We live in perilous times. I’ve been following news reports for months, keeping a finger on the pulse of global tensions and national politics and another finger on my own pulse to see which is more erratic. It’s a toss-up.
I have solutions to offer but so far the president's advisors haven't contacted me. I’m confused by
this. I’ve responded to every poll I read online. You’d think that
would count for something. Ironically, friends don’t seek out my opinions
either. People seem content with their own point of view and don’t really care
about mine. Weird.
I’m not taking any of it personally, even though as a card-carrying
baby boomer my gray hair ought to count for something. I’ve lived through so many national crises, surviving everything from the Vietnam War era to two
national toilet paper shortages, that I could be labeled a National
Treasure.
None of this matters to those in the Situation Room,
though, so I’ve decided to let Washington handle Putin and Xi Jinping and Iran’s
Ayatollah. I don’t have time to consult with them anymore. I’ve discovered an
even bigger threat to my homeland security than nuclear holocaust, and the
responsibility for dealing with this existential threat has fallen to me. At
this very moment I am tracking down a terrorist hiding in tunnels right outside
my own front door.
There’s a gopher in my yard.
I haven’t actually seen him in person, but he leaves
mounds of calling cards everywhere he travels. For weeks he’s been building a
subway system deep underground without my permission. He has no permits. No
right-of-way. No legal authority. But every few days he comes up for air and
sunlight and I find a big pile of dirt and a new hole in my lawn.
I think he’s part amphibian.
Well, I’ve had enough. Two weeks ago as I backed into
my garage, I pointed through the driver's window at his little construction zone and
snarled, “You’re going down. I have plans for you. I’m bringing in the bunker
buster bombs.”
It was no empty threat. I’ve been doing my research on
YouTube, y’all. I know what gopher traps look like and I’ve learned that I like
my fingers too much to risk losing any of them. Those are best left to the
professionals. My son-in-law came up with a method of his own. He prefers to flood
the tunnels with a hose and when the soggy survivor pokes its little head up
out of the ground, he’s waiting nearby with a golf club to play Wack-A-Mole.
It's all so violent. I even saw one YouTuber repeatedly
throw lit matches into a gopher hole without explanation until on the third try
he blew up his whole front yard. I didn’t see a gopher come flying out, though. I think his kamikaze idea backfired and he probably came away with singed
eyebrows and nothing good to show for it.
“There has to be a better plan,” I told a friend of
mine.
“Well, whatever you decide, just don’t use those
little sticky traps,” she said.
“What sticky traps?”
“You know, those little open-air boxes that
exterminators leave lying around to catch bugs. Lizards and geckos are always
getting stuck to them instead of roaches and end up dying a gruesome death, all
alone, even though everybody knows geckos are good and lizards eat bugs. The
very bugs the sticky traps are supposed to be exterminating.”
On the other end of the phone, I waited patiently for
her to finish her story before I started laughing.
“I really don’t care,” I said.
But my friend wanted me to care.
“One time,” she continued, “a friend of mine heard screaming
coming from her garage and when she investigated, there was a mouse stuck to one
of those traps. She asked her husband to set it free and he said he would, but she
listened to the poor little thing screeching all night long. He didn’t get
around to going out there until the next morning and when he did, do you know
what he found?”
“A dead mouse?”
“No!” she said. She lowered her voice and I could
almost hear the screaming violins from Psycho playing in the background.
“All he found were its little hands stuck to the trap.”
“Its hands,” I repeated.
“Yes! Isn’t that awful? I mean, it just makes me so
uncomfortable to think some poor little mouse is running around in the woods
without any hands.”
I couldn’t think of a funnier image myself, but maybe
I’m just a sinner and need to repent.
A day or two later, my daughter passed on an unlikely piece
of advice from her neighbor. The way to kill gophers, she heard, is to stuff
their tunnel entrance with fluffy, white marshmallows. It upsets their
digestive tract, she said. And they’ll die, she said. Potentially.
Well, it sounded easier than blowing up my front yard.
So, I bought a bag of s’mores-sized mallows which my grandson and I may or may
not have indulged in that very afternoon, forcing me to buy a second bag of marshmallows
the following day because, as the neighbor told my daughter, “if they smell
human scent on the mallows, they won’t eat them.”
Naturally. Rodents got scruples. The poisonous
marshmallow should probably be organic, too.
The next day I launched Operation Gopher Buster.
Having assimilated all my intel and gathered my stockpile of mallow ammo along
with another weapon of mass destruction - a long, wooden dowel from the patio door
track - I prayed for courage and launched a limited missile attack. Stabbing
into the soft dirt mound near the driveway, I located the entrance to the
terrorist’s tunnel and let half a bag of marshmallows rain down on enemy territory.
But I forgot to requisition a shovel. The aerated soil
filled the hole as soon as I flicked it away with the half-inch wide pole. Determined
to make the plan work as is, I pushed one of the mallows into the general area
of the gopher hole and withdrew the dowel rod to repeat the maneuver. A sticky,
dirty, puffy square emerged with the dowel, shish kabobbed.
Undeterred, I shoved a second mallow into the ground just
like the first and skewered that one, too, followed by a third and a fourth. Now
I was angry. The gopher was proving more clever than I first thought, but I was
determined he would not make a fool of me. I could do that by myself. I lost my
cool, beating the ground and the mallows with my stick, stabbing the candied
ammo until they lay helpless in the dirt at my feet.
The tunnel, if not stuffed with marshmallows as
planned, was now hidden by marshmallow crème.
Out of breath, I gathered my desecrated dowel rod and
the half-empty bag of ammo and headed inside the house. Even if the mission failed,
I held out hope that I would at least be able to harvest a crop of marshmallows
in time for Halloween’s first campfire.
It’s been two weeks since my sneak attack and tensions
seem to have de-escalated in the volatile region. No further dirt mounds have
been discovered. No new holes have been seen. Also, no marshmallows have sprouted.
I'm taking no chances, though, just in case he survived a case of food poisoning. We’ll be irrigating next
week and as the system of tunnels is flooded with water, I’ll be waiting and
watching for signs of the furry little urban guerilla. If he emerges, I’ll be ready for
him.
