Driving With Death, or How I Spent My Summer

I only look sweet and innocent

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May showers bring? In Southern Colorado, apparently, staggering quantities of rodentia and lagomorpha.¹ We don't usually get much in the way of May showers, and we definitely don't get June showers. Until this year. Thanks to El Nino, or so the weather prognosticators claim,² we've been blessed with more moisture falling on our parched little patch of earth by June than we usually see in an entire year. I'm not complaining. When you're one inch shy of a desert, water in any form is ALWAYS a blessing,

But there have been consequences to this blessing I did not foresee.  Don't get me wrong. I appreciate the orders rodentia and lagomorpha as much as the next nature lover. (For those of you who've already forgotten that Latin you slept through in first period biology, these would be your rabbits, rats, mice, squirrels, chipmunks, beavers, and, my personal favorite, pocket gophers).

We've come to appreciate the beavers. It took a while. We used to fight them. This was so moronic of us I must recount it for your edification if not entertainment.

A few years ago, when the beavers first returned to our section of the river, they began doing what beavers do so magnificently: building dams. They created lovely ponds in the river for hunting fish (and swimming). They created pretty sounding waterfalls. And in doing all this they effectively flooded the path on which we took our hungry goats to pasture.

Goats do not like water. I mean they really don't like water. So pasturing them became, temporarily, impossible.

We came up with two brilliant ideas to cope with this. The first involved destroying the beavers' handiwork. Every night. I actually did none of this. My strong, determined husband did.

And every morning we would find the dams beautifully, perfectly reconstructed right where they were the day before. Beavers are nothing if not survivors. Our beavers apparently grew up in Gaza.

The second brilliant idea was that we would haul wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of dirt to the place where the path had flooded in order to build the earth up enough that our aquaphobic goats would be willing to brave walking on it. It was a good idea (my husband's, naturally), just exhausting.  Our work usually lasted a day or two, before the beavers' enterprise would flood it again.

It took us about a month of hard, mostly futile labor, and our interns threatening to build a guillotine, before we finally surrendered. Smartest thing we ever did. Trust me on this, please: you cannot win against a beaver. You will not win. More to the point, you should not win because it turns out they're incredibly important and beneficial to healthy riparian ecosystems. So we stopped giving our interns a daily reason to revolt and learned to live with the beavers and love them.

We grew to love and appreciate them so much so that when they started mysteriously showing up dead on the land this spring—and, weirder still, not getting eaten by other critters--we called the Department of Wildlife out to investigate.

Boy, was that worthless. The DOW guy was lovely, but his news for us was pretty damned disappointing. On the upside, he didn't think the beavers had been poisoned since they're weren't a bunch of dead carrion birds and other Critters Who Eat Dead Things lying around the corpse. He wasn't sure what had killed the beavers, but he didn't think the river was toxic, and he said not to worry. The bodies would decompose eventually.

On the down side he informed us that our upriver neighbors—all of them—are completely within their legal rights to kill a beaver if they consider it a threat to their lives of property. In a county and state where ranching is king, this covers a pretty broad definition of beaver “crimes.” Even we, in our desperation, never stooped to killing the critters.  Stupid Human Laws 1, Beavers Nil.

Really sorry about the misunderstanding, buddy.
Can I get you a lemonade?

Nevertheless the beavers are thriving, so much so that we now have two rivers on the land, but because they're engineering geniuses who decided to reward us for no longer being assholes and destroying all their hard work, they've managed to do this in such a way that we have a dry path for our caprine ladies to traverse to pasture.

You stay classy, Beavers.

Unfortunately, this year, we've had myriad other members of the two orders to cope with.

Rabbits, for instance. Now, I think we can safely all agree rabbits are friggin' adorable. They're cute and cuddly and we all sided with Peter Rabbit as kids when he went up against mean ole Mr. McGregor, the gardener whose food Peter kept stealing.

But that was then and this is now, and no matter how fucking adorable they are, I am entirely clear that Mr. McGregor was the hero and aggrieved party in that story. In the past 2 months I've gone from “Oh, hey, little buddy! Aren't you cute? Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you,” to “Get OUT of my garden or SO HELP ME, GOD, I WILL EAT YOU!”

