#IN THE MIDDLE of the two….. a smashed skunk in the road

[mabelsguidetolife]

took my dog on the shittiest little walk ever and now we’re both hot, itchy, and disappointed

[acher0ntiastyx]

Cascade Range Gothic

as suggested by @malinchi!

- Your ears pop as you wind your way up into the mountains on the narrow two-lane highway. A car passes you, on its way back down, and then the road is empty again as it disappears around a bend. You drive on, watching for the turn-off for the trail you’re going to be hiking, and another car startles you as it comes around a blind curve to pass you going downhill. You check your mirrors and it’s already out of sight around the next bend in the road, but you would’ve sworn that was the same car.

- You squint as the usually dense pine forest opens sharply into a clearcut, ferns and wildflowers nodding among the debris of dropped branches, a lone tree still standing here and there. From the corner of your eye you catch a glimpse of someone standing in the open space as if watching the road. There’s nothing there when you look over. You tell yourself it was just a tall stump.

- The Gnarl Ridge fire was over 10 years ago now. Some of the forest it burned is still standing. The trees are like ghosts; bark mostly burned away, exposed wood bleached silver-white by sun and rain and snow. You rent a cabin in the area, looking to go hiking, but you don’t sleep well. You can’t hold on to your nightmares long enough to remember them, but every time they jolt you awake you swear you smell smoke.

- You camp for the night just off the Pacific Crest Trail. You’re on the edge of dozing when a sound snaps you bolt upright in your tent, a ragged wail that leaves you gasping in shock. It echoes out of the dark for several long seconds before falling silent. You had heard before that mountain lions could scream like women but never properly believed it til now. At least you want to believe it. Even in the worst distress, a human would remember the rhythm speech is supposed to make. No human voice would sound like that. You make yourself lay back down, and spend the next several hours trying to convince yourself it was just an animal. That there weren’t any words in that scream.

- You stop at a small roadside diner for lunch. There are a few other cars in the lot, a couple of grizzled hunter types at the counter inside. You grab a booth. The waitress smiles and calls you ‘hun’ as she hands you a menu and pours coffee into a white mug. You get the feeling now and then that you’re being watched as you eat, but when you glance towards the counter the hunters haven’t moved.  They don’t so much as turn their heads when you get up to leave. The waitress stares out the window after you as you drive away. You drive that stretch of highway many times, but you never find that diner again.

- You rest your skis on your shoulder as you walk back to your car.  It’s getting dark now after a few hours spent relaxing and warming up back at the lodge, and the parking lot is almost empty.  You move slowly and watch where you step, though your snow boots give you good traction on the icy ground.  Somewhere, off in the trees that border the lot on two sides, you begin to hear another set of footsteps crunching through the snow.  They’re coming closer.  You quicken your pace and keep your eyes off the woods.

- You loop back to the trailhead after a long hike to find your car isn’t where it should be.  You left it parked only a few yards from the opening to the trail and now it’s across the parking lot and tipped over on its side, windows smashed and flashers blinking weakly.  You have just enough signal to call for a tow, and when the men from the service arrive they’re eventually able to maneuver the car back onto its wheels.  One of them wrinkles his nose at a strange smell lingering around the lot and mutters something about skunks, though it’s unlike any skunk you’ve ever smelled in your backyard.  They all keep their eyes off the dents in your car’s roof and the base of the driver’s door.  You press your hand into one when the men aren’t looking; it’s the right shape, but a good five sizes too big.

- Sometimes when you go camping and you look out the mesh door of your tent you can see flashlights moving by on the path through the campground, the people carrying them little more than shadows beyond their brightness.  Usually they stick to the ground in front of them, only occasionally passing far enough to the side to hit you.  Even rarer than that are the lights that sweep side to side as they move along the path, scanning the campground in wide even arcs.  You swear you once saw one of them blink.

- There are noises around your house sometimes.  Usually at night, though not always.  A floorboard creaks on the stairs.  The wood of the small door in your bedroom that leads into a crawl space shifts or the outside metal storm door to the basement expands in the heat of full sunlight and the sound is so much like a single soft knock that you stare at it for a long expectant moment.  Something hits the siding at the front of your house and you flip on the porch light and find a single pinecone on the painted floor, when the nearest evergreen is well at the edge of your backyard.  You never see anything.  You can’t decide if that makes you more comfortable, or less.

- In the foothills leading up to Mount Hood you drive and camp along parts of the old Oregon Trail.  The ‘road’ is rocky and rutted, jostling you almost painfully in your seat, but it’s fun anyways.  The campsites are small and simple; a fire pit, a wooden picnic table, a patch of flat pine-needle-covered dirt where you pitch a small tent.  A stream runs nearby, its steady babble soothing you off to sleep.  When you wake to the creaking rumble of wagon wheels on packed soil and the snorts of horses or oxen, you put your back to the tent flap and try to go back to sleep.  When one of the few voices you catch says the salted pork has run out, you wonder if your bear bag is high enough up the tree.  And then, if that would satisfy them. 

- There is a Himalayan blackberry thicket on the edge of your yard.  You don thick gloves and with shears in hand you hack down the trailing vines.  Thorns snag in your clothes, a few deep enough to draw blood, but hours later you’ve beaten it back, stiff canes chopped only a few inches above the ground.  Something moves in the woods one night, sends leaves rustling against your windows and branches scratching the siding.  There is a Himalayan blackberry thicket in the middle of your yard. 

