Heartened by these new observations, I decided to run my insights by an expert, if I could find one. After a number of phone calls I tracked down a guy nicknamed “the Ratman” at the state wildlife office. I didn’t catch his real name, but everybody I talked to swore he was the pack rat guru in Nevada. When I finally reached him, he turned out to be another of the quirky, knowledgeable desert characters I enjoy so much.
“You up in the juniper? Yeah, cinerea for sure. Cute, aren’t they? Ever seen them climb? They’re amazing!” The Ratman is not only knowledgeable and friendly but also perfectly evangelical about the wonders of wood rats. He talks like a guy with nowhere to be, which is oddly pleasant, and he clearly wants to educate me as well as solve my problem. I go over my observations and options with him, and he concludes that he can help, but first he extorts from me a promise that I’ll bring him a frozen pack rat. “Not one that’s poisoned!” he insists. I agree reluctantly, though I haven’t the slightest idea how I’ll keep my promise.
“First, you’ve got to stop them from getting in,” he says. “Then you need to deprive them of protective habitat around your place—that’s their real vulnerability. They’ve got a small home range, so four or five hundred meters is plenty. Then you need to trap like crazy. Listen to the Ratman.” Passing over his creepy use of the third person, I proceed to resist the apparent complexity of his plan.
“I can’t figure out where they’re getting in, Ratman, and I have about six or eight cords of wood I’d have to move. Besides, I’m really not the hunter-trapper type.”
“If they’re getting in under the roof tiles, stick steel wool or blow foam in there. If they’re coming in around the foundation, mortar it up. You have to move all the stove wood—that’s ideal habitat. The best trap for Neotoma is the two-foot, two-door Havahart.” I’m comforted that he’s been so humane as to suggest a live trap, when he follows with: “And do not go soft and release them! Best to drown them in a trash can.” This from a guy who likes pack rats enough to call himself the Ratman.
“I know it’s hard to tell over the phone,” I reply, “but I’m really not the killing type. I’m one of those tender-hearted environmentalists. You know, a peace-to-all-creatures, live-and-let-live sort of guy.”
“Listen, nothing you do will dent the general population—we’re just talking about making an NFZ, a Neotoma Free Zone, in a five-hundred-meter arc around your place. Besides, you’re only icing some of this year’s model, the young who are being kicked out of the nests by the big adults. The home nests will still be out there in the scrub. You’ve got to tear up that woodpile like a coyote and hunt them at night like an owl. Listen to the Ratman. Peanut butter in the trap, then swimming lessons in the trash can. You have to get busy.” I thank the Ratman for his help and, at his insistence, renew my pledge to bring him a bushy-tailed Popsicle.
Then, over a solid week of summer, I set out to do everything the Ratman recommended. First I spent several days up on our roof, broiling in the sun as I lay on my belly, spraying foam into every rat-sized gap. The remainder of the backbreaking week was devoted to moving stove wood and debris to another part of the property—fourteen pickup loads in all. As I did so, I found no less than a dozen individual pack rat nests in the woodpile alone—downy soft, palm-sized cups of shredded juniper bark, more delicately woven than a bird’s nest. Every night I set a trap, and most mornings I had a hopping mad incarcerated pack rat to deal with. At first I allowed my tender green mercies to trump the Ratman’s directive, and I would drive my catch out into the desert each morning for its ritual release. But soon I admitted that the scarcity of quality habitat, the fiercely agonistic nature of Neotoma, the extreme climatic conditions, and the summer’s bumper crop of dispersing, aggressive young pack rats made this approach a death sentence for the animal, as well as being a very stinky and time-consuming prebreakfast activity for me each day.
And that is how I became a cold-blooded killer of my fellow creatures. Every morning I would wake up, drink a big mug of strong java, trudge off to my improvised trash-can water-tank death chamber, and use the unfortunately named Havahart trap to capture and give terminal swimming lessons to animals that, even if they are shameless stealers of baby pacifiers, are handsome, intelligent creatures that really just want to share our peanut butter.
Perhaps it was my guilt about the fact that my furry pupils invariably failed their swimming lessons that fueled my fascination with them, for as I became a murderer of pack rats I also became their admirer. Once I had evicted the bushy tails from our house and had, after repeated failures, finally managed to keep them out, I read more about Neotoma—both in books and in the landscape. I perused scientific studies of wood rats, gleaned what I could, and then hiked out into the desert to make my own observations. I discovered pack rat bones in owl pellets, and I climbed cliffs to examine Neotoma nests in granite notches. I identified many pack rat stick houses, which I visited regularly and watched closely, noticing if they had been built up, lined with fresh juniper, or disturbed by predators. Based on exposure, cover, and vegetation, I learned to anticipate where pack rats were likely to live, and eventually I even developed the ability to locate pack rat houses by following their distinctive acrid odor across the sagebrush steppe. I made regular visits to inspect the urination “posts” that pack rats visit repeatedly as a way of sharing olfactory information, and I watched the artistic patterns of their urine streaks emerge on rock faces after rain washed organic materials away, leaving expressionistic striations of dissolved calcium carbonate behind.
