Squirrels
After I graduated from college, for a brief period I lived with my maternal grandmother in Asheville, North Carolina, where I had been born and had always yearned to live there again. Sadly, my grandfather had died by then. My grandmother now lived alone in their huge, glorious house on a hill on five acres of land. Running along two sides of the house were babbling brooks with wooden bridges across them. There were immense trees all over the property, and many beautiful blooming bushes. The house was two stories with a full attic and full basement. My mother and her two brothers grew up in that house. The bedroom that was to be mine had been my mother’s when she was a little girl. All the bedrooms in the house had their own bathrooms. My bedroom had windows all across the two walls of the room, with beautiful views and a three-ring circus of squirrels scampering up and down the trees next to my windows.
My grandmother was a fascinating woman and we spent many nights up to three o’clock in the morning talking. She had travelled all around the world several times. She had ridden camels across the desert and slept in tents with sheiks, and she whispered, “don’t tell your mother”, that she had smoked hash with the sheiks in their tents. She had camped in the jungles of Cambodia and had to keep large spiders out her sleeping netting. All this was to let you know that she wasn’t generally a delicate, frightened woman. Except for one thing…she claimed she was deathly afraid of rodents.
Rodents. And that include squirrels, of which she was surrounded by the dozens, but as long as they were not in the house, they weren’t a problem.
But one night, I was awakened by the sound of pounding coming from my grandmother’s bedroom, down the hall on the opposite side of the house. I flicked on a light and went over to her bedroom to see what was going on. She was wearing a nightgown and had a broom in her hand and was banging the wooden end up on the ceiling ahead, much like one might do to shut up a noisy neighbor in an apartment above.
“There’s a squirrel in the ceiling,” she said in a panicked voice, “inside some kind of space on the other side of it. I am trying to scare it away. I had heard him scampering along the ceiling and every once in a while he would drop a nut. Obviously he is saving food for the upcoming winter.” And to underscore the veracity of her claims, I, myself, could then her the scampering of feet overhead, interrupted by the sound of a momentarily dropped nut. I could imagine the squirrel sitting there for a moment, breathing hard from his labors, before he picked the nut up again and continued along his way.
“And look where he is storing it all,” said my grandmother as she walked over to the wall right where her pillow would be as she would lie down her sleepy head. She said, “I could hear this” and she scratched the wall where her head would be, a slow but insistent gnawing on the wall. The sound of it would make me laugh if the situation weren’t so serious.
“It could gnaw itself out threw the wall and start chewing on my face as I slept!” she said. Wow, this really was terrible!
I looked at her helplessly, but she said, “I will have John go up on the roof tomorrow and find the squirrel’s hole and patch it up. That should fix it. But meanwhile, I will sleep out on the sleeping porch tonight.
Ah, the sleeping porch. I loved that. All along that side of the house was the sleeping porch, with five beds all lined up. My mother said that was where the family slept in the hot summers, my grandfather, grandmother, my two uncles, and my mother. There was no air conditioning in those days, just the cool night air that wafted in through the screens of the three walls of the sleeping porch. My grandmother loved to say that the house had been built before there was electricity. All that had to be put in afterwards when people began to electrify their houses.
The next day, John was up on the roof. John was the all-around handy-man who apparently could do anything; my grandparents’ chauffeur, auto mechanic, butler, bar tender, dish washer, and gardener. He thoroughly inspected every square inch of that roof, but sadly came back down from his half day on the ladder, saying that he couldn’t find any evidence of a hole. He also had inspected all over the ceiling of the attic, but to no avail. My grandmother said, “Oh, well, I guess I will have to hire an exterminator.”
But I couldn’t stop thinking of that circus of squirrels that I would enjoy watching outside my bedroom windows. Certainly the roof seemed to be a logical place to look for a squirrel entrance to an upstairs bedroom, but where so many squirrels “began” were down there on the ground below my windows.
