They Weren't Done Yet! 1991

The Piute Cabin gets closed up in October. Ranger gone, cats gone…it’s probably only a few days before the mice move back in. When my season starts in June, I open the door to be greeted by stale air, heavy with winter dust and the aroma of Deer Mice.

            Last winter they fared quite well, having finally managed to break into the one mouse-proof shelf in my storage cabinet. This tall piece of rustic furniture was fashioned from locally-milled pine, right here, likely soon after the cabin was completed in 1943. Its lower half is two spacious shelves behind swinging doors. For decades, probably, the lower shelf has been within reach of rodents (whose distant relatives gnawed their way in from the hollow space underneath it). So: trash bags, cleaning fluids, canned goods and such get to live down there while bulk foodstuffs—like the big sacks of rice and beans all rangers subsist on—are safely stored just above. Once a year that lower shelf receives a thorough Spring-cleaning after mice have gleaned, at their leisure, what little they could during the long, cold months. My dishtowels and tinfoil get compulsively nibbled to shreds; they use hundreds of tiny pieces for feathering nests (but plenty of these are just scattered around). I find turds in the big box of TIDE. I find bright-green versions of those ubiquitous pellets inside my carton of Brillo Pads; apparently they can derive nourishment from detergents and steel wool. But last winter, with hunger-driven diligence, they finally finished gnawing through ¾”-thick sawn-pine flooring and gained entry into the upper shelf—land of fat & plenty!—to wreak small-scale havoc. Guess who got to clean it all up?

June 16^th was my first day back in Piute-country this year. Mike Gaffney, a young guy on our firecrew—and a carpenter during the off-season—rode up with me to take out the old stove and install a new one which was getting flown in soon by U.S. Marines. (Umm…this calls for some explanation. But the subsequent Marine Corps invasion of Piute Meadows is a whole ‘nother story….)

Mike and I spent that entire first workday in the cabin; Mike dismantling the antique cast-iron woodstove and me clearing out dust and cobwebs plus cleaning up after mice. This caused considerable terror and mayhem in the local rodent community, which had really proliferated over the winter…in fact, if you were a Piute Cabin Deer Mouse, this day would forevermore be known as “Black Sunday.” They were darting around all day; I’d catch brief glimpses but clearly heard—loud on the plywood floor— almost constant scampering. I set traps right off, launching a full-scale raticide. Peanut butter, as bait, is deadlier than cheese and the first trap snapped shut in just minutes. This one caught it right across the ears and I took a good, hard look at those liquid-

black eyes staring up at me accusingly with the metal bar deeply imbedded in its fragile skull. Far from cute. When I opened the trap, a thick drop of blood welled from its nostrils and fell to the floor. I carried that soft little carcass outside—held, as dead mice always are, by the tail’s very tip—and wung it over the porch railing as far as I could, out into thick grass. Just as I walked back in, another trap set behind the stove went off—mere feet from where Mike was working away. Reloaded both traps. After only ten minutes I heard that sound of patent finality yet again. Must be a clan living right there in the woodpile….This one wasn’t such a clean kill—bar across the back—and it flopped around a couple times. I saw it draw a final breath. Yet another trip outside….

            Two more of those wicked SNAP!s while I was clearing out the cabinet’s shelves which, of course, reeked with the acrid smell of rodent piss and rodent shit. They’d moved into the upper one and established a colony: my ten-pound sack of flour had two gaping holes at its bottom leading into an apparent tunnel-system—a mouse’s “big rock candy mountain”—and the entire shelf was liberally strewn with little brown turds and drifts of flour. A nest made out of dishtowel and foil bits was in one corner. My rice and beans and pasta, fortunately, were actually all in three-pound coffee cans (whose plastic lids were gnawed but still intact). The whole lot was peed- and pooped-upon so I started removing everything. The flour & urine mixture made a paste that had then hardened into what would be a passable cement. I got a paint-scraper and heavy-duty wire brush from my tool chest and went to work. Me on my knees, scraping up this vile substance; sweeping it all out with a whiskbroom, breathing the vapors: life of a ranger.

