The Merganser

It’s 2006. I’m broke, and driving north from Sacramento. Getting into Portland around midnight, my plan is to crash on my friend’s futon for a few nights and figure out the rest later.

I may have been poor and unorganized, but I wasn't completely rudderless– I had just landed the prestigious (and unpaid!) videography internship at the Oregon Zoo. At 23 years old, I wanted a job that involved animals, wasn’t too boring, and wasn’t too hard. Making movies about tigers sounded pretty fun, and I was pretty confident I had the artistic chops to earn a first-class ticket to Nairobi on David Attenborough's private jet.

So I apply, get the gig, and drive 1,000 miles north. My only survival skills are what I learned from my recent bachelor’s degree in evolutionary biology (i.e. nothing). I only know one person in the city, and she graciously offers her couch for (what I will retrospectively imagine to be) an indefinite stay.

Pretty soon I realize that unpaid videography interns don’t make a lot of money. A week in, I desperately take a job delivering pizzas. It's the only place open past midnight, and I navigate the dark streets of Portland (usually getting lost) on my way to deliver food to eclectic late night diners. 

By day I film and edit footage of zoo animals (who tend to be sleeping), by night I get lost in a streetlight-deficient city in an era before cellphone-GPS. The pizzas get cold in the passenger seat, and the months stretch on. My unfortunate friend’s futon stays in a flat configuration. I'm not making a lot on tips.

Theoretically, I'm trying to make it as an artist, if that means occasionally pitching charcoal sketches to local thrift stores. This is also (shockingly!) un-lucrative, and I sink deeper and deeper into a funk as I realize the only value I have at this point in my life is providing greasy carb-bombs to people as the munchies kick in— and I’m not very good at that. 

But like the rest of Portland’s (unrealistically idealistic) population, my heart is in the right place. I really want to make beautiful art, and I want to do it to save the planet. There's a genuine flame in me. I capitalize the "C" in "Conservation". I disdain fluff pieces ("cute-xploitation). They're a waste of time, an obnoxious distraction for the rubes while the Earth gets slashed and burned. I want to tell stories that matter. Take me straight to the rawness of Nature’s hurt. Put me where the struggle is, please, so that we can turn all this ugliness into something beautiful.

Oooookayyyy, says the Zoo's publicist, as he politely redirects me to focus on producing a marketing video for the new VR rollercoaster experience. Once I'm done with that, as well as a series of zoo career profiles, I'm welcome to work on whatever floats my boat.

The Zoo's YouTube channel has about 50 subscribers at this point,¹ and despite an impending sense of dread about the deficiency of high-paying careers for artistic purists hoping to save all of Nature, I agree to the assignment.

The career profiles turn out to be kinda fun–the first one is (bizarrely) about the Zoo's executive chef, and he cracks me up during the filming. I continue the series, meeting and interviewing the zookeeper, the curator, even the Zoo's photographer. I get behind-the-scenes access to all sorts of cool places. But it's always just watching, looking through the viewfinder while everyone else gets to be a part of the action. 

It starts to bother me– I want to be hands on with the animals. 

I’ll admit it, as a kid who grew up watching nature documentaries, sometimes I wanted to step across the screen and intervene. Watching a little duckling being chased down by a fox, I'd plead with the camerapeople to shoo away the capricious predator. Sometimes, I felt such heartbreaking indifference from these videos, beautiful and enchanting as I found them, and I promised myself that I'd actually make a difference when I grew up.  

As it turns out, as an “adult” I was currently eating one free slice of pizza a night and adding cheesy jokes to short videos of naked mole rats. It did not look like I’d be able to save the world, after all. Sorry to let you down, Captain Planet!

But before the icy fingers of complete existential despair got a hold of me, my next career profile video assignment came in: veterinarian.

Of course, they want a video about the vet. Doesn’t every kid dream about being a vet at some point, at least for a little bit? Had I? I don’t know, but at least this was a way to get the YouTube subscription count into triple digits!

So I walk over to the zoo hospital, tucked away into a quiet corner of the campus. Two very busy individuals look at me as I introduce myself and my purpose. They look at each other, then over my shoulder, apparently hoping that somebody would help redirect my attention elsewhere so they could get back to work. 

