Magnum Opossum, Part One

When moving into an abandoned house, never assume the former tenants were human – or former.

Chota Valley - Repair works on the roof.

Twenty years is roughly how long the house in Chota had been derelict when we arrived in Ecuador last February. While inspecting the house for the first time we noticed a shoddy wooden food rack and two thin mats in the middle room which connects to the veranda. These obvious human artefacts put our minds at ease and led us to the assumption that natural processes had been kept at bay, at least somewhat, by the presence of people. Even if only a resting area for day labourers, we thought, the habit of the attentive species homo-sapiens to form a comfortable habitat could be relied upon to ward off complete re-assimilation of the house into the field. If we had taken the Mango tree seriously, we would have arrived at a very different judgement.

Chota valley - Stripping the ceiling 

Beside the front entrance to the house is an old Mango tree, the crown of which looks down upon all the land. I park the pickup truck in the shady nook between tree and house. We have trimmed the branches of this Mango tree several times to protect the house. In the beginning, the Mango tree was devouring the house; and an opossum was devouring the mangos.

Usually when something unexpected falls into one’s lap, one does not expect to be bitten: that is just what is unexpected. The worker we hired to repair the roof encountered an opossum in the rafters, startled, lost his footing and fell through the ceiling to the floor where he lay when the opossum fell on him, bit him, and scurried away. Or, as one version of the story went, he killed the opossum, worked the rest of the day, took the carcass home and had opossum for dinner. Whether we believed in escape or entrée, at least the opossum seemed to be a problem resolved.

Chota Valley - Covered in dirt

While we were back in Quito haggling over paperwork at the visa office, Oscar stayed on in Ibarra to continue working on the house. He soon heard scuffling and squeaks in the ceiling, starting daily around four in the afternoon. We returned and I went back to working on the house with Oscar. I didn’t hear what he had, however as we were about to fit a new ceiling into the interior bedroom and I thought removing the old, rotting plywood would make this easier, I suggested we have a look. Up the ladder I climbed, between the plywood boards I wedged a metal trowel, I pulled and down the board came. I was not prepared for the shit we found up there. Opossum turds, mango pits, dead leaves and corn cobs; detritus poured to the floor and rose billowing into a grey cloud until the walls of the room were invisible and I fled, coughing and brushing my eyes clean with the inside of my shirt. I resolved to buy an anti-dust respirator and goggles and continue the next day, which I did. When all strips of plywood had been brought to the ground and the grey dust hung low in the darkened room I surveyed my work. Several inches of debris covered the floor in a thick layer, hiding many of the plywood strips. Oscar came in with a broom; I took a shovel. All the refuse was enough to fill two large sacs formerly used for 50 kg of sand. We dug compost holes in the garden and emptied the sacs there.

Chota Valley - Stripped ceiling

Two days later I had stripped the plywood from every ceiling but the standalone room in which several weeks earlier we had installed the gypsum board sub-ceiling. I went through an entire anti-dust cartridge in the respirator and each time I finished a room I could feel the dust in my nose, in my mouth, on my skin. We had eliminated a potential Asthma risk for Ainoa but still we had not found the opossum. There were only three pieces of plywood left on the ceiling against one wall of the main room. We decided to leave those for the moment and continue putting in the new ceiling.