Mickey Walker-May 2, 2010
In Part I the squirrels were eating my cedar house as though
it were Ritz crackers and peanut butter. I judged them to be a menace. Funny thing, but my neighbors did not care. Neither did my barber. Imagine that. Playing the victim is passé` and
doesn’t get a lot of sympathy these days.
Yet today, the new spring leaves, a-twirl in the breeze, bright
yellow rays bathing them in a world of gold, gives me a temporary lift, a
change of mood. The squirrels
scamper about the leaves and branches up at eye level on my second story tree
house in the woods. What handsome
fellows. Then there comes a
gnawing as if something were gently sawing outside my chamber window. Damn squirrel! I raise the glass window and peek slowly
out, and there he is, spread eagle and stuck to the side of my house like a
suction cup. He seems intelligent,
more so than a Tea Partier with a “No Youth in Asia” sign painted in Red Neck font. I gently raise my BB pistol at him and
fire, bang, bang, bang, bang, as he scurries down the house over the picket
gate and into the woods. Don’t
know if I hit him, but he knows that he was under attack and completed two
aerobatic summersaults while springing from the house to the limbs of the high
trees.
Unlike people and dogs, squirrels do not seem to remember unpleasantries
like BBs stinging them in the butt. No Pavlov lessons learned when it comes to squirrels. Give it half an
hour and they come back for more like nothing happened. So I managed to drive a forest creature
that lived here long before me from his natural home. I was a hero, but felt empty at the same time, you know?
I vanquished a rodent all in the name of house and territory
and what we humans call home. I thought about how when man attacks another
creature or nation he does it in the name of a righteous cause. After all, I couldn’t allow him to
destroy my home, now could I? It
was not a simple matter of politics or difference in beliefs or of civil rights
of squirrels and man. It had
become my own interpretation of what the universe should be, and I was the
judge and BB executioner. I was the Decider of the fate of squirrels, not man, as
was Bush when he attacked Iraq. I
thought about how if Bush had been the Squirrel Decider, and I the Human
Decider, Bush might have shown more competence in managing the Squirrel
War. He would not have spent near
the bucks or the human lives in the process. And if I had been Human Decider, America would never have
attacked Iraq.
But squirrels can be a problem. Oh, I had tried to be noble at first. I tried all the stink sprays on the
wood cornices, which the squirrels ate with gusto as if I had given them a
shake of nutmeg and cinnamon on the shakes. Tried the cage trap and release across the San Jacinto River
technique, too, but there were too many of them. They reproduced faster than I could trap them. Electronic plug-in squirrel deflectors,
fugettaboutit, they don’t work. Pepper spray, mothballs tucked in the eaves, a waste of
time. The squirrels probably gobbled
them up like Milk Duds.
I sighed and wished things had not come to such a
place. I wanted to enjoy the
squirrels as they played in the trees, not shoot at them.
I diverted my attentions to Walden by Henry David
Thoreau. Remember his chapter on
‘Brute Neighbors?’ Thoreau said of
a woodchuck that ate his beans in his staked-off human garden, that the chuck
was one of God’s creatures and could partake of his beans with no hard human
feelings. But then, later, Thoreau
says that he had the impulse to seize the creature and eat him raw. Quite a paradox, but perhaps the two
thoughts were not joined as a justification to destroy and consume the
woodchuck as punishment for eating up the bean field. Perhaps Thoreau was describing some mysterious human trait
that drives us to make sad choices toward our fellow animal creatures of the
earth, maybe because we can. Is
that dark part of our human unconscious, the one where pain lives and hurts us,
the host, and other creatures, alive and well? Can man control his Darth Vader inside us all? Can man coexist with Nature without
spoiling it all for himself, the spiders, the whales, and the squirrels? Can man tolerate his human neighbors as
well? Can we smile at our
neighbors and be glad they are there without doing them dirt in some way?
Thoreau went on to say how much it pleased him to go
a-fishing in Walden Pond, to take the silver trout, dripping clear droplets in
the mesh of his net, dress them up and roast them over an open fire, and only
later to feel sad about it all. He
went through a period of wishing that he were a complete vegetarian, a nobler creature
who would draw no animal blood whatsoever. The eating of animals made him sadder as one of, but the
most destructive of, animals on planet earth. Curious.