            While pulling the last stuff off the upper shelf, something soft and brown dashed behind one of those big cans filled with rice. Looking around, I grabbed a nearby coffee filter-cone—perfect!—and, shifting the can, slammed it down. Gotcha! Then: A club…I need a club. Found one right at hand in the form of my whiskbroom, which I flipped around and held by the broom-straw, handle foremost. Quickly lifting the filter-cone, I caught just a glimpse of my huddled, blinking target before neatly bludgoning her over the head. She flopped twice and died. I knew it was a “she” because she was obviously in the final stage of pregnancy. Blood oozed from her mouth and nostrils and began to form a very small but poignant pool. (Looking at a puddle of fresh blood, you can’t believe how red it is.) I’d executed her with cold calculation and almost no remorse; have done this before—whacking them over the head—and would do it again, any time. When small mammals break into your home, eat your food, and start damaging stuff, they cease to be adorable little-fuzzy-things and start to seem more like large insects. Forget the Have-a-Heart route! Shouldn’t even start in on this…but it’s terribly naive to think they’ll just resume their happy lives in some nice place far away. In fact, I’ve heard remarkable stories about relocated pests returning from great distances, even crossing rivers. I explain to well-meaning people that when you catch & release a wild animal it’s very much analagous to someone trapping you, and to then be turned loose on a street corner in Oakland or The Bronx. Lots of other critters, who really don’t want any new neighbors, already live there and you’re going to be run off or murdered in short order. But I don’t take killing lightly; I’ve never killed animals for sport—never even fished—and, to be honest, did feel a twinge of good ol’ Christian-style guilt as I carried her body out and tossed it over the rail. Those inside her were probably still alive but I quickly pushed that thought out of my mind. I’ll not have rodents in my larder!

            Finished up that tedious job by cutting out a piece of brass window-screening mesh and stapling it over the gnawed hole. Helped Mike for a bit then, before starting another project, I took the lid off an old plastic trash can that held fuel for my chainsaw plus parts and tools and oily rags, just to check on its contents. (It was actually a “retired” trash can from before my time whose bottom had been gnawed-through by a woodrat.) I was stunned to see another nest built up against a two-gallon gas can. Stunned, because the inside of that trash can reeked of gas and two-cycle engine oil; the atmosphere in that mouse’s chosen home put L.A. smog to shame. The nest itself was a compact sphere of cotton stuffing removed from the cushioned seat of the big easy-chair by my bed (which a former ranger had cleverly made from a section of hollow-log and even upholstered herself). I reached down and pulled it out intact but not before the mother, making her escape, zipped through that compromised can’s bottom and across the floor to disappear into my woodpile. Lifting the nest, little pink things dropped from it. I tipped it intentionally over a cupped hand and more pink things rattled into my palm. Gingerly picked up the three that had fallen out and added them to those in my hand. Full of wonder, I counted eight, no, nine squirming newborns.

            They were pink and brand-new; maybe two days old. Fresh little packets of aliveness in my hand—the very essence of birth and fecundity. Their semi-transparent pink skin, the color of new life, was stretched over thread-like ribs and visibly pulsed with blood and breath. No hint of eyelids yet but I could clearly see black bulges beneath the pink membrane that would develop into those big, gleaming eyes. I could practically feel the frantic division of cells. They were identical; hairless except for short muzzle-whiskers of the finest hair imaginable. Mouths were tiny puckers that could clasp a nipple. Their paws were stumps with tiny bumps where toes and claws would grow. Wholly perfect, but incomplete, they radiated an amazing quantity of heat into my sweating palm and I felt slightly horrified. They aren’t done yet!

            “Hey, Mike…check this out!” He came over and we both stared with slack jaws. The mass emitted barely-audible squeaking cries. It didn’t seem possible that they were ready to be in this cold, harsh world. You only see human babies at this stage in little glass jars at the museum or photographs from LIFE magazine. But they were very much alive. And I was going to have to kill them. Mike asked breathlessly, “What’re you gonna do with’em?” I already had a plan and headed out the door and down to the river; I just couldn’t face putting them under my heel—a thing I’ve been forced to do from time to time when one of my cats is playfully torturing some damaged victim.