So I decided to walk around outside the house and inspect from the ground, starting at the region that was under my window on the second story and below that was the dining room in the first story. The house had a full basement, so it actually began underground, but the visible, above-ground portion of the house, where the first story began, was a half-story of broken chunks of rock mortared together. These were not like oblong bricks with flat surfaces, but millions of misshapen rock chucks, such as the tailings from quarry, each chunk about the size of a closed hand. So there had been a lot of mortaring done to fill in all the spaces among the various chucks of rock. I looked closely all over this side of the house and happened to find a chink surrounded by three or four chunks, a genuine hole. It looked like some of the dried mortar might have cracked and fallen out, but what was really encouraging was there were several light brown hairs around the inside of the crack. Could those be squirrel hairs? They sure could be!
I rushed into the house to tell my grandmother what I had seen, and even though it didn’t make sense that her squirrel had begun his journey from down below the first floor on the further side of the house, it was worth having John mortar that hole closed. I took John outside to show him what I had found and he said, “That sure does look like squirrel hairs to me!” I said, “But you think that that squirrel could get from way down here all the way up to above the ceiling above Nana’s bedroom on the other side of the house?” He tapped his head with a grin and said, “Squirrel, he some smart rascal!” and then went to go mix up some mortar to plug up that whole.
That evening, sitting in Nana’s room, we heard no sound of the squirrel. Nana grinned at me.
I said, “Well, let’s wait for a few days just to make sure that was the actual hole. Keep your broom stick handy!”
She laughed and said, “I have a feeling that you found the right one”.
A couple of evenings later, she handed me a brand new hundred dollar bill. When Nana gave us money for gifts, she always gave brand new money. Some of her brand new money helped me pay for law school years later. I said, “What’s this?”
“Squirrel’s gone, you saved me from the squirrel.”
“Aw no, Nana, I didn’t do that for money.”
“I know you didn’t, but you deserve it. I would not be able to sleep at night with that squirrel gnawing at my ear.”
To this day, the reality of that situation still gets me. For a squirrel to go into hole among some rocks, and find a way through the walls up two and half stories and then across who knows how many mazes to get to the further side of a large house, and choose a storage site behind a wall, carrying nuts, how could it do that, and why? Throughout that whole journey, wouldn’t there have been dozens of closer and more suitable locations to secrete his cache? Why all the way up there? Maybe that was the warmest and most inviting place in the whole house. After all, I am sure my grandmother kept it heated at night. But what amount of long-distance sensing did it take for the squirrel to discover that to be the chosen place?
And maybe there was something else—the sense of the living warmth on the other side of the wall, where my grandmother slept. Maybe the squirrel liked the idea of having my grandmother on the other side of the wall. For a human, it would be like having a pet, if only my grandmother hadn’t had such a phobia.
Cockroaches
A couple of years after I lived with my grandmother and had returned to California, I decided that I would like to live in New York City. So I packed my car with clothes and a few other crucial things (such as my typewriter) and drove across country to Manhattan. This actually was the first place I had ever lived on my own, not living with my parents, my grandmother, or in college dorms. Due to financial necessity, the apartment I rented was small, and even then I was able to afford it because I had a sublease on a rent-controlled apartment. Despite it being small, I really loved living there and even to this day, I still think back to that apartment quite fondly.
It was kind of funny though, my first night there after I had my dinner, I walked into the kitchen to wash my dinner dishes and when I turned on the kitchen light, I saw several cockroaches perk up and scamper away to hiding. Uh oh, I had cockroaches! I had never seen them before, but I knew what they were. But instead of this disgusting me like I think it would most people, I thought it was kind of cute. Something about the way those little buggers scampered away seemed sort of human, like they had thoughtful personal characteristics, mostly of the “bad kids” mode. I didn’t really think that I needed to do anything about them; their presence seemed to be a normal experience of living in New York City. It was almost a game…most of the time they were in hiding, the situation was a matter of “out of sight, out of mind”, but then there would be the times of my turning on the light in the kitchen after dark and I would see them scatter. I felt like saying, “Aw, I don’t mean you any harm.”
