September 4-18, 2023: Where the Wild Things Are

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

— Thomas Edison

The pickaxes were a bad sign. I’d been notified via email a few days before departing the U.S. and many months after volunteering to work for two weeks at the Iberian wolf sanctuary in Portugal that “up to 70% of the work will be grounds maintenance.” Bring heavy-duty work gloves, they advised and my spirit sank a bit. I am no stranger to hard work. I lived on a farm, I cleared fields, I built my own house. I just hadn’t meant to replicate that experience overseas so swiftly. In the complex last-minute packing decision of what to leave out of my stuffed-to-overflowing carry-on bag, the gloves went back into a drawer in the woodshop. They can’t be serious, I thought.

Then they picked me up in a rusty Land Rover that looked like it had done 20 years of hard labor in the African savannah before retiring to Europe, with a cab roof that sagged so significantly the only way to hold it up was to let it rest on the driver’s head, and as I wedged myself into the pickup bed alongside decrepit wheelbarrows and massive metal mallets and a collection of pickaxes, I thought: Apparently, they were serious.

Let me summarize my glamorous life of overseas adventure succinctly for you: I climb declivitous mountain paths to rake leaves and fallen branches. And the next day I rake more leaves and branches from under the same trees. And then I repeat. I siphon fetid water out of cisterns. I unearth armchair-sized boulders from underground repose (in areas to be reforested with native oaks) which must be beaten with mallets until shattered into step-stool-sized pieces to hoist and haul across said field to the battered wheelbarrow that can’t navigate the rocky terrain to get closer to me. I am Sisyphus. I am, more specifically, a poxed Sisyphus, covered in more mosquito bites than it makes sense to count but with 16 concentrated on my right cheek and eyelid because apparently I sleep on my left side most frequently. (“What is wrong with your face?” my daughter asked, in the tone only teenaged girls can summon, when I appeared on her WhatsApp video screen.)

It sure ain’t glamorous, but it also isn’t bad. Mostly, it keeps me laughing.

We are a motley band of foreign volunteers and work-for-the-love-of-wolves-not-the-money local employees hailing from Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands who struggle in equal measure not to put each others’ eyes out with pickaxes and to communicate across language barriers. Frankly, I find the British gal the hardest to understand. I share a wooden cabin with the young Frenchman who doesn’t speak to me (or anyone else for that matter) and who jumps out of his skin each day when I say good morning so I am trying to be quieter. We Americans with our booming voices tend to unnerve gentility the world over.

When our collective is not congregating in fields we are meeting over a chopping block, cleavers in hand, swinging away at the rotting corpses donated by local grocers to feed the wolves: Off with this rabbit’s head! Off with that chicken’s feet! (Why the wolves must be coddled and not let to eat heads and feet is a question to which I never got a straight answer.) Blood drips off the carving table and pools at our feet, where Asian wasps swarm in carnivorous orgies, and we try and fail not to laugh aloud at the fragile soul spooked by flies and gagging at the scent of rancid meat and ducking when a too-hearty chop sends shards of bone and bits of muscle raining onto shirtfronts. The rest of us, we have reverted to our Neanderthal roots quickly; in under a week we have morphed into a mad troupe of blood-letting barbarians. No week-old turkey carcass is safe from us.

Finished chopping, we hike up steep paths with our bounty in buckets and throw all the meat over fences into the wildland enclosures the wolves inhabit. We scatter quickly to conceal ourselves and watch the animals, observing their behavior, pretending we are doing them a favor when in fact it is the other way around. I am bloody. I am blistered. I am hiding in the shadow of a tree in the woods in south-central Portugal where I’m fooling no one. A savvy wolf watches me while I watch him back.

This is where the wild things reside. I am their guest.

For this privilege, I will wield a pickaxe any day.