            Carried them down the path with near-reverence and knelt solemnly on the lush, grassy bank of a broad bend near where I dip my water buckets. Took a last, long look. They…aren’t done yet! Then, like a farmer sowing seed, broad-scattered them all upriver.

Drowning in cold water is allegedly a good way to die; this seemed like the most humane option. The river, fresh snowmelt, had been 46° the previous evening when I took a very quick dip—had checked with my thermometer—so they wouldn’t last long. Now, this might sound a little weird but…I wanted to watch them float past, one by one, and see how long they’d survive. (This was me letting my scientist-alter-ego come out. Under the circumstances, I suppose it was a defense-mechanism for distancing myself from the existential implications of what I’d just done.) A slow current on the outside of this bend swept them down to me. I was leaned way out, waiting with a very peculiar kind of anticipation, and peering into deep, green water. Embryonic mice, well under the surface, tumbled by one after another, rolling on invisible currents and dying.

Everything changed. The world suddenly became very different and was now totally silent, completely closed-in. My “self” got left behind—Tim was not present for what happened next—but somehow, some part of me remained as a witness:

            Calm, flowing water turned into space, or infinity—timeless, dimensionless. The baby mice were there. They appeared large; they were dimly concious, and they were everything that I am. They were all of life, everything, from beginning to end. The first ones that passed were gulping and waving their incipient limbs. The others were still. Then they were gone. All this meant something that was of monumental significance.  

It was over (mostly forgotten already) and I stood up, shaken. I knew something had happened to me, something extraordinary, but as is always the case with these rare visitations, our minds immediately reduce the incident to something comprehensible and familiar and proceed with forgetting as quickly as possible. (I’ve had similar kinds of experiences before….) Forced to conceptualize what I’d witnessed, I could see astronauts floating through space, cut adrift from their craft and life-support, like that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The “message” was fading so swiftly—What…what was it?—and in its place there was an agonized sensation, like when you wake up and try to hold onto a dream that’s just slipping away. You try so hard to pull it back…but it’s going, gone. I walked back to the cabin gravely and, when Mike asked what’d happened, made some flip comment about astronauts, and got right back to work.

            Shortly after, and for the last time, a trap by my woodpile went off. There’s the mother…got her. I’d wiped out the whole clan in the space of hours with no help from my cats. It had to be done…nothing I could do about it.

                                                                                                                   31 Jul 1991, 26 Feb 2013

© 2013 Tim Forsell

All rights reserved.

                                                                                                                            

Just Tote Up the Odds...........part one 2012

Carl Jüng, one of my many heroes, would have loved the following tale. It’s true, every word; accounts of the many curious events in my life need no embellishment. 

Despite much admiration I’m no student of his work (nor psychology in general). His books are dense, dry, and loaded with obscure references but I’ve read bits here and there plus a volume of selected letters. His autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was a real pleasure; I’m more interested in the man, his way of bringing that enormous store of arcane knowledge to bear on such thorny subjects. Though Jüng’s worldview was so much deeper than my own we share some of its preoccupations: the convoluted, layers-upon-layers nature of the human psyche (so little of which we’re consciously aware); the perceived flow of this thing we call “time,” the cosmos at large. It is vast and we are small but gifted with an array of amazing sensory equipment, for us to use—for us, at times, to even savor with delight—in our interaction with a world full of wonders. All this….What for? I still like to bat that tired old question around, just for fun. I wouldn’t expect any answers but there’s no harm in sniffing at the edges of The Big Ones. (In truth, few things interest me more.) Topping the list, this cagey mystery:

            During my brief tenure on Earth I’ve seemingly had the lion’s share of highly unusual experiences and, years ago, started a list which gets added to on occasion. Those crazy coincidences, just-plain-weird incidents and meetings-in-strange-places  have inevitably led me to reject the philosophical stance that randomness and pure chance rule over all. No. Something else is going on here—something most subtle—woven elegantly into the fabric of reality. I have absolutely no idea what “it” might be but recognize that, puzzling and uncanny as all these occurrences seem, they’re just another manifestation of the fantastically intricate whole. I also realize my notions are abhorrent to the likes of Richard Dawkins—author of The Blind Watchmaker, arch Neo-Darwinist, teleology-denier—who blithely (and with maddening condescension) assures us that such wishful thinking is merely a protective device for staving off fear of the pitiless truth: All of this is no more than a cosmic fluke. It just happened, for no reason.