There was one cockroach, though, who was a bit rebellious and marched to his own drummer. I would see him, and only him, in the bathroom just before I would go to bed, sitting on my toothbrush, to be exact, with his little antennae waving back and forth. I guess he was drawn to the scent or maybe a residual taste of the peppermint toothpaste. Toothpaste fumes, not exactly a sufficient meal for a hardy cockroach, but he took to being my nightly companion on the toothbrush. I assume that the very thought of a cockroach on your toothbrush would disgusts people even more than the running away cockroaches in the kitchen, but this one lone cockroach who did not scamper away, but instead nightly waited to see me, was charming instead of disgusting. When I would come to the bathroom, he would politely step off my toothbrush (“I believe this is yours, sir”) but continued to still stand there on the toothbrush holder. I mean, his behavior felt like he had a unique personality and this made him seem almost like a pet. And he wasn’t a coward, you know, didn’t run from the light, and also seemed to seek human companionship, so that elevated him in my mind, like he was a friend, and I was happy to see him every night.
However, many years after I no longer lived in New York, but had gone to law school back in California and then moved to Los Angeles and rented a large apartment in a classic old building from the earliest days of Hollywood. There was much to recommend this place, the two story high living room, the two bedrooms, the formal dining room, and the beautiful architecture inside and outside, but the immense cockroach infestation the revealed itself weeks later was a huge negative. Unlike in New York where the cockroaches were kind of pets, these in Hollywood had no charm at all. For one thing, there were just so many of them, they would be experienced in every room in the apartment, and it was impossible to get rid of them. I would “bomb” the apartment with anti-roach poison once a month, which would kill them for a while, but then new ones could come in from the neighboring apartments and the cycle would be repeated.
To give you a sense of how many cockroaches there were, do you remember those early digital clocks that told time by little plastic sleeves that had the times written on them and each minute would flip down the next numbered sleeve (called a flip clock, from the 70s). I had one of those on my nightstand and after a while, the clock stopped working. Something had happen in the inner workings of the clock. I decided to see if I could open it up to see what was wrong with it, and I nearly vomited…cockroaches had turned the clock into a nest and they kept filling it more and more with their bodies until it was packed solid with roaches and their bodies jammed the inner works to a grind halt. The cock was completely filled with dead cockroaches.
The day I moved out of there, the movers would pick up chairs from the living room to put in the moving van; they would turn the chairs upside down and hold them overhead and unexpected cockroaches would spill out from behind the cushions and fall into their hair. It would make them disgusted and angry while I attempted to become invisible. I vowed to never again live in a place that had cockroaches and so far, I have succeeded, may that last for the rest of my life!
Giant Water Bugs
But maybe I shouldn’t have made that vow, because a decade or more later, in Los Angeles, I was bothered by something worse. Actually, I don’t really know what they are. Thank goodness they come in singly, not in hordes like the Los Angeles cockroaches. These are a reddish insects that I swear are at least six inches long, but that may be an exaggeration, although not by much. I did a Google search for large red insects and didn’t find anything comparable to what I had. Normally Water Bugs are only about two inches long, and these things were gigantically larger than that.
Where I would find them was in my bathtub. The bathroom in this particular apartment had a window for outwardly venting the shower steam, but the window was to an airshaft, not to the outside directly. Presumably, the apartment next to mine and those below me all ventilated into that same airshaft. If you look into it, it was like looking into the inside of a chimney. I believe that there was supposed to be a screen or grid at the top of the airshaft so that critters couldn’t come in, but it must have had a hole in or, or maybe was missing altogether.
