans have bottles if you are a bummer lamb,
yet even when the bottle is no longer there or necessary,
the human is,
and the association is.
Humans may no longer feed Otter 841,
but sea-going neoprene-clad ones are present,
and the association is.
It is not lost upon Otter 841
that the humans she now associates with
have surfboards,
clearly a comfortable contrivance to rest upon
after enjoying a shellfish snack.
So you see, there is no problem to solve.
Otter 841 has adapted.
Surfers are safe:
I guarantee
she will not attempt to learn to surf.
or steal waves
or take off in front of anybody,
or drink beer and get rowdy in the parking lot.
She will be quite happy
as part of her clan,
her aquatic tribe,
her busy,
watery,
paddling
gaggle of cohorts.
Humans may likewise adapt
by simply donating
an old surfboard for her
to be moored among the swells
beyond the impact zone
out at Steamer Lane.