I’d have no difficulty embracing such a cold-hearted outlook, grim as it is…if it were true. There’s nothing negative about randomness; chance is an essential lubricant helping make the world go ‘round. We live, quite comfortably, cheek-to-jowl with chaos but amidst all this disorder sense a kindly harmony, some sort of Unnameable Principle that pervades everything. It both amazes and saddens me that a thinker as brilliant as Richard Dawkins doesn’t perceive this, too, and apparently isn’t bothered in the least believing that his presence on our exceptionally fine planet is devoid of significance.  He has stressed that living in a world without meaning or purpose doesn’t impede appreciating its beauty and intricacy. But, what then, does he make of the fact that none of this even “needs” to exist? If conditions at the Big Bang had been ever-so-slightly altered the universe could be an amorphous soup of subatomic particles instead of there being all this nifty…stuff. So Richard gets to be here with the rest of us enjoying (and suffering) the fascinating vicissitudes that come with the package-deal of life. After a life devoted to observation and contemplation I’ve seen not one sign of The Grand Plan but it seems terribly obvious that something is going on here. The phenomenon that Jüng called “synchronicity” has, for me, been crucial in affirming the actuality of some sort of purposeful force—or influence. A long string of fortuitous events, splendidly-timed, made my most momentous decisions easy ones and gave the trajectory of my life its fine arc. What’s transpired has lent my worldview a comforting conviction that there is meaning linked with being granted a chunk of time to actively participate in The Great Swirl. Not only are we here, now, but live in a world that in so many ways seems too good to be real. I saw a bumpersticker recently that expresses it perfectly:   

IF YOU’RE NOT IN AWE

YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION

I’m fine with not having the slightest idea about the hows & whys; we have only so much perceptive equipment—acute as it can be—to make use of, after all, and it’s obvious our capacity for Understanding is fairly limited. But on some level those absurdly improbable synchronisms—just another aspect of what I call “the given”— must be explicable. Whenever one happens my reaction is a frisson of delight; knowing the whole shebang is flowing and unfolding in its proper, inexorable fashion.

            A classic example of one of these random gifts-from-the-Universe:

            My father used to bring home stacks of these little time-and-expense notebooks from his workplace. They have a stiff cover and about twenty 3½”x 5½” lined pages bound by two staples. He used them to keep track of all kinds of things: gas mileage, vehicle maintenance logs, needs-lists. I’ve gone through quite a few myself. For more than two decades they’ve served as handy Name&Address books.

            But, being chintzy little notebooks, they’d wear out every few years and need replacing. My father is gone and with him went the endless supply; about four years ago I used the only one left for a new contacts-book. To help make this last one last longer did two new things: at the top of each page a I wrote a big letter (or two) in ink but the names and coordinates in pencil this time. That way, as they changed or the person left my world, an entry could be erased instead of crossed out. And, to protect the thin cardboard cover, a layer of clear cellophane packing tape.

            I’d never done this with previous editions and thought to decorate (and further stiffen) the cover with a photo before applying tape. Got out a box of old three-by-fives, looked for one I could sacrifice, and picked a rather odd image but one that could be trimmed to fit on the cover and still leave space for tape to hold it down. It was taken through a macro lens with my Father’s Minolta, summer of 1976, on a family vacation to the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson. Our reason for visiting this little desert range, famous in “nature people” circles, was to see some of the exotic Mexican plants and animals that only show up in the U.S. there. The picture was a close-up of one—a type of scarab beetle, Chrysina lecontei—crawling up my left forefinger. This animated jewel, caught in the act of trying to escape with its life, was an inch-long, iridescent emerald-green-colored bug with metallic-gold highlights. Its stout legs were colored a similarly metallic-hued bronze. Like no creature I’d ever seen.…

 I trimmed down the thirty-year-old snapshot and “tried it on for size” but…it just didn’t look right. So, back to the stack. I finally settled on this picture of a former home right at the foot of the Sierra—my funky little shack, blossoming fruit trees; a guitar-playing friend seated beneath one in the foreground—an idyllic scene that somehow seemed much more appropriate on the cover of a homemade Name&Address book than a photograph of an insect so I trimmed then glued and taped it down.

