my little woodland friends.
© 1996 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

My last apartment was in the bottom floor of a house, up in the Berkeley hills. It was a very nice neighborhood, with a lot of greenery and a great view of the San Francisco Bay, but the house itself was, to be blunt, a shithole.

To get to my apartment, one had to go around the side of the house and down some very rickety, steep stairs (someone called it ``the goat trail.'') My floor of the house opened on to a deck out back, but the front of my apartment was actually underground (the hill into which the house was built was very steep.)

My upstairs neighbors, for the most part, sucked. But that's a different story.

What I'm here to talk about are my little woodland friends. For you see, the front of the house, while underground, had a crawlspace next to it (see illustration.) And this crawlspace opened on the outside world, as crawlspaces are wont to do. However, the wall between the crawlspace and my apartment (really, my storage area) was made of a few sheets plywood, roughly tacked to the beams.

At a few points, it was necessary for pipes and ducts to penetrate this wall. Large pipes. Large circular pipes.

Through large, square holes.

This, of course, meant that the interior of my apartment was open to the great outdoors: not only to wintery breezes, but also to visits of all manner of furry creatures.

One evening we were sitting on the couch, watching TV. From where I was sitting, I had a view down the hallway. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the cat was wandering down the hall toward us.

Then I remembered that we didn't have a cat.

I looked up again, and it was not a cat, it was a skunk. With a double white stripe and bushy tail and everything. And it was waddling its little skunk-like waddle right towards us.

``There's a skunk in the hallway,'' I said. Understandably, this provoked a ``What?''

``No really,'' I explained.

So she leaned over for a look, at that point the skunk noticed us. It looked up for a second, sniffed, then turned around and started slowly waddling back down the hallway in the other direction.

We didn't really know what to do about this, but we were in agreement that chasing it with a broom was probably not the best of ideas. So we got out the yellow pages, and called someone who had the words Pest Control in their ad.

``Whatever you do, don't chase it with a broom,'' the helpful man said. Check. Next he suggested, ``Probably you should just hope it goes out the way it came in.'' Gee, ok, thanks for your help.

I didn't sleep well that night; I barricaded the bedroom with a pile of pillows hoping that this would deter the skunk from coming in and sitting on my face in the middle of the night. Oh, did I mention that none of the rooms in this apartment had doors? None of the rooms had doors, including the bedroom.

I had been in the bedroom reading a book, and went into the living room / kitchen area to get a snack. I heard the clanking of bottles, so I turned on the light, and slowly leaned around the corner to see what manner of company awaited. It had a big fleshy nose, and seemed quite distressed at the light; it gave the impression of not being able to see very well.

I walked across the room and opened the door that led outside to the deck, picked up the broom, and tried to sweep it in the general direction of the great outdoors.

It didn't like this much, because from its point of view, a big ape was waving a stick at it and backing it into a corner. Right. So I climbed up on top of the stove, so that I could sweep it from behind (and also because I was still in bare feet, and visions of a blind rodent swinging by its mouth from my toes didn't really appeal.)

The creature seemed to think that the best response to my prodding was to curl up and hope I went away. So it rolled up into a ball, and I swept it about a foot across the floor, then another, then another, and finally it got the basic idea, and bolted for the door. Buh bye now.

One day, I came home from work (having been at the office, and awake, for the better part of two or three days) and the place smelled like shit, literally. I thought maybe the toilet was in extreme need of a cleaning, or maybe the mold growing in the kitchen sink had gotten way out of control. Always the wishful thinker I.

Anyway, it was late, it was dark, and I was exhausted, so I went to sleep. The next morning, a mere six hours later, I was in the car and on my way to work within ten minutes of waking. A few days later (the next time I was home) I discovered what that troublesome smell had been: one of my furry friends had visited in my absence, and had taken a dump right in the middle of a pile of clean clothes on my bedroom floor! I mean, it had to pick the only clean thing in the house. I don't really know what manner of beast the culprit was, but I would guess that it was smaller than a cat, and a lot larger than your typical rat or mouse.

But maybe I imagined the whole thing, I was having the occasional sleep-deprivation hallucination at the time.

At this time I started to wonder whether the fact that I was only spending a few hours a week in my apartment meant that it was in the process of being reclaimed by nature.

I had mice for a while. I would hear them scurrying about above the ceiling tiles and beneath the floor, but I didn't see much other evidence of their existence. For a while, I adopted a live-and-let-live philosophy toward them; after all, they weren't really doing anything to harm me, right? And we never saw each other. I could get along with my rodent brothers. After all, I was managing to basically get along with the fratboys.

But then they figured out how to climb up on the shelf, and ate through a bag of doritos.

At that point, they forfeited their right to live.

So I called my landlord and complained; this was before I had realized that my landlord was worse than useless. Her solution was to buy me a ``supersonic mouse repellant'' device, which supposedly emitted a sound that mice found annoying. Well, apparently they liked my food more than they hated that noise, because it didn't do a thing. And also it emitted a sound that humans found annoying as well, or at least this human, though there was nothing supersonic about it: it was simply the buzz of a cheap transformer.

So I bought poison, and somewhat-reluctantly killed them all. The wacky thing about this poison was that it touted as a feature the fact that it was slow-acting, so that the mice would have time to make it home before the toxins caused massive internal hemmoraging. Because that way you didn't have to pick up the bodies. How pleasant.