With lots of help from the squirrels, who previously just excelled in eating the tiny bit of fruit our trees produced, the rabbits have managed to decimate our chard, cut a toothy swath through our beets, unearth and decapitate impressive quantities of carrots, nip the leaves off our bean plants (you know, those things necessary for photosynthesis, i.e. the growth of green beans, a.k.a. the entire reason we planted them in the first place, but never mind). They were chowing a Sherman-esque swath across our lettuce beds when my brilliant husband realized if we didn't cover everything we'd have no crops left to sell or eat.

It wasn't me. 

So we covered the most vulnerable plants with agricultural ribbon. And this deterred the rabbits not one iota. Smart critters, they know a good all-you-can-eat buffet when they see one.

Then there are the mice, and their brawny cousins, the rats.

Ben, one of our young farmers from England, decided--with an acceptance of reality to wow the Buddha--to befriend the inevitable mice with whom one must share a tipi (tipis, unlike tents, do not seal). He named his mice Jeffrey, and would joke, in a charming Ricky Gervais-ish London accent, about what an inconsiderate roommate Jeffrey could be at times, bringing home women at all hours, leaving his stuff everywhere, etc. Jeffrey truly found a friend in Ben.

Not so, Jeffrey's rat cousin, Joffrey, who took up residence in our house one night when an unusual wind blew our front door open while we were all sleeping.⁴ Joffrey made the mistake of trying to befriend me. I was having a hard summer already. A rat taking up residence in my house, in my bedroom no less—even a healthy field rat with a good diet—was enough to send me over the edge.

Aside from the obvious health concerns—rat pee and rat poo not being exactly sanitary or pleasant smelling additions to one's sleeping space, living room, etc—Joffrey, like his mice relatives, was nocturnal, and our bedroom was a rat's paradise. Given that it's the coolest room in the house, it doubles as our pantry, our seed storage unit, my writing office, and the place where piles and piles of laundry—washed, unwashed, neither?--live, waiting for farmers to deal with them mid-summer. This means that there is an almost endless supply of things for Joffrey to eat, places for Joffrey to hide, things on which Joffrey can poop, things with which Joffrey can noisily drive us insane by denying us sleep, and ultimately use to make a nest.

And make a nest Joffrey did, as evidenced by the baby rats who appeared before our traps, poison, and de-rat-paradisification could persuade Joffrey to leave⁵

At this point I kinda started freaking out. For one thing, we'd hardly slept for a week, since every time I would fall asleep my poor, exhausted husband (who could hear someone rattling a piece of paper in the next county) would wake me up to help him deal with the Thing Making So Goddamned Much Noise.

Ultimately, we decided to just wait for the poison to work and turned a fan on to drown out the noise. We scoured our room, took everything out of it that could possibly, theoretically, appeal to anyone in the rodentia order, thoroughly sanitized the floors, walls, etc., and then slept like the dead. We left for a much-needed four-day break, and when we returned, our young farmer interns informed us that Joffrey was indeed dead. Oh, and fucking huge, by the way.

Not even if you learn to cook as well
as the guy in "Ratatouille"

Joffrey's offspring appear to have found their way outside, thank God, but not before stinking up our bedroom again one last time for good measure.⁶

Ben eventually got tired of Jeffrey's antics and asked him to leave.⁷ Unfortunately, Jeffrey then moved into our 2003 Mazda, our trusted farm car. Jeffrey was really only the latest in a long line of mice to try to live in our car. This is not unique to this year. One of the first things our neighbors taught us when we moved here was the importance of putting dryer sheets and mothballs throughout one's car, including one's engine, to discourage the critters from making their homes there.  Supposedly the smell puts them off.  This used to work, at least somewhat. We've had to fix battery wires that were eaten through, and clean lots and lots and lots of half eaten tissues out of the car, but for the most part, this kept them at bay. Mousetraps baited with peanut butter also usually proved effective (Ben was surprised to hear that American mice differ from their English cousins in terms of preferred Last Suppers).

Not this year.

This year, the mousetraps which inspired the saying “try to build a better mousetrap ['cause you can't, 'cause it's fucking impossible]” don't even work. The mice just kind of look at them, say, “oh how nice! The humans left us some more peanut butter!” before wandering off with their bellies full and the traps still set.

Out running errands one day, we decided to vacuum out the car to get rid of the new, unbearable smells that indicated the presence of a living mouse. While we did, a mouse escaped, doubtless terrified of the sound. Cool, we thought. Mouse gone. Yea!