This was another old Hollywood building. Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy had lived in this building when he first moved to Hollywood. I hadn’t known that until after I had moved in there and happened to read about where all the places Laurel lived. I must have some affinity to him, because when our family moved to California when I was five years old, we lived in Canoga Park for a while and only a couple of blocks from our house was a swimming pool where I took swimming and diving lessons. That pool was all that was left of an estate that Laurel had after he became more established. I think that by now even the pool is gone.
But these horrible bugs…well, they were horrible to me because they were so big. No way could I tolerate them being in the house; they weren’t like cockroaches that could go disappear behind the walls, these insects were just too big for that. They seemed to like to move along the walls, that they aren’t secure going out into wide open spaces. I imaged them crawling over my bare feet while I worked at my computer and I was almost phobic at the idea of that. At least I knew when they came in if I were home. I could hear the sound of the thump as one of them landed in the bathtub. That was creepy; I don’t like the idea of an insect being heavy enough that its weight makes a noise when it lands that I could hear anywhere in the apartment.
So that thump meant that I was going to have to go to battle.
I was compassionate toward these huge bugs. While I didn’t want them in the house, I didn’t want to have to kill them if I could avoid it. I didn’t mind their existence in the world, I just didn’t like their existence in my house. So several times I attempted to capture then in an empty shoebox or some other box. My idea was then to take them outside and dump them in a planter. I for sure did not want to touch them, so I used something to attempt to corral them into a lidded box, such as a ruler that I could use to goad them into a box.
But no such luck. Attempting the get them into a shoebox was more difficult than trying to get a cat into carrier for going to the vet. Wherever those bugs wanted to go, into a box is not it! The minute they sense the shadow of the box and ruler, they start running, but they are in a slippery curved bathtub. They move and maneuver very fast, and the field of the bathtub is large enough for them to have a lot of running room. From my perspective, it had been like trying to corral a zigzagging pinball with a golf club. Both of us were thoroughly motivated…me to get these damned thing out of there and they thinking they had to save their lives.
These insects were more fragile than their size suggested. It seemed that every touch by my tool was breaking off pieces of their wings and body, and fragments of them would litter the bathtub. There even was some kind of smoke or dust that seemed to come off their bodies, as if their life’s essence was floated off throughout the struggle. The force of their manic running back and forth and every which way was also causing them to break apart pieces of themselves, so it wasn’t all me leading to their demise.
While I had been attempting to save them, I was only making it worse, and unfortunately, both of our adamant resolves, me to capture them, and they to run away from the capturing, was leading towards their sure deaths. Finally I realized that they would become too damaged to survive, now my task was to put them out of their misery. But directly killing them was just as difficult as corralling them had been. Despite the fragility of the externals of the insect, it seemed their inner core was an armor. I finally had to end up beating them cruelly in order to end it, which made me feel sad, because killing them had not been my intention.
After a few experiences like that, I knew that the only option when I heard that thump in the bathtub was to directly kill them, not attempt to save them. The last couple of times, I used various insect poison sprays, lathering them with glittering poison as they did that same speed running back and forth and all around in the slippery tub. Again, I hated having to do this, it seemed that it was such agony for each insect I had to kill and due to their size and efforts, it was like killing an animal like a dog or a lamb. I am thankful that at least these insects can’t make any noise, although their physical gyrations were a silent scream.
If I were going to continue to live in that apartment any further, I would have insisted that the manager have that chimney finely screened, because I would not tolerate any more battles with these insects. As it happened, I had been wanting to move to a much better apartment, which I did pretty soon after my last insect battle. I am truly thankful that I have nothing like this going on where I live now.
The worst “animal” thing I have to deal with nowadays is every once in a while a bird will fly into my balcony and rest on the wire of my party lights. I like to watch them as they gently rock to and fro. They do leave bird droppings that I have to clean up, but their beautiful singing is compensation. The pollen blown from the line of trees nearby creates more of a clean up problem than the birds do. But that is only seasonal and the trees are so beautiful.
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