Rants from the Hill Page 4

  LAST NIGHT, I lay awake in bed listening to the sound of little claws scrabbling inside the walls of our house. Because the sheetrock acts as a drumhead, amplifying sounds that originate within the wall, the scratching is disturbingly loud. It sounds as if there is an irate raccoon in there, which is how I know it is only a mouse; if it were a big packrat, as it sometimes is, it would sound like a terrified person trapped behind the wall, evoking the chilling entombments of an Edgar Allan Poe tale.

  Tonight, the packrats are on the outside of the house, where I hear them racing along the stucco walls before pausing to clean their whiskers. In the morning, their turds will litter the stoops, and their urine will stain the windowsills, as if someone had spilled a pint of porter there. For now, I try to lull myself to sleep with the dim hope that rye whiskey might provide an effective inoculation against Hantavirus.

  “Ground truthing,” a term used by environmental activists, refers to the important process of comparing a representation of the land (for example, one that appears in writing, photographs, or maps) with actual conditions on the land, and then measuring and recording the inevitable gap between the two. When we bought this isolated piece of land and planned to build our home and life here, we understood that we were choosing to live among the wild critters. But, like most folks who pursue a pastoral fantasy, we had not ground truthed it; that is, we did not have a solid idea of what we were actually signing up for. I am unsure what I imagined back then, when my idealized vision of desert dwelling was obscured by the golden haze that surrounds all untried plans, but I suppose my rural dream was equal parts Retreat from the Vices of Overcivilization, Enter the Peaceable Kingdom, and Wear Only Boxer Shorts and a Coonskin Cap. These are dangerous fantasies when indulged individually, but in combination they have proven especially perilous.

  For the past decade, every assumption I ever made about nature has been challenged, every environmental value I held tested, and every elaborate self-image I constructed slowly eroded away by living amid fire, blizzard, and wind. Out here in the desert West, the lion does not lie down with the lamb; instead, the mountain lion prowls by night and tries to eat your dog and cat. We tree huggers find very few trees to embrace around here, and those few are being used to shade Great Basin rattlers from the scorching sun. Certainly, pacifism is nowhere in sight, as the land is dotted almost as often by bones, entrails, and tufted piles of feathers as it is by desert peach, gooseberry, and rabbitbrush. Even the great horned owls, which we assumed would lull us to sleep with their gentle hooting, instead keep us wide-eyed by shrieking “whaaaa whaaaaaa-aa-aa-aarrrkk” (a direct quotation from my bird book) as they prepare to eviscerate their hapless prey.

  While we humans tend to fear megafauna like bears and mountain lions, no force of nature is more daunting than rodents, which are so prolific, unrelenting, and indefatigable that, after living a few years here, I began to wish I could be fatally attacked by a mountain lion, just to have my capitulation to the rodents over with all at once. Instead, I must engage in endless and losing combat against the utterly invincible Army of Rodentia, which around here consists of platoons of field mice, kangaroo rats, bushy-tailed packrats, montane voles, antelope ground squirrels, and California ground squirrels—each of which does its special kind of damage, and none of which could be extirpated even if a Special Forces unit were suddenly dispatched by chopper to Ranting Hill.

  The real problem is not the rodents but me, with my stubborn insistence upon inhabiting a place that, absent my intrusion, would have little difficulty controlling its rodent population. Even when we are gone for a few days, the owls take up hunting perches on the peaks of our roof (as evidenced by the jumbo-size, white crap blasts beneath them), the coyotes use their paws to excavate ground-squirrel tunnels, the harriers and red tails constantly threaten death from above, and even the gopher snakes move in to patrol the packrat stick nests among the junipers. It is as if all of predatory nature is simply waiting for me to get my pathetically ineffectual operation out of the way so the usual business of chomping and gulping can resume apace. By disturbing this natural cycle of predation with our presence, we have inadvertently become Ranting Hill’s top predator, which means that reveries about pastoral nature must be interrupted by a lot of slaying of my fellow creatures. So much for the Peaceable Kingdom.

  It is easy to prattle on about methods of “pest control,” but out here there are real limits to their effectiveness. I cannot use snap traps to catch rodents, since that would risk injuring Lucy, our lazy cat, whom we adopted in the vain hope that she would do the rodent catching. I won’t use poison, since this place is also home to our little girls, whom I now refer to not by name but only as “my sweet little nontarget species.” Instead, I have been driven to a variety of depressingly violent strategies for protecting our home against takeover. My most innovative and elegant tactic involves a small, inground fishpond, which I installed so the girls could have a few goldfish whose bowl I would not have to clean. It turns out that rodents are wonderfully fond of suicidal drowning, which most mornings leaves the goldfish staring up at a long-tailed silhouette. Better still, a local magpie has discovered that our little pond is a rich source of carrion, and so it visits each morning to haul away the dead. Nature thus provides undertaker as well as corpse, allowing me to keep both my conscience and my hands clean.

  More troubling is that my desperate determination to battle these rodents has turned me from a mild-mannered lover of nature into a gun-toting vigilante. On days when Eryn takes the girls to town and I am home alone, I undergo a disturbing transformation from a mild-mannered writer to a free-blasting hillbilly who more closely resembles Yosemite Sam than Henry Thoreau. I now use my writing desk primarily as a hunting blind, from which I rise occasionally (in my boxer shorts and coonskin cap) to fire out the window at antelope ground squirrels as they devour our plants. If you find it unconscionable that a grown man would turn a shotgun on an animal weighing five ounces, you will not be heartened to discover that another method of rodent control I employ is electrocution. In an especially desperate moment, I resorted to the online purchase of a device called a “Rat Zapper,” a battery-operated death chamber that accommodates mice and smallish packrats. It is only moderately effective, but in a battle that must be waged on many fronts it has its place, not to mention that it arrived accompanied by a handsome T-shirt depicting a terrified rodent being struck in the skull by a fiery bolt of lightning. When the mice become wary of the Zapper, I resort to chasing them around the garage with the shopvac, keeping score aloud as each “tthhhwooosh-plonkk” sound registers another short journey through the esophagus of the vacuum tube. Not an easy method, but perfectible; it’s all in the wrist.

  My primary means of self-defense is live trapping, which I do each day and night in order to round up both the diurnal and nocturnal among my furry neighbors. To become an effective trapper, I have had to do a great deal of research into the behavioral ecology of rodents, which has immeasurably increased my appreciation for what absolute marvels of evolutionary biology these little monsters are. Their ability to adapt to extreme environments, eat almost anything, occupy diverse ecological niches, produce young at a dizzying rate that keeps them ahead of even the most voracious predators—all this and a great deal more has inspired my admiration. The irony that I have come to respect these animals even as I have learned to exterminate them is rivaled only by the more painful irony that I send them to the Elysian Fields using the unhappily named “Havahart” trap. Once rodents are live-trapped, there are few alternatives for their disposal, especially since I have resisted the temptation to release the captives a mile from here, near the home of a grouchy neighbor whom Caroline calls “Mister Grumpledumps.” And so I subject the caged beasts to “swimming lessons” in my improvised hillbilly-trashcan swimming pool. Needless to say, my rodent pupils invariably fail.

  If all of this sounds grisly, that’s precisely the point. My home desert is not an antiseptic, pastoral retreat bu
t rather a teeming, fecund, wild place, where we all scrabble away desperately to get the upper claw. Walden Pond is nowhere in sight, and the hard truth of life on the ground here exposes the Peaceable Kingdom for what it is: the impossible fantasy of a natural world that is not only harmonious but also bloodless.

  A MONG MY MOST SULFUROUS and vitriolic rants are those inspired by Lucy, our family’s housecat. Because we live in wild country, at high elevation, with terrible weather, surrounded by a spate of voracious predators, this is hardly a proper habitat for any cat that is not a bobcat or mountain lion. When I moved out into this vast desert to get in touch with my Inner Curmudgeon, I certainly never saw a cat in the picture. My forbearance in this case is linked to the fact that I am the father of young daughters, a condition that is 95 percent blessing and 5 percent unwanted pets. I certainly agreed to the idea of having Hannah and Caroline, but I still maintain that Eryn bringing a kitten in on their diapered coattails was taking unfair advantage of both me and my old dog, Darcy.

  I hold no truck with the idea that humans can be neatly taxonomized into “dog people” and “cat people,” but I suspect that my bias against cats firmed up long before Lucy the Desert Cat joined us on Ranting Hill. It has long been obvious to me that cats are unsociable misanthropes, and because I myself am reclusive and antisocial, I find these qualities intolerable in others. No reasonable person can deny that cats are sneaky and untrustworthy—even the way they slink over to their food bowl makes them look suspicious, as if they just robbed a liquor store or snatched an old lady’s purse in their thieving little paws. They do no work and yet have unreasonable expectations of others, have pretensions to brilliance but are insipid, and routinely express their disdain with an air of sanctimonious condescension. While it is a fair observation that many humans share all of these unhandsome qualities, those people do not also defecate in a box in my home.

  Lucy the Desert Cat was saved from drowning in a swimming pool in California, which prompted Hannah to observe that, since the kitten was such a poor swimmer, it would be a good idea to bring her to Nevada, where there is so little water. This is the kind of logic fathers must deal with regularly, and, instead of trying to muster a counterargument that makes sense to a kid, we dads soon learn that it is easier just to crack another beer and play along. Although satisfying in the short run, this coping strategy has the long-term consequence that one day, while changing the cat box or cleaning the fishbowl, you realize, suddenly, that kid logic has thoroughly reshaped your life, one kitten and goldfish at a time.

  So Lucy joined us here in the high desert of northwestern Nevada, where she promptly received the unearned surname “the Desert Cat,” and where she has consistently displayed all the appalling qualities universal to cats, plus other bad behaviors so idiosyncratic as to defy explanation. Like many cats, she scratches the furniture, craps in the houseplants, gets cranked up on catnip, and cools herself down by lapping up toilet water. I defy you to contemplate tolerating this behavior in a person, let alone describing it as “cute.” Just try it: “Honey, I invited Sarah over for lunch. She’ll shred the couch, poop in the potted palm, get high as a kite, race around the room, and then stick her face in the toilet. She’s so cute!” Other behaviors are more weird than objectionable. For example, when I agreed to adopt the cat, I rationalized that I could use a good mouser. But while Lucy is content to nap as mice run circles around her, she is fiercely devoted to hunting fence lizards, whose bloody, tailless, still-wriggling carcasses she delivers to the living room carpet whenever she isn’t counting mice through half-shut eyes.

  Then there’s Lucy’s peculiar arboreal habit. Hannah and Caroline like to gather sticks and build nests in juniper trees in the hope that birds will inhabit them—a neat trick that on one memorable occasion actually worked. The problem is that the cat climbs the trees and sits in the nests but knows as much about getting out of a tree as she does about laying an egg. Then, there’s the unconscionable way she treats my flatulent old dog, who, like me, simply wants to be left in peace to daydream and listen to baseball on the radio. Lucy likes to visit Darcy as she naps, nuzzle her affectionately, then slap her on the snout with her paw, curl around, and stick her ass in the dog’s face—all before slinking away to knock over a liquor store. Worst of all is our cat’s bizarre habit of walking across my keyboard as I am writing, which she does in a regular rhythm that usually results in the cryptic three-paw cluster of “dfc…7yu…p[,.” Even if this is more eloquent than some of what I come up with on my own, I still find it irritating.

