Showing an Uninvited Possum the Cat Door

Woody Allen said it best: “I am at two with nature.”

So am I, Woody.

I love magnificent vistas from mountain trails and the roar of wild rivers. That’s the nature of the Nature Channel, and that’s, naturally, the nature that I love.

But then there’s the 70-million-year-old marsupial that’s broken into your kitchen at 3 a.m. to snarf up the cat food. Of all the things you can come across in your home at 3 a.m., there is nothing worse than coming across an opossum slavering and hissing over Mademoiselle Fluffy’s Science Diet.

That’s the nature I can’t quite get my arms around.

What you want to find in your kitchen at 3 a.m. is Martha Stewart spelling out your name in fragrant, flaky little pastries topped with orange-ginger custard and sprigs of mint.

What you don’t want to find is a long-snouted, scaly-tailed mammal baring its teeth at you and drooling--particularly if it’s not a blood relative.

It’s as simple as that.

Things that bed down in drainpipes have no natural place in the kitchen. But, naturally, one of them has made my kitchen a regular stop on its nightly rounds.

My wife saw it first. Idly watching the predawn infomercials in the room off the kitchen, she heard a scraping at the cat dish. Ah, she thought sleepily: A cat. Instead, it was what appeared to be a cat-sized rat that had spent its kittenhood at a nuclear waste dump, trying on various mutations. As Jane sprang off the couch, the thing waddled back out the cat door.

The strange part is, our cats can’t use the cat door. They haven’t quite gotten the hang of it.

Some know-it-all told us, “Just shove them through it a few times--they’ll learn!”

Now they just sit in front of the vinyl flap and yowl, waiting to be shoved through. Meanwhile, the possum slides in with ease. I won’t bother describing the evidence of one such visitation, except to say there was quite a pile of it on the couch. Somehow, this knowledge adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the TV-viewing experience.

To deal with this sorry situation, I sought the advice of Patrick Musone, an education specialist with the county’s animal control department.

Predictably, he took the side of the possums. He described them just as a Hollywood flack would describe a bad-boy star entering rehab--again.

“They’re misunderstood,” he said. “They’re very sweet, very vulnerable, very easily hurt.”

In his years with animal control, Musone has fielded more possum calls than he can remember.

“I’d get a couple coming home from a party and freaking out when they found a possum in the house. I’d go out there, mostly for the possum’s sake.”

Budget cuts have reduced the frequency of nonemergency possum response, but Musone and his fellow animal control officers still trap errant possums. Musone likes to release them at a pond near Lake Sherwood.

“They love it there,” he said. “They’re unmolested and they can carry on their lives. They’ve got fish, they’ve got frogs, they’ve got protection.”

Musone is not the possum’s only friend. Every species in this country has an advocacy group or two, and Didelphis marsupialis is no exception.

Its boosters point out that the possum is no more a disease carrier than your dog or cat. It seldom gets rabies. It devours snails, mice, rats and other blights of home and garden. It almost never bites. It has a noble temperament and a retiring disposition.

“I’ve worked with many species and I love them all,” said Anita Henness, founder and president of the Orange County-based National Opossum Society. “But these guys have something that’s one step more. I don’t know what it is. I don’t have the words to put to it. They’re very different; one bonds with them, every bit as much as with a child.”

I felt like a lout for not inviting more possums to break bread with me and my family, but Henness added that they can be panicky, erratic, upholstery-gnawing visitors, and they’re not meant to be pets at all. To avoid plunging them into the famous swoon known as “playing possum,” Henness said you must “hide behind a blanket and use it like a drape to sweep the possum out in front of you.”

Ole!

Next time the possum shuffles through the entrada del gato, I will masterfully sweep the drape through the kitchen. The cats will be startled, my wife amused, my daughter bored, my neighbors irritated. Ole!

And I will keep in mind the silver-lining comment from Henness, the Opossum Society president:

“Be thankful it’s not a skunk,” she said.

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.