Woodchuck

When I was in high school, my car smelled sorta funny.

That was due to about eight different reasons. But one of them was because mice liked to escape the cold weather by crawling into heating vents of my car where they would promptly die.

When you turned on the heat or air conditioning, it smelled like death. One time I saw the Grim Reaper fly out! The awful smell would eventually go way after a few days.

Well, one time, my car smelled like death for a whole month. This puzzled me.

Hmmmm...I said.

Because I'm deathly afraid of all rodents (we owned a bunny rabbit that once bit me in the nipple), I asked my Dad to look under the hood of my car to find out what smelled funny. When he did, he pulled out a dead, fully grown woodchuck! It had crawled into my car to escape the cold, just like the martyr mice. He must have crawled in my car to find a warm place to sleep. Then, I started my car and he couldn't jump out without being hurt. So, he just stayed there and cooked in the engine's heat. He also had a big gouge in him where one of the belts had almost rubbed him in half.

It was gross, and sad. Because, he went to Woodchuck Heaven.

I fault myself for this. I should have noticed the "Woodchuck Indicator Light" flashing on my dashboard.

So, now, I'm all growed up and I live in the suburbs where people behave like they did in high school. They care about their lawns. It's a status thing, I think. My lawn has weeds and we have a family of a hundred woodchucks living under my shed. I don't enjoy much status. And, I think I'm okay with that.

One day, I went out and bought a Havahart trap. I set out to trap me a some woodchucks so more casualties would not be on my hands.

I caught one.

He looked like this.

Now what to do?

Go for a bike ride and think about it, of course, like I do everything else!

When I came back, Greene county animal control had already visited and gave him the Jim Jones Cool-Aid.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

So, yesterday, I caught another one. He was just a little baby and I wanted to make damn sure he didn't get killed.

I took him out to the cornfield behind my house. I tried too loosen one of the panels of the trap and he took a swipe at me!

How ironic, eh?

Well, eventually, I freed him by opening one of the panels of the trap and pushing it over so he'd run the other way. I did the same, screaming.

I guess this story doesn't have much of a punchline, except that woodchucks are certainly a theme of my life and and I wish they'd just leave me the hell alone!

Bye.