As I explained to Hannah and Caroline, the pack rat is no Johnny-come-lately, like the Old World rats whose pedigree dates only to the Mayflower and which now infest the sewers beneath every city in America. Neotoma is instead a true native, and there are fossil pack rat nesting sites in the Great Basin that have seen more or less continuous use for fifty thousand years. As a result of this long residency—and because pack rats have not changed their basic social behavior since the last ice age—we have learned amazing things from them. Of special value is the pack rat’s powerful but indiscriminate penchant for collecting and storing things, often caching them deep within cliff faces and protecting them within stick houses, where the worst weather never reaches. Better still for posterity, it is often the case that generations of Neotoma will urinate on the collected materials, causing them to be encased in a virtually impervious, amber-like gem of crystallized pee—a substance the earliest western explorers couldn’t identify but thought looked a lot like candy (some who took the confectionary appearance literally reported that the stuff actually tastes sweet but causes a terrific bellyache). Because it is an assemblage not only of food but also trash, a pack rat’s midden (the debris pile it gathers in or around its nest) is a wild miscellany of objects that functions as a time capsule of the local environment at the time of collection. What some of us call trash an anthropologist calls an artifact and a paleoecologist calls a macrofossil.
Within the pack rat’s trash we have discovered answers to some of the most important questions we ask of the past. How do we know what level ancient lakes in the West reached, and how have we managed to chart their rising and recession over tens of thousands of years? By documenting the elevations of fossil pack rat middens, the ages of which are determined by studying the easily dated materials they contain. How do we know whether martens or jackrabbits or pikas or rattlers lived in a certain place twenty thousand years ago? Because pack rats collect and store small bones, as well as coyote scat and owl pellets, in which bone fragments of larger animals may be found. How do we know that here in the Great Basin subalpine conifers once grew 1,000 meters below their lowest distribution today? Because the twigs of bristlecone and limber pine are found in ancient pack rat middens that are far lower in elevation than the areas where those trees now exist.
This sort of information isn’t important only to paleogeeks. Knowing the relative distribution of various plant species over a period of thirty or
forty thousand years allows us to extrapolate changes in climate during that period, which in turn provides a paleoclimatologic baseline against which we can measure current rates of climate change. The pack rat’s appetite for gathering trash provides a crucial means to gauge the degree to which the human appetite for consuming fossil fuels is causing a planetary environmental crisis. And we know all this for a very simple reason: pack rats gather trash near their houses and store it safely. The pack rat is a preservationist of the first order, one without whose collections of scat and berries and bone we would be hard pressed to understand the environment of the late Pleistocene and early Holocene periods.
It is no doubt true that one person’s trash is another’s treasure, but to the pack rat all trash is treasure—and I have discovered that it is in this treasuring of trash, as well as in the trash itself, that treasures are often found. Although we made sure that the pink pacifier I found beneath the house never made it back into Caroline’s mouth, we still keep it in a shoebox along with scores of other objects the girls and I have collected from pack rat nests. And while our box of pack rat treasures includes tufts of fur and shards of bone, most of the objects we’ve discovered in local pack rat houses are rediscovered items—those ponytail holders and bobby pins, flat washers and beer bottle caps that are the unmistakable artifacts of our own unusual twenty-first-century life lived out on this high desert hill. Although the pack rat is a truly wild presence here, he also traffics in domestic goods and in that sense might be considered part of our extended household.
In fact, Neotoma and I are still cohabitants of sorts. Although he no longer lives within the walls of our house, he does have his own houses nearby, and we visit each other from time to time. In this truce we both prosper, even if my way of “dealing with him” doesn’t involve the apocalyptic extermination Charlie advocated. I realize, of course, that there is blood on my hands. Indeed, I’ve remembered my debt to the Ratman and have in the back of our freezer, where Eryn isn’t likely to notice it, a wrapped and taped butcher-paper package clearly labeled NOT A BURRITO. Despite this frozen corpse, my relationship with my bushy-tailed neighbor is mostly peaceful, and détente has its advantages. I still have my wife and my single-barrel hooch, and he still has his wives and his beer can tabs. If my spare key vanishes occasionally, I trust that my furry neighbor won’t use it to let himself in. Perhaps in another fifty thousand years, some earnest researcher may discover that key enshrined in crystalline pee in the heart of an ancient midden and wonder what kind of life was lived behind the long-vanished door it once would have opened.
Chapter 7
7. Playing with the Stick
The photograph of Curator Man that hit all the wire services and accompanied most of the online stories is of a tall, thin, well-groomed, friendly looking fellow (the kind of guy you’d actually call a “fellow”), with short hair, prominent ears, wire-rimmed glasses, and what looks like an expensive tie. In his hands he displays an elegantly framed item that in a few moments will become the most prized and celebrated treasure in his museum’s collections. Curator Man’s proud smile tells us that this is a big day for him. And what is the treasure behind the glass in the mahogany case? The stick.
