I’d always assumed, mistakenly it turns out, that the book was about a sunken boat, with a vague notion that it maybe also had something to do with World War II. You can hardly fault me for taking the title literally: Watership Down. It’s so clearly about a ship downed in the ocean. Probably torpedoed by a German U-boat.
So imagine my surprise when, as an adult, a co-worker pressed her copy of the novel into my hands and I began to read a story about bunnies. Well, no, bunnies isn’t quite right. Bunnies implies cuddly tufts of fur, Easter egg hunts and jelly beans. Watership Down is populated by rabbits. Warrior rabbits.
I can’t imagine a less likely group of heroes, save perhaps hobbits. Yet heroes they were. Fiver, Hazel, Buckthorn, Bigwig, Silver. Their quest: an epic odyssey in search of home. What could be nobler?
Their adventures captivated me in the same way Tolkien, Narnia and The Borrowers had drawn me into their fantastical worlds as a child. I lost myself in the rabbits’ warrens during evening commutes on the bus, and believe me if there’s ever a time to lose yourself in an alternate reality, it’s on the bus. Pay too close attention to your surroundings and you’re likely to be driven insane by people who consider it perfectly acceptable to clip their toenails while riding public transportation. In those Dark Ages before the invention of the iPod and iPhone, gadgets that have since enabled humans to erect invisible force fields around themselves, sticking your nose in a book was the only escape.
At the time, I had a job as an acquisitions editor with a small publishing company. I know, that sounds like a glamorous gig, and it probably would have been if the publisher in question were, say, Random House or even the University of Poughkeepsie Press. Our company, on the other hand, specialized in ripping off other publishers’ lowest-common-denominator ideas and getting product to market faster and cheaper than the competition, although who we were competing against to churn out For the Love of Cats remains a mystery.
My role was to coerce desperate writers into producing massive amounts of text, under ridiculously tight deadlines, for a rate that I would place somewhere above Wal-Mart’s sweatshop wages but below Old Navy’s. On a good day, I would stumble upon a potential sucker who had never heard of the Writers Union. Mostly people hung up on me, usually after telling me that I should be ashamed of myself.
I was ashamed. Job title notwithstanding, I still fancied myself a writer, a comrade in arms of the very people I was attempting to screw—imagine a vegetarian working in a slaughterhouse. It pained me to list the terms of our contracts, most especially the phrase “we buy all rights,” which killed conversations at a speed matched only by “I have herpes.” I knew our company’s practices were unethical and the sense of guilt by association was demoralizing.
It was a welcome respite to climb aboard the 210 bus at night and spend an hour or so with my rabbits. I admired their intelligence, loyalty and bravery and was inspired by the way these underdogs refused to back down or betray their principles in the face of stronger foes. I became so attached to them, in fact, that during their crucial battle against the evil General Woundwort, I had to close the book and stuff it in my backpack—the equivalent of hitting pause during a DVD when the action becomes too intense. Though logically the author, Richard Adams, wasn’t about to kill off all my favorite characters, I wasn’t sure I could muster the courage to stand beside them in the fight while the outcome was still in doubt. It was vitally important to me that somewhere, even in a work of fiction, right should triumph over wrong.
Meanwhile, I had my own dictator to confront at work and proved unequal to the task. The vice president of acquisitions was, like Woundwort, an imposing physical presence. “J” had at least a foot on me and easily a hundred and fifty pounds. Yet his appearance wasn’t so much intimidating as it was off-putting. His shirts were habitually missing a button (at just the point to reveal a swath of fleshy midsection) and perpetually rumpled, as if he’d slept in them or salvaged them from the bottom of a crumpled heap of laundry. He gave off a signature aroma that I can only describe as curdled baby powder. I could track his path through the building simply by sniffing out the scent left in his wake.
Each new assignment required a one-on-one meeting with J in which he’d calculate the budget for a book based on word count and the number of photos or illustrations needed, using as a frame of reference outdated rates he’d been able to finagle back in the ‘70s. I found it hard to focus during these confabs, not only because of my sensitivity to the aforementioned odor, but also because his office was one stack of books short of a Hoarders episode. I kept expecting a rat to scurry out from one of the many precarious piles, under which the remains of a decade’s worth of half-eaten lunches were undoubtedly decomposing. It didn’t take much of an imagination to picture how this office scene might translate to J’s living quarters, the thought of which turned my stomach.
As comical as this all sounds, it had a way of keeping a person off balance. In his very dishevelment, J signaled his position of power. The fact that our CEO tolerated such shabbiness from an employee at the VP level indicated the influence J wielded and how highly his contributions to the company were valued. He was not a person to be challenged.
So, unlike the stouthearted Fiver, who valiantly approaches the chief rabbit with little more than a vision that the warren is in danger, I didn’t have the nerve to speak truth to power. Call it reverse anthropomorphization—I had become as timid and anxious as a cottontail. During my tete-a-tetes with J, I never seized the opportunity to say our deadlines were absurd, never asked to have input in the actual hiring of writers as opposed to simply routing their clips and typing up their contracts, never told him that my heart lay with editorial and acquisitions was slowly leeching me of my soul. Instead, when J handed me a fast-track assignment two days before my wedding, I meekly accepted. Somewhere a landfill is clogged with copies of a “poster book” about the one-hit-wonder boy band Hanson, tainted like a blood diamond with the misery of my labors.
Eventually I left the company, as Hazel and friends had deserted the Sandleford warren, only to land, as they did when they hooked up with Cowslip, in even greater jeopardy at a seemingly benign corporation that proved not to be so. It took me years, as opposed to mere days for the rabbits, to extricate myself from that latter nightmare; either rabbits are quicker on the uptake or they’ve never been seduced by the allure of a regular paycheck.
Yet finally I learned the lesson that Watership had tried to teach me: I needed to find a place that respected my talent, ideals and dreams. I needed to find a place that felt like home.
And I did, literally. I walked into the chief’s office and handed him my resignation. No, I didn’t want to think about it. No, I didn’t have a better offer, or any offer to be honest. No, more money wouldn’t change my mind. Then I set up shop in the spare bedroom of my condo.
Sometimes, on a slow day—and freelance writers have lots of slow days if they wait for clients to find them, as I tend to do—I step away from my computer and stare out the front window at the yard two floors below. In the summer, I like to check on the progress of the impatiens that I plant in circles around the trees in the parkway, which I recently learned is the term for the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street. Occasionally I’ll catch a squirrel in the act of digging up the blooms so that he can bury a nut or, more likely, an avocado pit.
I bang on the windowpane, hoping to startle the rodent and bring his destructive pawing to a halt. If that doesn’t work, I run downstairs to the entryway and pound my hand against the glass of the front door. Sometimes the squirrel gets the message and bolts and sometimes he holds his ground, at which point I may step outside and stomp on the pavement. My husband witnesses this behavior and thinks I’m crazy. He doesn’t get it. My warren is under attack; I have to defend my territory.
I am a warrior rabbit.
