Some towns have swallows, some butterflies, but West Center had possums.
There weren't any possums until some enterprising southerner introduced them to provide meat for undiscerning gold miners. But possums found the country to their liking and they remained and prospered long after the mining camps had become flower burdened havens of Bed and Breakfast and coffee shops.
But West Center was off the tourist track. It had two auto parts stores, one hardware store, one fair size grocery, two convenience store gas stations, a volunteer fire department, two schools built in the thirties and one built in the seventies that still had sick building syndrome and a city hall and library.
West Center used to have a logger fest every summer but when logging became incorrect it was dropped, though there was a strong undertow to reinstate it.
A boy named Arthur Stevens first reported the possum migration. No one believed him. Arthur Stevens was a night wanderer. It wasn't his mission to peek into the bedroom windows of the town, but if the opportunity presented itself he wouldn't turn it down. Mostly he just liked to observe the secret lives of cats and skunks and owls and lonely bicyclists.
About two thirty one August night when the moon was full Arthur Stevens saw the possums come down 17th Street, cross Kern Creek bridge and disappear into the city park. There were about a hundred of them.
The next year he saw them again. The following year he had his uncle Sykes, his biology teacher and two friends with him. Yes. Possums. Hundreds of possums coming down 17th by the light of the moon.
The zoology professor at the State University had a good laugh. ``They are not herd animals,'' he said.
But the next year two television crews - one with an infra red camera - caught the migration and demonstrated to the world that the possums of West Center did indeed migrate - or at least take a volkswalk - en masse down 17th Street by the light of the August moon.
All thoughts of the Logger Fest were forgotten. The late August Possum Festival at West Center became a destination for ten thousand Californians and possum hats (artificial fur of course) were worn by all.