Uneasy Rhetoric

If you spend any length of time living in Land Park, you’ll learn that the pest rodent of choice is the rat. They scurry along the power lines and occasionally make their way into homes. Some friends swear they can tell time by one that runs along the line behind their house. Tell an exterminator that you have a mouse and he will say, “not likely. There aren’t any mice around here. You probably have a juvenile rat.”

Actually, we’ve been blessed. Since we moved into the neighborhood a year and a half ago, we’ve had one rat, a year ago, and it was a juvenile. Among other things, that means it wasn’t too good at hiding. We saw it at night, during the day, on the counter, along the baseboards, and in the middle of the floor. It left little rat “gifts” wherever it went. This is how I know it never made it into our bedroom or the bathroom.

We even chased it out the front door the first evening we saw it; at least that’s what we tell ourselves happened. We had it cornered and came at it from two directions. The only way to go was straight toward the open door. Probably what it did was make a 90 degree turn and slink behind the couch before we could see it. They’re fast that way. Whatever happened, three days later we saw him again in the kitchen.

When I described to the exterminator what was happening, he thought we might have several. He laughed at the mouse traps I had set. (See above — “but they work,” I insisted. “I caught no less than seven mice on my porch in my old place in Portland.”) He set a number of snap traps large enough to break a wrist. Over the course of the following week, the pheromone-covered bait disappeared from each of the traps, twice. And then the peanut butter disappeared. The rat was too slight to set off the traps, even when he was eating from them.

Very reluctantly, I agreed to glue traps. That night, we caught the offender. He was the size of a large mouse, but he had the rat head and the thick rat tail. One of the promises exterminators make is that the rodents get caught in the glue traps and go into cardiac arrest. I doubt that happens nearly as much as they tell people it does.

Waiterrant describes catching a mouse at the restaurant:

I look down at the mouse. It’s rolled onto its side where the glue’s gotten a real hold of him. The rodent’s squeaks increase in intensity as he wiggles on the paper desperately trying to free himself. Glue traps are the cruelest way to catch a mouse. Inwardly I curse the owner for selecting such an inhumane solution to his rodent problem. It could take days for the mouse to die. He’ll probably gnaw off his leg or rip open his skin trying to free himself.

Unfortunately, the owner probably uses the traps because they work. Yes, if it can, the rodent will probably gnaw a leg off to get out. Wouldn’t you? Or it will manage to get itself even more stuck. In our case, the rat had somehow managed to get all four legs and its tail stuck in the glue. It had also managed to empty its bowels. Wouldn’t you?

Unlike the Waiter, who uses his story to question why it is always the man who has to do the killing, that thought didn’t cross my mind. I just assumed that role as I’ve done with spiders countless times before. I took the rodent outside and brought out a length of small PVC pipe from the garage. You can imagine the rest.

The Waiter and I did almost exactly the same thing:

I head into the bathroom and lather my hands in hot soapy water. As I’m running my hands under the tap a bothersome thought pops into my head. Did I kill that mouse because it was the right thing to do or did I kill it because I couldn’t stand to see it suffer? If I could ask the mouse to evaluate my handling of the situation, what would his reaction be? He might be unhappy I decided to crush his head so quickly. As I dry my hands I examine my face in the mirror. I shake my head in disgust. Sometimes I over think things.

“Get over yourself,” I say to my reflection. “It was just a fucking mouse.”

It turns out we just had the one. That weekend, we did a top to bottom cleaning of the kitchen and the other rooms it had visited, and, thankfully, there have been no new signs. (Every little piece of lint gets a second look now.) That may be because over the summer I managed to clear away a lot of the old fallen foliage in parts of our back yard. Or maybe we’ve sealed up its way in. It may be because the neighbors cats have taken to hiding in our yard. Or maybe the possums have scared it off.

At any rate, the lack of visitors has also meant that I don’t have to ask those existential questions, or at least, not as loudly. There are always the spiders.