Versus

 

            It wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could have possibly done in the age of infancy that would have prompted what has become a lifelong battle of Me vs. Nature.  I don’t even have a particular dislike of Nature.  I love camping and the ocean and I’ve even volunteered at animal shelters.  It’s Nature that’s got the problem. Not me.

            You could say this all started a couple months after I was born.  I lay in my living room surrounded by my two-foot field of visual world when out of one small crack in my ceiling came hundreds of wasps.  They were confused and enraged in the open space and caused quite the to-do.  We were all rushed out of the house by a pair of fast-acting pest controllers as sections of the walls were drenched in poison to kill the swarm.

            Except for that initial attack from Nature we got along splendidly until I was about eight years old.  After my parent’s divorce my mom moved into a house near Black Pine Circle where I lived for half of each week.  For the most part it was fine; we had a big yard with butterflies to catch and a mossy patch where I eventually buried my hamster, Maple. 

He was a Russian Dwarf hamster, about the size of a kiwi and with teeth so sharp we had to wear leather gloves if we ever wanted to take him out. His days had been spent hiding and twitching and carrying out other manic rodent behaviors.  My mom and I had gone on vacation and her friends, who lived with us, had forgotten to refill his water.  Regardless he died of what I always believed was less the dehydration and more his constant and frenzied rage.

My Dad tried to cheer me up after the whole death ‘ordeal’ by telling me that in college his girlfriend had a hamster who she let run around the common area. One day, my Dad’s best friend opened the door to the common and the little guy was crushed between the corner of the wall and the door jam.  Needless to say this didn’t entirely cheer me up, but I decided hamsters must be bad luck – there was no way I could have avoided this small, furry death. He just had it coming.

            Once you’d gotten past the little gravestone in our yard, it was house itself was trouble.  Besides being convinced that it was haunted, within a month I learned that it was infested with spiders.  Now, before this spiders and I had nothing against each other.  I would catch them in glasses and set them free outside of my house. Besides that I only saw them when my Dad mowed the lawn and they retreated up our fence.  But the spiders at this house were different. Every morning walking out of the yard my Mom and I would run into six or seven webs.  With mammoth spiders scuttling around on our shoulders, can you blame us for not being the arachnid fans we used to be?  I woke up every Sunday morning with ten new bites and lived in fear of them after one dangled above my head in the middle of the night. The spiders and I were officially at odds.

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            My Mom and I moved into a small house of our own, above a quiet downstairs neighbor, when I was in middle school.  It had been passed down in my family from generation to generation, and it showed.  Its insides were the color of pea soup and it smelled like mildew, which was the real problem. The person below us had to leave their apartment because the walls were so soggy you could push your finger through them into what was left of the insulation.  But it was home – and it had significantly less spiders, so we got to work fixing the leaks and painting the walls.

            We’d gotten most of the leaks fixed just in time for summer to pop its zero-chance-of-precipitation head over the horizon.  Regardless of the irony of the situation we welcomed the warmth.

            My Mom, her boyfriend, and I came home one day in the late summer and went about our business as we normally did.  “Oh my God!” rang out from the living room.  My Mom’s boyfriend and I rushed in just as she rushed out. On the ground were thousands of bees.  They were pouring out of the chimney, where they’d begun building a hive for the past few months.  Luckily the soot still clinging to fireplace’s walls acted as a natural anesthetic. As they escaped the chimney the bees swam through the air in lazy drunken circles.  They sprawled on our floor, they nestled into the crook of our armchairs, they died in the cracks between the windowsill and the wall. 

            Wasting no time we grabbed the first official bee-fighting appliance we could:  vacuums.  We sucked up ever last one of those bees, straight out of the air if we had to.  It turned into a competition, and we counted how many we’d gotten. “Thirty-four!” shhlluup “One Hundred and Seventeen!” shhlluup. 

            The impromptu plan went flawlessly until we’d filled all the vacuum bags.  There were still bees left and we had no idea if they could maneuver their tipsy insect bodies back out once the suction was turned off. For the second time with no options left we surrendered our house, and for the second time called pest control.

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            A new year brought a new house, a new step Dad, and new problems with nature.  Our new house had water problems.  The plumbing was wrong or something, I was never entirely sure, all I know is that it made bubbles in the paint on our walls.  I never really noticed them, who looks at walls that closely?  My Mom.  The walls drove her crazy, she couldn’t find the right color to paint them, so not only did they have bubbles but they had the gaul to be the wrong shade of apricot.

            I came home from school to find, for the second time at this house, a hole.  Not a small ‘oops I accidentally knocked a paint chip off’ hole.  This hole in the dining room ceiling, like its predecessor which had been in the living room wall, was massive.  There was a good four by four area of ceiling gone. Pipes peeked at me through the ceiling beams, leaking sympathetically.

“Guys!”  I said, exasperated, “What happened to our ceiling?”

“It was your mothers fault!” my step father Roger exclaimed, gesticulating wildly in mock accusation.

“I’m sorry Liv,” said my Mom, grinning “I chipped off one paint bubble and suddenly Roger and I had picked our way to the ceiling fan. By then it was too late, the ceiling was done for.”

            Various plights followed this particular family venture.  Our ceilings leaked more than ever.  If you jumped on the second floor of our house, bits of ceiling would fall into people’s food below you.  Once, my cat Jack took it upon himself to mark his territory in the upstairs bathroom.  The urine trickled down through the pipe and wooden slats and ended up, quietly, sneakily, and inconspicuously raining into the dining room.

            The worst of it ended up being the ants.  Ants had colonized our house far before we’d moved in.  The popular theory about the bump in the wood floor of our kitchen is that there is a massive anthill beneath it that’s growing slowly upwards.  Bending the floorboards, cracking the foundation, the ants are slowly but surely cementing their place in our home.  They also lived in the walls, which was a problem whenever one of these holes developed. Every once and a while the ants would venture off of their well-trodden paths and ended up upside down on our ceilings, peering at us. 

Tired of this my Mom and Roger put up ant poison.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, kill the ants, get rid of the problem.  A couple nights after the poison was administered we were going to sit down for dinner, but the table was black.  The chairs were black, parts of the floor were black.  Black with an unfathomable number of dead ants which had fallen out of our ceiling.  Out came the vacuum, out came the mops, in went the ants, shlup, shlup, shlup.

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            By late middle school this whole Nature thing had really gotten out of hand.  I’ll admit that maybe this next installment was partially brought on by me.  A little.  But everyone chases squirrels right? Dogs do, cats do, I’m sure you have at some point.  Maybe I did it more than the average kid, but that’s beyond the point.

            It’s the squirrel’s damn fault they get chased.  They’re so small and furry you just want to catch ‘em.  Stuffed animals are little and cute too, but let’s be honest, they’re not the fastest.  If you’ve ever tried to catch one my guess is you were sorely disappointed. Squirrels are speedy.        

            Anyway, that was one of my great childhood passions.  I loved chasing squirrels.

            This all started to change.  Slowly, with small calculated movements, the squirrels retaliated.  They would chase me out from underneath trees, dive-bombing at ridiculous speeds towards my head.  They made terrible squirrely noises every time I went out onto my deck.  They stole my papers, ate my snacks, and would follow me for blocks at a time wherever I walked.

            The summer of seventh grade my Dad and I took a road trip down the California coast.  We’d stopped at a beach to look at the sea lions.  You had to look at them from the top of a cliff (those sea-lions are sleepy but dangerous) and my Dad and I ended up following a more than precarious path along the cliff edge to get a better view.  We were on our way back when out of the ice plants came the rumbling of tiny feet.  Two squirrels shot out of the underbrush and straight into my ankles knocking me off balance and almost down into the pit of snoring sea lions.  They rounded a turn and flew back at me.

            I ran up a hill into the iceplants towards my Dad who was laughing uncontrollably.  He hadn’t believed my stories about squirrels before, but now there was undeniable proof.

            The squirrels had taken it too far this time.  But what was I going to do? How could I battle millions of tiny rodents? They reproduce at an absurd speed and I was sure they were telling their squirrely offspring stories about me.  It was me alone against an ever growing squirrel army.

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            My Dad and I were in Yosemite.  We’d stopped in a small picnic area underneath El Capitan to relax and read and generally enjoy how ridiculously amazing the park is.

            I was in the middle of “A Modest Proposal” when my Dad left to get something from the car.  There was a crunch next to me.  I looked down and saw a blue-jay.  Not unusual, I said to myself.  A couple seconds later there was a tremendous rustling in the branches above my head as a group of crows landed in the trees.  Two of them hopped down into the foliage next to me.

            Another noise came from behind me. Chipmunk.  This is all still relatively normal, I thought.

            Then the squirrels arrived, and at that point I knew I was in for some real trouble.  I had suddenly become the epicenter of a ring of small woodsy forest animals.  There was no way out.  They moved in, about ten feet from me, and at once it was a standoff.  No one wanted to make the first move.  We stared at each other.  I started calculating my chances against them in an all out fight to the death, figured I could take four or five squirrels on their own.  One squirrel equals how many crows, equals how many chipmunks? Why hadn’t I been learning this instead of doing gummy bear labs in science? Those sweet sugary bears, despite their ferocious surname, couldn’t help me now.