But nobody rescues them, and I maintain a smile and unusually prolonged eye contact for an “animal” kid. The awkward expectation is that at least one of them respond, and eventually one of them does. She’s a zoo vet, a doctor of veterinary medicine, and very graciously explains she could possibly give me a few minutes (no doubt at the expense of ten million other “To-Do’s” on her list that day) to get some footage. She even lets me attach a lapel mic and conduct a short interview, before rushing over to an anesthetic procedure as a veterinary nurse calls for her attention with a patient. 

It’s a small, diving bird–a merganser, I believe. Either it's sick, or it’s getting a quarantine exam, or there’s some other reason why it has the full attention of these veterinary professionals. It's under anesthesia and attached to some strange medical equipment. 

I don’t know. I genuinely have NFC what kind of bird it is, or what the machine its connected to is (it looks like one of the droids you'd find in the loading bay of a Tattooine sandcrawler). I don’t really know anything. And it's bugging the crap out of me.

But my job is to get a good shot, so I look around the room– overwhelmed by the complicated medical equipment. I don’t want to bump into anything: it looks sophisticated, delicate, possibly dangerous. The oxygen tanks wants to explode, my feet want to trip over the dangling wires and tubes, and they're all converging on this little anesthetized animal. It's all there for some helpful purpose, but it's all kinda scary. 

I see an intriguing angle– through a clear bell (of what I would eventually learn is a ventilator) I hit record on a wide shot. The room is somewhat cold, sterile and full of intimidating technology that looks like a Stephen King version of The Brave Little Toaster. I want to flee into the jungle.

But in the center of my shot,² unrecognizable and distorted by the clear plastic cylinder, there's the little, helpless animal. Surrounding the bird, the zoo vet and her technician focus their attention on all the little details of it's health. They fiddle with the alien-like technology, they handle the patient delicately, and it's like watching a master artist at work.

Possibly, none of this penetrates my vague awareness, and it just seems like a cool, artsy-fartsy transition shot. But I slide the lens around the ventilator bellows, and everything comes into crystal clear focus: I want to do that. 

I want to use spooky medical equipment.

I want to memorize heavy textbooks.

I want to wear an expression of grave concern and dangle a stethoscope around my neck and wield this incredible magic. Give me the tools, put the power of healing in my hands and let me lay them on the animals. 

I am ready to accept the challenge.

I want to be a veterinarian. 

Three years later, I'm driving north again. Only this time I stop in the lovely little town of Davis, California. I’ve been back home in San Diego applying to vet school, and it's finally paid off.

Four years in Davis, one more in Long Island, and I'm suddenly a real, battle-scarred Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. It all happened so fast. 

That was over a decade ago, and after treating thousands and thousands of cases, I decide to write about my experience. Two years ago, my first post goes live on this website. 

For every week since then, I’ve tried to share something real. I’ve reached into the sharps container that is modern veterinary medicine because it seemed like someone should document this crap. I thought it was important. Sure– it couldn’t hurt my chances at a National Geographic Contract, but really I just needed to get it out. I had to bear witness. Right as AI was making content creation as easy as clicking, I set off on a path of some 87,348 words (as of this writing–no wait, that’s 87,35-nine–oh, never mind!) because it just... needed to happen.

If I could be extremely grandiose for a moment, I’d like to think that I’m part of a long tradition of veterinary storytellers. It’s strange to put it that way, but every group of people needs someone to explain their situation. One way to uphold the veterinarian's oath can be storytelling, even–and I’m aware of the stretchiness required of this claim–cartooning.

I appreciate any time you’ve spent here, and I promise to continue to tell the truth. I'll put up honest material that reflects the modern world’s relationship with the animal one. I really did promise to protect the animals, even before I got my white coat. I've treated many animals and their humans in the physical world, and I hope, in some small way, that my words and silly drawings help them too. 

I’ll continue, albeit at a less frenetic pace, whenever I think I need to. And I’m sure I will–turns out it's a part of my calling.

I didn’t just go to vet school to become a veterinarian, I also went to become a storyteller.

1. Hey! That’s how many subscribers Sasquatch Paw has now!
2. At 2:57, here, if you're interested: