The Assistant Curator

by Charissa Nasrallah   

The first time I met the Assistant Curator, he about frightened the life out of me.  I had found a turtle on the trail through the animal forest and was getting ready to toss it into a pond, when he came around the corner and sharply questioned.

 “Just what in the hell are you doing?!?!” He was a tall man, with a very commanding voice.  For the moment I just trembled, turtle in hand.  “That there is an Eastern Box turtle or a terrapin,” he stated, “They live on land.”

“Then how do they get water?” I asked.

 “They probably lap it off a leaf!” he responded, and that was the end of the discussion.

His gruffness was startling at first, but soon I discovered deep down he was a very kindhearted man.   Through the years that I worked with him I grew to respect him more and more. He was a woodsman from the mountains of North Carolina.  He had bluegrass in his blood, and good stories to tell to others that shared his appreciation of wildlife.  If I had his wilderness survival skills and could stomach eating some meat once in awhile, I would drop out of society and just live in the woods.

He had worked at the park for twenty years, and I learned a lot listening to him and his stories.  He had a natural sense of humor about him.  One day when I was giving tours through the Animal Forest, he and his crew were releasing some wild raccoons into a reserve.  The raccoons had been live-trapped by the trashcans and we were hoping to contain them so they wouldn’t be a potential hazard to our visitors.  I walked my tour right by the reserve where they were working, just in time for everyone to see all the recently release raccoons climb up the trees and hop out of the reserve.

“Oh my, they’re getting out!” the alarmed visitors exclaimed, and in a low deep voice behind me, I heard the Assistant Curator mumble “Well….that didn’t work.”

He was a good animal keeper and a very efficient worker.  He also chose to only disinfect the animal cages once a week.  One day I mentioned my concerns about the water to him, and told him I was going to look into having it tested. 

“Go ahead,” he said, “sounds like a good idea.”

So I followed up on my intentions by making repeated requests to management to have the waters tested.  Despite my concerns, two and a half months later, no water quality checks had been done.  I grew frustrated. 

“You know what your problem is,” the Assistant Curator stated to me one day, sensing some of my frustrations, “you let people walk all over you, and if you continue to do that, things are never going to change.”

Then he proceeded to tell me a story about when he was a young boy growing up with his momma, their neighbors had decided to plant a tobacco field.   At harvest time, the neighbors asked his momma if they could plow through her yard to get to the tobacco.  She firmly told them “No.”  But the neighbors tried to do it anyway.  So one morning the assistant curator woke up to see his momma in her little pink nightgown standing in their front yard with a shotgun.  She had it cocked and pointed straight at the man who planned to drive a plow through their yard. 

“Back that thing up or I’ll shoot you,” she said, and those neighbors never bothered them again.

The Assistant Curator’s story got me thinking.  I thought about a friend of mine who had once mentioned how he wanted to take a stand against development by getting a shotgun and going after the plows.  I didn’t advocate the use of firearms in any situation other than sheer self-defense, but I was very inspired by the Assistant Curator’s mother’s determination to take a stand for her rights.  And at that point in my life, I decided to become less of a pacifist and more of an activist.

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