This stick is at once just any old stick and not at all just any old stick. It is the stick that on November 6, 2008, was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. As yet another anniversary of the stick’s induction rolls around, I’m reminded of this photo of proud Curator Man, who could not have anticipated the media circus his museum’s stick would provoke. When news of the stick’s induction was announced in a ceremony and accompanying press release, the story was picked up by hundreds of online news sites and blogs and was even featured prominently in the last sixty seconds of many local TV news programs, right in the slot where the quintuplets usually go—which proves that even quintuplets can have a bad media cycle. Reporters invariably skipped the obvious question, “Is there really a National Museum of Play?” and went straight to the kind of penetrating journalism that helps a benighted public understand the complexities of so important an issue. “What can you do with a stick?” they wondered in print. “Who plays with sticks, and just how do they do it?” Since the stick doesn’t come with directions and doesn’t cost anything, they worried, how will Americans figure out how to use or value it? And, the tabloid sites asked, what do we really know about the panel of nineteen so-called experts whose deliberations resulted in its selection? In short, everyone demanded to know what’s so great about a stick.
I’m intrigued by this famous stick for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I still can’t figure out if it is profound or absurd, or profoundly absurd, or absurdly profound. There’s a little of the emperor’s clothes phenomenon going on here, I think. When I tell people about the celebrated stick, the response is nearly always the same. “You’re kidding, right? A stick? You mean a real stick? Like one you’d pick up off the ground?” There follows a long, uncertain pause. Then, almost invariably, comes the grinning reply: “Hell, yeah, the stick. Greatest toy ever. Totally brilliant!” And after proclaiming something “Totally brilliant!” it is difficult for people to turn back. But I do want to turn back, to ask whether the museum’s stick was nature masquerading as culture or culture masquerading as nature. I want to return to the moment in which we had to decide for ourselves what to make of the idea that a stick, rather than being viewed as a natural object, needed to be displayed in a museum.
If Curator Man thought any of this was funny, he certainly didn’t let on. First, he pointed out that the selection panel of esteemed judges—intellectuals, artists, curators, pooh-bahs of various stripes—had a very difficult decision to make. They also had to adhere strictly to a formally articulated set of explicit criteria when choosing a toy to join the vaunted ranks of already inducted classics like crayons, marbles, the teddy bear, and Mr. Potato Head. To be selected, the toy must: (1) possess icon status, (2) have longevity, (3) encourage discovery, and (4) promote innovation. Curator Man went on to extol the many virtues and uses of the stick: “It can be a Wild West horse, a medieval knight’s sword, a boat on a stream, or a slingshot,” he pointed out. “No snowman is complete without a couple of stick arms, and every campfire needs a stick for toasting marshmallows.” The media’s immoderate love of Curator Man and his stick even spawned a widely syndicated “news” story actually called “Notable Suggestions for How to Play with a Stick,” which made it evident that Hannah and Caroline were already as intelligent as at least some journalists.
It is at this point that the strange stick story jumps journalism’s slick tracks and begins tearing through the weedy field of American popular culture, no longer under anyone’s spin control. In Rochester there was still a stick in a case on a wall, but the story of that stick had gone viral. The first wave of responses to the stick was uniformly positive. What we might call the Good Old Stick! crowd rushed to expand Curator Man’s already long list of noble uses for the stick, and they were mighty hard to argue with. I wasn’t so impressed that a javelin and a golf club may be considered sticks—finding one so dangerous and the other so dangerously boring as to have no use for either—but a fishing rod and a baseball bat were sticks of an entirely different sort, and it was painful to imagine life without them. What about a conductor’s baton or a pair of drumsticks? The fretted neck of my guitar is a kind of stick, and even the wooden combs of my harmonicas are little ten-notched sticks. The more I thought about it, the more impossible life without stick play seemed, and for a while I teetered on the brink of conversion.
But then the intellectuals got involved, and before I could make up my mind about the stick, all hell broke loose. First the developmental psychologists more or less said that kids would all be retarded without sticks, and some careless readers concluded by extrapolation that ADD, ADHD, OCD, LH, SLD, SLI, HDTV, THC, PCP, and LSD could all be blamed on the condition of tragic sticklessness
to which “kids these days” had been so brutally subjected. Evolutionary biologists then asserted that it was the use of sticks that caused humans to develop immense cerebral cortexes, which apparently we needed in order to ensure that the really sharp sticks would poke the saber-toothed tiger and not our brother-in-law—that being the kind of “accident” that might halt activities leading to procreation and would surely have been selected against by evolutionary pressures. The sociobiologists went even further, asserting that the human affinity for sticks was evident in our fort-building behaviors and in our innate desire to have pickets in front of our houses when somebody came over to kill and eat us.
Then, predictably, the closet Luddites—who might best be described as “really old white guys who somehow learned to use social media”—got involved in the debate, and they were so elated to see the triumph of the good old stick that they felt their lives fully vindicated. The excruciatingly detailed “When I was a boy . . .” stories about sticks proliferated so quickly as to crash several servers, even as young IT people scrambled to figure out how a lowly stick could have brought down their networks. These old-guy stick lovers were soon joined by the TV haters, who didn’t care about sticks one way or the other but judged them better than what they called the “mind-numbing cancer” of television, never mind that they were sitting in front of glowing computer screens and posting their views on blogs with disturbing names like Turned Off Moms.
Raising Wild Page 12