            Totally overwhelmed I did the first thing I could think of.  I yelled KABLAH! A pair of hikers near me ducked and moved away quickly along their trail.  The animals were relatively unperturbed.  And there was my Dad, walking back from the car with a huge bemused grin on his face.  “You are the only person,” he said, “who I’m not surprised to find in the middle of a bunch of small animals.”

            The forest creatures scattered pretty quickly after my Dad came back.  Needless to say, the world was getting more and more unsafe for me.

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            “Squirrel traps!” said my Dad with a smile, holding up a live-cage.

            “Dad! Don’t trap the squirrels! They’ve done nothing to you!”

            “Oh yes they have, they’re eating all of my bird seed.”

            “Dad. Squirrels can’t tell the difference between bird feed and squirrel feed.”

            “Well they should.” (this was probably a joke)

            “Well they can’t, why don’t you just stop putting out birdfeed if you don’t like them in the yard?”

            “Because then how will the birds eat?!”

            “Dad! Birds can…never mind. Fine.”

            Thus began the squirrel trapping.  He would trap them, they would pee in the trunk of his car with squirrely spite, and he would release them somewhere far away from his house.  Not surprisingly this never diminished the number of squirrels we had in our backyard.  There’s an eternal well of squirrels out there somewhere, a line of them progressing constantly outwards.

            One day my Dad comes home with a giant bag of peanuts. “Dad.” I said cautiously, “Why so many peanuts?”

            “They’re for the squirrels!” he says.

            “What? But you were trying to get rid of them!”

            “I was! I got rid of all the bad squirrels, now only the good ones are left. They won’t eat my bird food.”

            I’m pretty sure he felt bad about displacing all of the other squirrels, or just got bored of it, either way we have a barrel of unsalted peanuts in our back yard. Now our lawn is acceptably aerated, since the squirrels bury peanuts everywhere, and neighbors for blocks around have soil nurturing legumes growing in the dark corners of their gardens.

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            My eighth grade science class hated each other.  Let’s get that straight. We had cliques of two people each and it was you against everyone else.  I’m not sure if it was us or the teacher, we just never adjusted to a copasetic relationship.

            Every first Friday of the month for sixth period our teacher would take us out to Willard Park and set us loose to climb trees, play football and create havoc. We stuck to our cliques.  Being outside of a classroom wouldn’t change anything.

            In this story it was Friday again.  The park was damp, it smelled like rain, I liked it.  There were two Boston Terriers that day, Bucket and Jelly Bean.  Bucket is tiny, she has the attention span of a goldfish, and when I saw her years later at the beach she was trying to drink the sand.  Jelly Bean, on the other hand, is a giant among terriers, sweet, huge and lovable.

            At some point a soccer ball was released onto the field.  Jelly Bean snatched it up.  The game was on.  We all swarmed the ball, but Jelly Bean was good, she weaved, she jumped, she nuzzled.  We gained control. Bucket charged, running erratically, forgetting what she was doing. And suddenly, without anyone noticing, and without anyone acknowledging it, then or afterwards, my entire class came together.  We were a team.

            This, I thought, was Nature’s way of putting up the white flag.  We were both tired of this back and forth.  And at Thirteen and Eternally Old, weren’t we mature enough to put our differences aside?  I put down my weapons, shook its many mammalian, avian, and insectoid hands, and walked away.  The war was over. Good game, everyone.

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Epilogue

My most recent squirrel encounter was not a personal attack from Nature on me, I simply witnessed the events. It was a Nature vs. Nature battle, like it should be.

            My friend’s step Mom had recently bought a bag of dried bull penises advertized as dog treats. On this particular day, as my friend and I were lying out on her lawn absorbing one of the last fleetingly warm Moments before winter, her dog was going to town on a new one fresh out of the bag.  We felt a little cruel letting him crunch his way through another animal’s manhood so Emily called him over.  He ignored her with a particularly loud crack and the satisfied look of a dog who can disobey because he’s already got the treat.  We countered with a large production of clapping and whistling which finally convinced him to waddle over because maybe, just maybe, we had something better than a crispy member for him to chew on.

            Almost immediately after the dog had dropped the rawhide on the grass a squirrel shot down from the fence.  In two leaps it crossed the yard making an A-line for treat. The dog, Ollie, turned just in time to see the squirrel snatch what was now his and sprint off in the other direction.  The rawhide was easily as long as the squirrel but the little guy was fast.  The chase was on.  Dog after squirrel after bull they raced around the yard at high speed.  The squirrel hopped the fence into the neighbor’s yard where we could see it bolting away, stiff bull penis careening wildly around its abductors head.  After a couple seconds it vanished into the foliage, whooshing through the air on some phallic adventure.