  The worst thing about the cat is that the trouble she causes leads to “solutions” far worse than the problems they are intended to solve. When the cat took up strutting on the counters, for example, we resorted to a high-tech remedy: cans of compressed air equipped with whistling, motion-sensing nozzles. The result is that Lucy has learned how to slalom the counters without triggering the devices, while I routinely come in from work, forget that the cat blasters are set to detonate, and end up having to change my underwear before I pour my first whiskey.

  The ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, which they called “mau,” believing the animals to be magical protectors, and even going so far as to mummify some. Lucy’s remarkable powers of self-preservation cause me to wonder if there may be something to this myth. When she was a kitten, Lucy could have been eaten by just about any critter out here, from red tails and bobcats to harriers and mountain lions. Even an adult cat should fear the odds here, where the most active predators of small mammals are coyotes, golden eagles, and great horned owls. Old Man Coyote alone can eat several rabbits a day (and what is a cat, finally, but just a sort of lazy, pampered rabbit?), and you need only listen to the wonderful call-and-response howling of coyote bands at night to do the math and conclude that there is a lot of skull crunching going on out there amid the beauty of balsamroot and lupine. Despite these many threats, Lucy the Desert Cat abides.

  This cat’s terrible habits and magical ability to elude predators have prompted me to think more about other kinds of accidents that might befall her on Ranting Hill. For example, she always hangs around when I am trenching with the backhoe, a situation in which pushing a lever one way rather than the other would forever rid me of cat blasters but also break my daughters’ hearts. Lucy also stays fairly close when I’m bucking logs, and a chainsaw is especially hazardous when wielded by a man distracted by the looming chore of cleaning the cat box. Most gratifying is the contemplation of what the weed-whacker might accomplish if swung suddenly catward at full throttle. While such a mishap would address the problem of my toilet being used as a drinking vessel, it would certainly result in my family voting me off Ranting Hill, where I would then have no toilet at all—not that I relieve myself indoors very often in any case.

  The distribution of power in my family ensures that Lucy the Desert Cat will remain safe and sound, perhaps soon to be rewarded for her “cuteness” with the privilege of driving my truck to town to buy catnip and expensive rye with my credit card. Speaking as a father who has officiated a funeral ceremony for a goldfish, I think it unlikely I will succeed in relegating Lucy to the garage, much less having the opportunity to fire up the Stihl and buck her into furry little rounds. No, my fate was sealed long ago, perhaps even before I received the transformative news that our first daughter was preparing to enter this beautiful world. The way I reckon it, though, 95 percent blessing is a respectable stat, even if it does cause some dfc…7yu…p[,.

  THE RURAL POCKET of Silver Hills where we live is so remote as to be virtually uninhabited, and I am delighted to be among its virtual uninhabitants. This status comes with some logistical challenges, though: roads that are often impassable, the real threat of wildfire, long response times for emergency services, and the risk that a tragic miscalculation might cause a person to run out of beer during the World Series. The most interesting liability of our isolation, however, is that the cell phone companies are unsure if we exist. Their coverage map for our
area looks like a Great Basin gopher snake: a long, slim, sinuous band of human contact wriggling through a vast desert of incommunicado wildlands. Out here on the frontier of digital Terra Incognita we are barely on the map. This liminal status has never bothered me, and since our move out to this big country from town I have missed almost nothing I’ve lost and have treasured almost everything I have gained. Whenever I am asked why I choose to live in the middle of nowhere, I’m reminded that, from my point of view, I have the privilege of living in the middle of everywhere.

  One practical problem with being a virtual uninhabitant of the middle of everywhere is that it is an easy place to pull an Everett Ruess or Chris McCandless—to go out for a stroll and simply vanish into the vast labyrinth of unnamed hills and canyons that extend west from here to California. For this reason, my wife—in acknowledgment of my charm, wit, and habit of bringing home a paycheck—thought it best to ensure my safety by getting me a smartphone to carry out into the wilderness. Because I average around 1,300 miles of solo walking in these wildlands each year, she reckoned that at some point the odds could catch up with me, in which case I might want to just sit in the sage and call a relief helicopter to medivac me back to the world of bourbon and baseball.