Image copyright Nickelodeon
To talk to animals, I wonder if I’d have to get on all fours, hands and feet in the dirt, to make my tongue move in lion-speak, wolf-speak, hyena-speak. I wonder if it’d be as easy as Eliza Thornberry made it out to be.
I wonder if I’d have to grow antlers before the elk trusted me. I wonder what they would articulate if I could understand, truly understand, the meaning behind their lowing. Would they speak of our earth? Our climate?
What would the bees say as they died around me in fields of bluebonnets? Would they speak in stings? Or in memories? In feelings like waves—pushing out and out and in again and gone to shell? Would the great white shark tell me of the surfer’s leg he devoured? The tanned one, lightly furred, that bloomed so blessed in his depths?
Could I have saved the dodo if I was alive when it still was? If I could speak in dodoese, and if I had the knowledge of the way the entirety of them would perish, I would have clucked my way onto Mauritius and carried them off, one by one, one by—or no, I wouldn’t, couldn’t, because even if I was there before 1662, and even if I knew I could speak to them and wasn’t found out, wasn’t put to death by a church, any church, or a roving mob hurling stones through stained glass, through one side of my head and out the other, through things they didn’t understand, wouldn’t try to understand, like a man with a soft heart who dreams of bears and otters, humans getting involved in the Earth’s inner workings are why we are all headed to a land of saltwater and ash in the first place.
But Eliza Thornberry believed she could save the animals who needed her. There was Darwin, her best friend, the chimp in the tank top, and Eliza’s sister, the too-cool-for-your-shit 1 Debbie, and then there was adopted Donnie, the wild-child voiced by Flea of all people—and the irony isn’t lost on me, not one bit, for if I could speak to fleas, if I could move like them, hold blood in my mouth and let it drip down neck and chest in the hopes of ingratiating myself to them, I would ask the fleas if they hated us. I would ask them if they jumped to live or if they were alive to jump.
Eliza’s Mom and Dad were there, too—Nigel and Marianne (whose parents in the show were Ed Asner and Betty White, royalty we children weren’t able to appreciate)—and their home, that incredible cartoon marvel, I remember it sprouting floatation devices whenever they needed to traverse a lake to capture footage for a nature documentary. I remember how the ComVee would roll down hills, dirt paths, rocks shooting out from under its wheels, as they sped away, away, towards another part of the globe every episode.
A globe that is heating. Changing. And as the animals adapt, as they burrow down or roost higher, travel closer or drift beyond our knowing, I wonder if my gift—if I was so lucky to speak in the way of the beaver, the mongoose, the dolphin, and the snake—would adapt alongside.
Did Eliza, back in 1998, ever think of things like that? Did she ever picture herself in college, living in a dorm, having a roommate who wasn’t a chimpanzee? Did she ever see herself marching past the White House? If she existed today, would she cry if she knew Greta Thunberg existed? If she knew that little girl had to exist in such a public way because the adults of this world failed us with their inability to act with the decisiveness of a child? Would Eliza want to take the magic in her animated mouth, the shaman’s curse, and extract it like wisdom to give it to a girl just as brave as she was once upon a time?
But then, maybe Eliza would have become jaded in adulthood. Maybe she would have gone 2 to work for the coal industry in the hopes of fixing it from the inside out; maybe she wouldn’t have been good enough at speaking human to change any minds. Maybe she would have drunk herself silly every night in the same lesbian bar post-PhD, natural deodorant wearing off—shot after shot souring her stomach, ice clinking—all to quiet the utter cacophony of screams in the air. The seagulls with plastic rings around their necks. The crows tipping off of telephone wires. Dead frogs on hot roads. Pipelines polluting, buckling, ravaging, land. Displacing. Pleading everywhere. Constantly.
Save us!
Nickelodeon aired five seasons of The Wild Thornberrys between 1998 and 2004. 91 episodes of journeying. Of discovery. Of learning. And if I had Eliza’s power, I’d take my voice and shout inside a cave of bats, and as the squeaks bounded off the guano-slick walls and into the chaos of their throng, I’d spread my arms and let furry bodies slip up the bottom of my shirt, then out my collar, brushing my neck, to go forth with a warning: We are killing you. Fly. Please, fly.
I think warnings are lost on us humans. They must be. The scales have already tipped so far in the direction of Earth being unsalvageable. Even if Eliza and I knew every human tongue, every dialect, every word from every land—and even if we could yell until our lungs burned—I don’t think anyone would listen harder than they had been before. Which, on the whole, hasn’t been that hard at all. I think we would be invisible to them. Like animals are invisible in a world where no one cares.
The last known passenger pigeon, Martha, died in 1914. Now, they are extinct. Now, Eliza did not know the sound of her coos, the words her beak made, but she would have if she had been born—created—in the late 1800s instead of the late 1900s. She would have been her friend, 3 animated or not, if the arc of time, of fate, had been kinder to her.
Passenger comes from passager, meaning passing. Meaning transitory. Meaning passer-by. Meaning, look up at the blue sky and call to the birds with all the magnetism in your voice, Eliza, and tell them they are beautiful. Tell them none of us will forget.
Jared Povanda is an internationally published writer and freelance editor from upstate New York. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, CHEAP POP, Virtual Zine, Back Patio Press, Lammergeier, and elsewhere. Find him @JaredPovanda and at jaredpovandawriting.wordpress.com
