Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit
Published in The Moment, March 2021
Today is the first of March - bunny bunny bunny— beckoning the second year of quarantine, perhaps the fairytale season four of Quar. It is a British and North American tradition to say “rabbit rabbit rabbit” upon waking on the first of each month to avoid bad luck. Somewhere along the telephone game lines of narrative superstition; I learned this as “bunny bunny bunny.” Though I feel I am not upsetting the ancestors with this youth-promoting swap.
In fairytales, animal helpers exist to represent the instinctual realm of the human psyche. They may show up when a generative spirit is needed or when the tale’s characters lack the capacity to transform the tale without them. While rabbits have always existed as a symbol in many landscapes that I’ve lived in, they have been more elusive this pandemic.
I spent the first half of the quarantine, well the first 3/4, but I am going to assume an eventual-even-split, in Dallas, Texas. Here I lived with my two animal helpers, dog, and cat, in an industrial loft, dodging my unmasked neighbors and walking around an empty former WPA World’s Fair park turned state fairground with my dog every day. I tried not to repeat my route because dogs hate that, and my brain was hunting for novel experiences. Rabbit rabbit rabbit. I only ran into the very occasional cottontail at Fair Park and was missing the jackrabbits of where I had moved from, in far west Marfa, Texas. I saw the turtles and geese more often in Dallas’ Fair Park- they had been planted in the park’s lagoon similar to the manmade lake I grew up around in Maryland. I always wondered if the fish and geese there resented their transplant-home. Like any captive creature, how unfair the ones who get plucked for the mall fountain versus the ones who get left alone in their natural habitat.
The park in Dallas was my respite. My only connection to nature as the world shrank increasingly each month. Inside my loft, where experiences were same-y and I was going out of my mind, time of course was revealed as decidedly unreal; I began counting seasons of it in the translucent pink lizards that were finding their way into my apartment. Once captured, a veritable eye-test with their size and color, I would move them back outside before my cat saw and tortured them. A quick Google search yielded that these lizards, The Common House Gecko, or Mediterranean Gecko, an introduced species to Texas, actually preferred my domicile to the one I continued forcing upon them, the entryway courtyard garden in my apartment complex. How godlike I had become in my tiny universe. It made me miss the lizards from the west, they knew they were outdoor ones, and liked it that way. Once upon a lizard...it had been nine lizards, and I decided to move back to the desert.
In West Texas, the sky makes every day novel, as cloud theater boasts a nightly show. When the season is right, I can witness the Milky Way from my backyard. I was happy to again trade squirrels for roadrunners, have outdoor lizards visit the porch, and to reside in the migratory path for monarchs and many bird species.
On the ride to Marfa, I was bracing myself for the suicidal jackrabbit onslaught. They dart into your lane as if they live for the thrill.
One fabled year there were supposedly too many rabbits, a unit description apt to their stereotypically known propensity to multiply. Too many, to the degree that it was unsafe to swerve and you just had to hail marry and haul ass through that section of highway hoping to harm none.
On the drive into town, I took the long way at the end of the route, through Wild Rose Pass, which sounds fairytalesque and looks it. It was magic hour, less than an hour from town, the most golden gold streaked the landscape. Having previously been equivocal about this move back from whence I came, the following animal helpers felt like a series of yes’s in this final stretch: a tarantula slowly crossed the road, I steered slightly askew to contain it safely within my tires; I saw a pair of coyotes walking west into the sunset and parallel to the road, they looked like a couple, I got momentarily jealous; There was a roadside, singular javelina eating, normally an animal that travels in a pack. Yet though I was really feeling this combo of the archetypal four; a feminine weaver, a psychic-doubling of this desert dog, a normally extroverted peccary pig now solo— I was dismayed at the lack of jackrabbits. I later found out that this year has brought upon a plague to the rabbits of the region. An apocalyptic-sounding hemorrhagic virus that has wiped out the population. As the jackrabbits disappear, the coyotes move in closer to town and the whole system shifts. This ecosystem swirl was hitting close to home.
When I got to West Texas there was a skunk family living under the house. One of my favorite tricksters, and famously good with scent, which I can appreciate. This was its own fairytale, as it took four weeks and series of my own tricks to coax it to another home, and out from under mine. They are persistent, and apparently have opposable thumbs?
During the mid February polar vortex wobble, Arctic blast and resultant return to Texas’ pioneering roots— I started feeding the birds more directly, with intent, and with a varietal blend plus some halved citrus. This was to of course honor nature’s shift, knowing that their food stores may have frozen or been covered. But it was also selfish, as I would watch them for hours- learning to decipher which was which, and who liked what food. The cat very much enjoyed this television show. The skunk had long gone. I still hadn’t seen a rabbit.
And now, this approach of March, on the first day, bunny bunny bunny; I think the most archetypal, fairytale-like month of the year; the lion-lamb association, the bad luck of the Ides, the seasonal winds that comes into far west Texas to break up the horizon or ride past your window as a dust devil. And also this dreaded quar-versary. Are we in the lysis of this fairytale, the in-between or also possibly the near-end? In the realm of the fairytale you start with the exposition (the introduction of time and place); second to that is the dramatis personae (the persons, or animals, get introduced); then the problem is named (the riddle to be solved); and the most amorphic section is also the final: the peritpetia, or ups and downs, but also the lysis or catastrophe that completes the tale. Things either find homeostasis and the world turns out right after the riddles are complete, or chaos ensues and the possibly more evil archetypal force wins out.
Just like the rabbit to coyote natural world order shift, but the Anthropocenic version, I am thinking a lot about possible viral futures that consider a multi-species reckoning. How with rapid development, and humans’ wish for remote but convenient land—suburban swaths subsume biodiversity, sectioning it into viral landscapes, relegating its carriers to the center.. The death drive of our species astounds me. The more I can be fascinated by us the less I can be annoyed or in pain about us. The animal helpers remind me to stay curious, to employ a multi-species community focus, and to hold space for the liminal. So I put the diverse bird food out, and wonder if that’s a finch or a grosbeak eating on my wall while the rabbits hopefully repopulate. Rabbit rabbit rabbit.