            What to do with the scarab beetle? While not overly inclined to dwell on the past, I enjoy preserving memories (it’s in my blood…) and wasn’t about to just throw it out. Something like this—a random photo, an obituary, an old note—I’ll  tuck into one of my books. Most of them contain these mementos and it’s amazing, when I stumble on some such bit of flotsam (perhaps unseen for years), how it instantly becomes a ticket to a long-gone time or faraway place; a lovely little present from the living past.

            So I reached for a volume to cache my beetle in and pulled several that already held one or two items before finding an “empty” one: Jüng’s Synchronicity. Opened it, put the little bookmark-sized scrap of photograph inside, and slid it back home. I’d read its first half a few years before, naively hoping to get some smidgen of concrete insight into the phenomenon, but shelved the slender paperback when a chapter about his experiments with subjects guessing symbols printed on cards began. (I lost interest there, already knowing from other sources that the results had been inconclusive.)

             Fast forward two years or so. One day I happened to notice the book and pulled it off the shelf since I’d just been pondering the subject again—a matter long dear to my heart—and thought maybe to try again and finish this time. Not surprisingly, it opened naturally to the pages between which I’d stashed my picture of a golden-green scarab beetle and I absently began to read partway down the left one at random:

            “…I shall mention an incident from my own observation. I was treating a young woman who, at a critical moment had a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a Scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.”

             Reading these words with mounting shock and wonder, I felt oddly numb, as if the day had come to a stop or gone silent. Of course I remembered this famous anecdote from my previous attempt (and a very similar version in his autobiography.) Finished, I gazed at the picture of my own golden scarab with a grin that had spread from my face  through my whole body. As mentioned, these events are a familiar element in my life. But this time I hit a synchronicity grand-slam…I won the synchronism sweepstakes. Just tote up the odds, Richard Dawkins, and read off that probability figure of ten-to-the-minus-whatever and tell me right to my face there’s not something just a little bit fishy going on here.

                       

For a few years of teenage-driven angst I flirted with believing the Universe was a cold, meaningless place “where nothing bears out in practice that it promises incipiently.” Things changed when I began to forge a life of my own; making choices, gaining an illusory (but necessary) feeling of control, and becoming “content with tentativeness from day to day.”[Thomas Hardy, diary] Then: amazing things started happening and at some point I began to feel like the Universe was really trying to lend a hand. Why me? I didn’t know…but began to conciously foster my gratitude for all these gifts. Eventually it was becoming downright ridiculous and, unavoidably, began to see a world that was operating under an additional set of subtle laws that couldn’t be explained scientifically but, by the same token, needn’t be attributed to a grey-haired, sky-dwelling deity. It just seemed so obvious that…something…was going on here. This story is merely an extra-good example of the unexplainable Something Wonderful that occasionally brightens an otherwise “normal” day. But there’s the trouble: just living is hard work, and to get by in our constant struggles we’ve been conditioned to not even notice that this planet and everything on it is altogether the One True Miracle. We seem to appreciate this fact only on rarest occasions (if ever). A pet theory maintains that my life—relatively, so easy and fortune-filled—has been granted so very much because I’ve been able to sustain durable feelings of wonder, appreciation and gratitude. I’ve also “been through the fire” and come terribly close to death, which has only strengthened my core beliefs. All the weird coincidences have served to affirm what I sense to be a fine thread of pure harmony that underlies everything. Even knowing I’ll never plumb this mystery, it’s the one truth upholding my essential and deep faith that this world we get to live in is a perfect place to be and everything, all of it, a gift not to be taken for granted— 

            Never to be taken for granted.

Lest the well run dry.         

                                                                                                                 19 Nov 2012, 14 Feb 2013

© 2013 Tim Forsell

All rights reserved.