It has been something of a challenge to get online for any decent length of time since arriving here. The internet is somewhat expensive and somewhat elusive. To add some complications Sarah has come to visit, and I fell ill. Sarah visiting is a great distraction! Getting sick is a much less desirable one. In the end though, it has all added up to a paucity of posts in September. Since it seems that people do occasionally read my wandering thoughts, I have decided that I need to come up with "easy" posts for times that I am not able, willing, or motivated to write something new and exciting. While telling new friends and acquaintances the stories of my life, it occurred to me that some of these stories could make good posts, even though most people who know me have heard at least some of them. Thus, without further ado, a new category of post is born, the war story.
When I lived in Socorro, I lived in economical accommodations. My duplex was small, fatigued and poorly built. The ceiling was not insulated. The carpet was old and gross (I will admit to being partly to blame for this as my vacuum cleaner was generally down for unscheduled maintenance). The toilet was slowly rotting through the floor, allowing the tank to slosh during hurried ascensions to the throne, further rotting the floor. The house behind me had pigs. And, my neighbor was a deaf, retarded smoker. He could often be seen through his screen door asleep with the TV blaring, a lit cigarette slowly burning in his hand. Among all of these peculiarities, the most amazing feature of this building is that the walls and floors were not attached.
Any person who has peered into the blackness of a crawl space, through the layers of spider webs and debris that crawl spaces (particularly in unloved buildings) attract and retain knows that while the ecosystem is supposed to stop mere inches into the abyss of the underworld, the simple thought of what might actually be living down there is the stuff of nightmares and horror films. I know this, not from ever venturing into that crawl space, but because when the walls and floors of a building are not connected, what lives in the crawl space, lives in the house. It was not uncommon to be sitting in front of a movie, and spy a visitor scuttling across the floor. Sometimes they were harmless roaches, other times they were centipedes, or worse. Jason once woke up to watch a spider cruise by on a mission to wherever spiders mission to. All the insects mostly just passed through, but at one point the population of mice exploded.
I did not want to kill the mice with traps, nor did I want bricks of poison laying around. Thus, I endeavored to capture the mice, by hand. In the beginning, it was largely unsuccessful. Heidi would often attain a perch, on a chair or other high place, and I would tear the house apart after the mouse. In these days, I used the domesticated dog approach to capturing prey, with no knowledge of what to do should I actually meet with success. While I never truly "caught" a mouse in my early attempts, I did once chase one into the pantry, where it seemed to simply disappear. Days later, I discovered a tail sticking out from under a bin filled with camping gear. Lifting the bin, I discovered a dehydrated mouse, pressed to the bottom of a Rubbermaid, as a flower between the pages of a book. A definitive failure in the avoidance of killing the mice.
My first success was actually a careless mouse, more than skill on my part. The mouse managed to climb into a bag of tortilla chips, and having discovered what it thought was mouse heaven, decided to munch chips until it was caught. I took this first mouse out to the shed in front of my house (yes, the shed was in front), figuring it would find plenty of mouse habitat there, and never want to return. The next mouse I caught in the silverware drawer, and again relocated it to the shed. With time, I learned stealth, and hunted the mice like a cat, or less like a domesticated dog. With every mouse I caught, I worried more that the mice were not retiring to the shed, but were returning to my crawlspace, more convicted in their quest for chips, flour, chocolate, peanut butter and the other stores of my pantry.
This concern led me to relocate the mice further and further away, but with every captured mouse, the concern escalated that I was simply capturing the same couple of mice over and over again. Thus, I did the only logical thing. I obtained a vast array of colored Sharpies. Upon capturing a mouse, I would use a Sharpie to give the mouse a racing strip (or two), and would then release them to the neighborhood.
Never did I get a repeat mouse. This may be because mice shed their fur rapidly. It may be because they never came back. It may be because one of my neighbors kept getting mice in their mouse traps with carefully drawn racing strips. I'll never know.
In time, the mouse population subsided, and I moved onto new endeavors and new homes. The days of mouse hunting are hopefully behind me, but the memories live on as stories shared with people, and now the internet. I will endeavor to keep a queue of these types of post at the ready in the inevitable event I encounter a period of few posts. I hope you enjoyed it, and there should be a plethora of updates in the coming days as much has happened, and is happening in establishing myself in the land of the long white cloud.
