Possum got run over by a truck. Not the animal pest possum that gets run over every day. I mean Possum Anderson. I didn’t know his real name till I saw it on the memorial handout at the funeral: Robert Mornington Anderson. I thought his real name just didn’t suit him, especially the poncy middle name. But there it was under his photo. I even thought at first that is was a mistake.
I suppose he got called Possum because he was a possum trapper. He made a decent living from trapping, skinning, curing and selling possum skins. At least he did until the bottom fell out of the possum skin market and it wasn’t worth trapping them for a dollar a pelt. Animal skins just went out of fashion, thanks to the animal rights people. Red carpet divas no longer wore fur coats and one that still did had red paint thrown on it by some protestor. So most of the trappers stopped trapping and the possum numbers got out of control and munched their way through the Waipoua forest and other native bush all over the country. You could soon see the damage. So the Department of Conservation started the 1080 drops to poison the possums and people are protesting about that too.
There was one other Possum that I knew of: Possum Bourne, the rally car driver, now also deceased. I didn’t know his real name either, but I know he got his nickname after he crashed his car one night avoiding a possum in the middle of the road. He died when another rally car crashed into him on a practice run on the Race to the Sky track in Cardrona. Possum Anderson was killed instantly when he was riding his motorbike along the Desert Road by Tongariro National Park and he met a truck head-on. Truck versus motorbike is no contest. Sam Hunt struck down a possum on the same road and wrote that poem Main Trunk Country Road Song. ‘Little man’, he said, ‘little man, I never meant you any harm.’ It’s a pity the other rally driver didn’t avoid Possum Bourne on the Road to the Sky. Pity the truck driver didn’t avoid our Possum Anderson on the Desert Road. Pity.
Robert Mornington Anderson. He could’ve been called Rob or Bob I suppose, but even those names didn’t seem right. I’ll always remember him as Possum. I knew a few other guys with animal names. Bear, Chook and Frog were all at the funeral. Chook got called Chook as a child because his parents had a poultry farm. But Bear and Frog? I don’t know why they acquired their nicknames.
We all went to Possum’s funeral at the crematorium. It was a closed casket funeral because I guess his body was so smashed up from the accident. We gathered in the crematorium chapel for the service and watched the casket pass slowly through a steel door into the maw of a gas fired furnace, where it was consumed with jets of flame. All to the accompaniment of the haunting, soaring strains of Steve Green’s Albatross, Possum’s favourite piece of music, emanating from speakers around the chapel. Quite a flash casket, I thought, just to be incinerated in a furnace. I’d never seen a cremation before. It was all very automated, not that I was expecting a funeral pyre.
After the funeral service I went to the wake at Bear’s place, as did most of us who attended the ceremony, and a lot of others who weren’t at the chapel. Possum’s grieving parents held their own family wake. For some of the local friends, the wake at Bear’s place was just another party and the prospect of partaking of the finest weed in the district. Bear had a well-deserved reputation for the quality of his home-grown cannabis. Lots of the locals grew their own but none could match Bear’s sinsemilla for quality, for flavour and potency. He culled out male plants and harvested big, resinous, seedless female buds and cured them with honey and whisky and slow drying. He discarded leaf into the compost and scoffed at anyone who smoked what he called cabbage.
There was food and drink too, of course. It was an outdoor barbecue in the back yard by a big old puriri tree, with a pig on a spit, cooked over a wood fire in an iron brazier. It was wild pork, hunted out of the bush. And there was all kinds of alcohol. Our old mate Possum was toasted repeatedly with glasses of beer, wine, whisky and various other spirits. Toasted with accolades and epithets: a good bugger, salt of the earth, a good mate, give ya the shirt off his back, and so on. The revelry went on into the night with dancing and yahooing around the fire. Albatross blaring again from outdoor speakers, as a tribute to Possum, as well as other Fleetwood Mac songs and other bands of a less mellow sound.
The energy of the party eventually began to wane. The pig was consumed, the booze was running out, and some people drifting off home. We that remained gathered close around the fire in the cool of the night, still smoking Bear’s weed. I sat gazing into the fire, thinking about Possum being incinerated in the flames at the crematorium.
Bear’s place was on a lifestyle block, backing onto bush, far from city lights, and the darkness was a treat for star gazers. Two of the women, Janice and Tina, were standing together actually gazing at stars and pointing at some constellation or other. I scanned the sky myself and discovered a number of previously unknown constellations. A little native owl in the puriri was crying more pork more pork and a possum in the bush was coughing and snarling.Janice, Bear’s wife, was wearing her possum skin coat against the chill air, and in remembrance of Possum, who had traded the pelts from which it was made, for a large bag of Bear’s finest. Janice had a soft spot for old Possum and was quite tearful at the funeral. She was sharing the warmth of the fur coat now with Tina as they huddled together. She had been going in and out of the house checking on her sleeping baby, and making sure the noisy revelry didn’t move inside.
Bear was getting more firewood from the stack in the upturned water tank under the puriri tree and he called out to Janice to go make a pot of tea “and bring out another bag of weed while you’re at it.” He stoked up the fire and took his seat on his beach chair again. “No point in having a dog and barking yourself, eh,” he joked, as Janice and Tina went into the house. A few of the guys had a laugh but I was just trying to work out what it meant, my brain being a bit addled with smoke by this time.
I was still pondering having a dog and barking yourself, when the ladies came back to the circle around the fire, Tina carrying a tray with a teapot and cups, and Janice carrying a paper bag, which she threw into the brazier. The contents flared and smoked. Bear broke the stunned silence by blurting out, “What the hell, bitch?!” Frog and Chook shifted around downwind to bask in the smoke. Others just shifted uneasily in their seats, while Tina calmly poured cups of tea. “Never mind,” Bear said, in a calmer, more restrained voice. “There’s plenty more.” I just hoped there wouldn’t be recriminations later. I recalled hearing about how Bear had quite viciously beaten up someone who had ripped off one of his cannabis plots in the bush. Maybe that was why he was called Bear. He had a tough guy reputation, but not for domestic violence, as far as I knew.
I was too out of it do drive home at the end of the night so I crashed on a mattress on the living room floor, along with a few other wasted revellers. Everyone eventually went home or went to sleep in the house. I was just dozing off when I was woken up again by Bear shouting. He and Janice were having an acrimonious argument in their bedroom and now the baby was awake and crying. I heard Janice get up to see to the baby. Bear quietened down but it took ages for the baby to settle again. I’ve always been a light sleeper, but Frog was still sound asleep, snoring away on the mattress next to me. I got up and went to the toilet and then back to bed and eventually got back to sleep despite the Frog snoring.
I was all bleary-eyed and hungover in the morning and shambled into the kitchen to get a drink of water. Janice was at the kitchen counter making tea and toast and Bear was sitting in the morning sun pouring through the window, with the baby on his lap. He was feeding Bubs a bottle of milk and Janice was calling him Papa Bear. Frog joined us in the kitchen and we sat round the table slurping cups of tea. Tuis chuckled and tooted outside in the puriri tree.
Bear was all chirpy and chatty. “What a fine morning,” he said. “Did you guys sleep all right?”
“I slept like a baby,” Frog said.
“Yeah, me too, like a baby,” I said. “Looks like another fine day all right.”