Brooks Peterson

Monday, May. 17, 1999

Urban jungle is chock full of pitfalls

   I would make so bold as to suggest to you that there is a tiny kernel of truth at the heart of every cliche. I can speak as one who has gotten his feet wet in the school of hard knocks.
   Over the last few days (OK: over the last few minutes) (Hey, I've got a column to write here), a line keeps popping into my consciousness:
   It's a jungle out there.
   And I don't mean that in the metaphorical sense. I mean it really, really is a jungle out there, literally.
   See, here's the thing: We urbanites have this tendency to assume smugly that we have old Mother Nature pretty firmly in hand, don't we?
   Ha! As if.
   Got a bulletin: We are not alone.
   A while back, I chronicled our ordeal by mice: For whatever reason, after years of elegant rodent-free living in our present digs, we found ourselves a magnet for vagabond vermin. First it was just one of the little guys - but then his party-animal friends and relatives arrived.
   They were formidable, but not invulnerable: Turned out they had a thing for the dry dog food we kept in a big old bag near the back door. They'd go diving in the canine crunchies, putting me in mind of nothing so much as Disney's Scrooge McDuck paddling around amid the gold doubloons and the bearer bonds in his vault.
   Worked our way through that, finally. (I'll spare you the details.) More recently, it's been a plague of toads . . . and a vengeful squirrel.
   The toads . . . how to put this? . . . well, they're not what you'd call the intellectual giants of the wild kingdom. When they're not hurling themselves under the garage door as it descends (sometimes with grisly results), they're do-ing the backstroke in the dogs' water dish.
   Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's between the dogs and the toads. Over time, Whitley (the terrier) and Conan (the beagle) arrived at a grudging accommodation with the uninvited amphibians.
   So how do the toads respond? By leaving, er, souvenirs of their pool party behind them. And you know who gets to dump the polluted water out and replace it with clean water, don't you? Right.
   Toads got no class.
   On the other hand, they're not squirrels.
   I must explain: For virtually my entire life, I've been a fan of squirrels. Their amazing aerial acrobatics, their ingenuity at foiling the most elaborate efforts to keep them out of the bird-feeder, even their sheer indecisiveness (many's the time I've brought the car to a screeching halt to allow a deeply conflicted squirrel to decide whether it's to be stop or go, hither or yon, to or fro) make for great entertainment.
   So when I noticed a squirrel or two in the area, I was elated . . . until I realized we'd acquired a nocturnal squirrel.
   Does that compute? Thing is, this character scampers back and forth on the roof in the wee hours, chattering abuse at the dogs, who do what dogs gotta do: bark, and bark, and . . .
   And who do suppose staggers out into the stygian darkness to invite these noble canine sentinels into the garage? Right.
   What the heck is going on? Beats me. My theory, for what it's worth, is that the squirrel is sore over the sorry accommodations at our place. See, instead of planting sturdy, slow-growing oaks like solid-citizen homesteaders should, we opted for huisaches, which grow at a dramatic pace (forget stop-action photography; you can see 'em erupting with the naked eye).
   Alack (at least from a squirrel's point of view), the huisaches have two points against them: One, they don't produce anything edible; two, they are full - and I mean full - of thorns. Serious ones.
   As you can imagine, this does not make life easy for a squirrel. Once or twice, I've watched them making their way ever so carefully along the limbs, and . . . I dunno; maybe it's my imagination, but it seemed they were glowering at me, communicating not just hostility but a sense of profound betrayal.
   So: At our house, A Little Night Music these days consists of YAP YAP YAP (Whitley) and Aaaaarrrrrooooo (Conan). And me? I'm looking for a really fast-growing strain of oak,
   It's a jungle out there.
   (Peterson can be reached by phone at 886-3772, or by e-mail at petersonb@caller.com)