When we got to our next stop I opened the back door and screamed. Now, I really hate the fact that I screamed, because I'm not one of those women who does that. But for some reason I still wasn't expecting something to be moving in the back of my car. Lo and behold, Jeffrey was also a female, and left two babies behind in her effort to escape The Vacuum.

My husband managed to grab one of the babies and toss him/her out of the car. He didn't mean to hurt it, he just didn't want it in the car. It flew a short distance and landed hard on the pavement. Hard enough to render it's rear legs unusable, but not enough to kill it, and—seemingly still blind—it did its best to crawl back towards the car, doubtless in search of its mother. I should have killed it. I couldn't. It was trying so damned hard to live.

I can't express how terrible this was, how sorry we were to be a human.

The other baby was still somewhere in the car. We didn't know where, we couldn't find it, we never saw it again, but after a few days we began to smell it. It was hot then, and the poor thing probably died of heat stroke or dehydration, locked in the car. When we opened the car again, the smell of its decay-in-process nearly overwhelmed us.

Driving with death, in the form of Eau de Rotting Mouse Corpse, is another one of those things which demonstrates I have enough of my mother in me that my sanity begins to fray around the edges.

But drive with it I did, for more than a week, because we couldn't find the body. We opened every window, turned the fan on high, and it kinda worked. I even overpaid a Jiffy Lube mechanic to replace our air filter in the hope that the corpse was in there. It wasn't.

Interesting thing about a decaying mouse corpse. It eventually stops smelling. Do not think about why that is. Do not, do not, do not.

In the interim my husband managed to catch another two mice in the (now miraculously working) traps (you'd think the smell of one of their kin dead would have clued the poor suckers in that maybe this wasn't a good neighborhood, but no).

A few days later as we opened the hood on our farm truck, Dora-the-Explorer, to refill the oil (it has an unfixable leak, naturally), we saw a lovely, huge rat nesting in a corner of the engine. She was intrepid; she was actually using the dryer sheets as part of her nest. My husband chased her around the engine for a few minutes, and then I grabbed her by the tail and threw her away from the truck, unwittingly in the direction of my sister-in-law's boyfriend who grew up in New York and is therefore not fond of rats. He recovered quickly, and, happily, so did she.

A few days after that I found another rat outside--missing part of her tail--nesting in the box which houses the batteries for our garden pumps (charged by a small solar panel). I told her, “you know what, honey? That's just fine. You stay right here and make your little nest and I'll leave you be. No need to shake so hard.”

It felt like a tiny victory in the direction of decency toward another of the creatures with whom I share this Earth. Finally I could let one of them live, build a home, procreate, etc. Imagine my disappointment when my husband found the rat, and worse, learned that I knew she was there and had done nothing to get rid of her. “Remember the chewed-up wiring I had to fix on the batteries last week? It is NOT okay for her to stay in the battery box!” Duhhhhh!

Meanwhile, the bunnies keep multiplying like...I'm sorry, truly...rabbits.  And, for months now we've not seen or heard sign of coyote, which probably means some genius in the neighborhood decided it would be a brilliant idea to shoot them, thus depopulating the landscape of one of rodents' primary predators. Times like this I really think everyone should have to study differential equations (jokes that only a biologist could love).

So, I've started researching online the most effective way to trap a rabbit, the most humane way to kill it, the most efficient way to skin and eviscerate the creature. Things I Never Knew I Needed To Know. I reiterate: bunnies are cute as hell. But they have 75 acres of God-given food they could be eating, and instead they insist on eating the half-acre of human food we labor to produce. I feed them, they feed me. That's how it works.

C'mon.  Be honest.  Could you do it?

But since I'm a coward and a hopeless softie, I'm probably never going to trap a rabbit, at least not 'till after the apocalypse.  So I'm off to the hardware store to find chicken wire with which we hope to rabbit-proof our fence. I'll open the windows, of course, and turn on the fan, to get out the stench of the living or dead mouse or rat currently sharing the car with me.

Sigh.  Is it winter yet?

1 So now you know why it's never become a saying.

2 They don't know! 

3 References available upon request.

4 We never lock it. We live in the country, and we're poor. Burglary is literally the least of our concerns.

5 Attempts to rename Joffrey “Cersei” failed abysmally.

6 And I wonder why I take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.

7 Politely, of course. He is English after all.

Our Heroes Have Returned!!!

Welcome back, Mr. Crane!

Welcome back Ms. Mills!