After three days of filling and re-filling forms, speaking to managers, sub-managers, and associate supervisors, and subjecting Hector to a variety of physical, mental, and seemingly spiritual tests, I decide to give up on the long application process required for admitting the leathery lump to ‘The Rabbit Hole,’ a wildlife sanctuary outside Maine. The office does not seem at all set up to receive visitors and, more than once, it’s suggested that ‘most mammals just wind up here.’ They emphasize words in a way that seems suspicious but isn’t otherwise threatening. They offer me self-guided tours of the grounds and seem baffled or disappointed when I return. The last straw is a man that bursts through the sanctuary-facing door, thickly bearded and dressed in rags.
“I’m back!” he screams, “My god, I’ve finally returned!”
He seems a changed man, his perspective on our mundane world greatly altered by whatever occurred to him inside ‘The Rabbit Hole.’ He laughs gleefully as the manager calls him a ride-share and somehow I get the stink-eye for having arrived with a rabbit and not with a revelation. Hector and I take our business elsewhere and, on the way, we drop the gibbering man downtown.
‘One might assume that a wayward hare, run to ground, would find refuge in ‘The Rabbit Hole.’ Typical of a woodland bureaucracy, ‘The Rabbit Hole’ is a liminal haven, at best, useful only as long as one is content to run in place. Most who take up residence there find nothing special about the forest, only that its benefits stem solely from the respite it provides from the city. ‘The Rabbit Hole’ is a wilderness and, in preserving the ecosystem it is careless with the individual parts. Life is inconvenient, there, meaning most emerge with a new respect for civilization and nearly as many simply die.”
-traveler