I meandered to those bumper-car collisions in the mind. Was this philosophy to destroy
squirrels and set the books of Nature straight, typically human? To wit, did I have the moral right to
affect outcomes with strength and power and pellet guns, well, just because I
could? Was I justified in pelting squirrels
in the ass just because I judged them to be bad? And could?
Is ‘might right?’
Do we have the right to attack and kill each other and any
animals of our choosing just because we as a species have the power? Does making the judgment, and then
inflicting the trauma on another species or our own fellow man, well, does it
bring us happiness? Are we fulfilled
as a species at knowing that we exerted our will and power over another and
made him heel?
Robert Frost said that man’s finest writing was “about the
human heart at struggle with itself.” Precisely. I was
struggling with whether I had the right (or was right) in attacking squirrels
who lived in the forest about my house. And could (or did I have the right) to shoot them (dead if necessary) to
save something of value to a human (me)? But other thoughts tugged at me, too,
like weren’t we humans the keepers, and the enforcers of the greater good? Wasn’t our charge as keepers of the
faith to fight countries of the Evil Axis or the Evil Empire? And if squirrels ate your human house,
well wasn’t it a just thing to drive them away?
I wanted to save my house, but I wanted to be one with
Nature, too. Sadly Woody Allen’s
quip, “I am two with Nature.” was
more like it. I was there. Is that what Frost meant about the
human heart at struggle with itself? Why would that be particularly worth writing about? It seemed to me that I was bordering on
treading in the dark waters of some dreadful human unconsciousness. Neurosis, anyone?
Does the United States have the right to attack countries at
will, such as Iraq, kill their leaders because we deem them to be harboring
terrorists and about to attack the United States when in truth, it’s about hard
line Goebbels propaganda tactics to further the purpose of Big Brother’s latest
whims? Was there some human
unconsciousness at work when we attacked Iraq? After all, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban who harbored him
operated out of Afghanistan, not Iraq, right? Did we just opt to go after Iraq with no proof of or
existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (as Bush scared us about in his state
of the union address) because, well, they were Middle Eastern Muslims who were
unlike us Judeo-Christians here in America where we enjoy freedom of religion? Psychologically, were we making war on
not only the squirrels that were not eating our house (Iraq) but on all
the flying squirrels, chipmunks, fox squirrels, ground squirrels, the whole
squirrel species and animal class (all dark-skinned Middle East people)? Just because they looked alike, and
hated the United States (so some have said the Koran tells them to do) and needed
to be eradicated like the squirrels that were eating my house?
So Bush gave 'em “Shock and Awe.” Lovely. Like the squirrels eating my house, neither
the Iraqis nor the rest of the world seemed to get it, the meaning of the BBs,
the Tomahawk missiles, the smart bombs that lit up the Baghdad night. They returned, just as the Iraqis kept
on living in their homeland, and new terrorists came into the country. And several hundred thousand bodies
later, is Iraq better off than they were? Does the world applaud us for doing the right thing? Or the might thing? I don’t know. Maybe Toby Keith could tell us after running over 100s of
the Dixie Chicks’ CDs in his pickup truck. Running over things and attacking things was the order of
the day, by God. Swell. Bubba found new meaning in his life after
911. Now it was okay for him to
hate.
The squirrels will never get it though. They are Nature-embedded and God-fashioned
creatures that have their own unique character that sets them apart. They are different. And that is a good thing, if we train
ourselves to look long enough.
Right now there is a squirrel below on my wooden fence gate,
eating an acorn he just plucked from my backyard rose garden. He does not see me and twirls the acorn
around and around to get the right angle for chewing. He is alive and well and a part of the universe, and right
now he is not eating my house. I
ponder it all. He needs to be
alive, I think, so I might learn some new tricks and fit in and be a part of
the whole, so that my spirit might not wither. And lose touch with perhaps the simple things, the most
important things about being here and getting the most out of this short
journey. Bottom line, I got to
have squirrels and learn to get along with them. They are too fine and sleek to ignore, to pass over, or to
shoot. They have become quite a
treat to be with in these, the twilight years as we all approach the inevitable,
the end of days.