[nrdynarwhal-blog]

The Only Porchlight in The Abandonment

I’ve taken to calling the stretch of land surrounding our house “The Abandonment.” It is an ever-expanding space– three adjacent abandoned lots, two garages, a barn, three houses on our right and five houses on our left. It stretches two blocks behind our house, one to the right and three to the left– surrounding our house with overgrown, falling-down, litter-covered property beginning its re-wilding.

           The Abandonment is far from deserted– abandoned by the humans that created it, but far from devoid of life.  My daughter Tristen, our dog Gemma, and I have taken to exploring this space and documenting the goings on here.

           Presently, the list of tenants is a little short.  Feral cats live in the empty houses. Rats have colonized the barn and garage.  They dart and dash between old tires and smashed television sets to avoid us on our weekly walks.  The cats are braver. A big yellow and orange tom cat adopted us last summer.  We called him Walter and he stayed with us for a few weeks before moving on.  Our feral cats are a transient bunch. We never see the same cat more than three times. Winter has been particularly harsh (changing from cold to warm and from rain to snow as if flipping a coin) driving these urban animals to their breaking point.  A wind storm in August destroyed my sunflower garden and with it went our flock of birds.  Without all those seeds, there is a calorie deficit in The Abandonment– there is nothing for the birds, mice, and rats to eat.  Our troop of scavengers: raccoons, groundhog, skunks and opossums don’t leave much for the smaller animals.  These guys have a monopoly on our garbage.  If it’s not in the metal can, its fair game.  If it is in the metal cans, it’s for the raccoons.

In our almost-three-year tenure on 10th Street, I have only ever seen these raccoons on two occasions.  The first was late one night in June or July right after we moved in.  My husband, Justin, and I were sitting on the porch (with Gemma) having a late-night cigarette, when this portly creature came stumbling out of the abandoned lot next door.  He waddled into our yard.  Blinked at our porchlight. Looked slowly around at us and the dog.  Made eye contact with Gemma then slunk along the shadows until he disappeared under our porch. Because he took us by surprise, my husband and I laughed as his striped tale vanished under the sideboards.  But in truth, this raccoon made me uneasy. I was glad we had seen him at night so I could be almost sure he wasn’t rabid but not totally sure so we quickly retreated into the house and vowed to put the trash bags into the cans.

Stowe Township (out in the far west extremities of the Pittsburgh area, down by Mancini’s Bread) sits between McKees Rocks and Kennedy Township.  Our neighborhood has the look of memory– most of the houses have been forgotten about.  Once they were nice, but now they have fallen into a state between functional and abandoned: peeling paint and rotted wood stay so long as they do their jobs. While McKees Rocks was once a thriving machinery and railroad town, now it is mostly the temporary houses made for steel and railroad workers that have been bubble-gummed-and-duck-taped into lasting until 2017.  When the jobs left, most of the people left too– the people that remain are a mix of hardened old-school Italian, Polish, and African American barely-middle-class working folks simply surviving. From the Italians we have bread and pizza, from the Polish golden churches (and pierogis), and from the African Americans the small businesses that maintain our micro-economy.

The second time we encountered this raccoon was right at dusk as we were unloading groceries.  Coming up our walk way, we heard scurrying over in the lot.  As I got to the porch with the first load of plastic bags, the portly raccoon came wobbling out from under a chair.  His front paws were out in front of him, cupped, and filled with cat food. He didn’t even look at us as he wobbled off, his buddies chattered in the darkness at the top of our street where the side walk ended and turned to grass. I remember thinking how ballsy he was, but I was also impressed with his brazen ability to survive. He knew that cat food was there.  It was almost as if he assumed that it was for him and his buddies. He was just like Yep, this is mine now. Peace. I guess urban raccoons need attitude to be able to survive in this wasted town.

Raccoon chittering has become one of the characteristics of Stowe Township– alongside the hourly train whistle and the smells of fresh bread and pizza … and skunk (maybe on some streets it’s marijuana, but on 10th Street it is a real, flesh-and-stink skunk). Not just one skunk though, a troupe of skunks.  At least four skunks. Maybe a mama and pups. Maybe just a gang of hood skunks.  All I know is that they live under our porch. Eat our garbage. Furrow grubs out of our grass and emit odors.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the skunks– even if they did cause us to be without a house for four days because their odor correlated with a major problem with our furnace.  I just wish they would relocate.  I don’t like the risk involved with our dog. Gemma is way too nosey to be a good skunk-neighbor.  It is just a matter of time before they spray her for getting too close. They probably think the same of us though. We leave lights on. Drive cars. Don’t buy canned cat food anymore.  

Gemma doesn’t have a good relationship with most of The Abandonment tenants– she chases the opossum, groundhog, and feral cats up and down our yard. Sometimes the groundhog will try to out run her and make a dash for his burrow on the side of our house.  Sometimes he fails.  That is why this groundhog is Henry 3.0.

Before the house directly next to ours fell empty, the guy who rented it would shoot bow-and-arrow off of his porch.  He used a target block on top of five huge bales of hay to stop the arrows.  Henrys 1.0 and 2.0 used to eat the clover and wild strawberries that grew in his yard.  His dog, a massive cream-colored pitbull, did not approve of this invasion of his territory. Henry 1.0 liked to sunbathe in the mornings when our back yards were filled with sun.  One morning, poor Henry didn’t perk up soon enough and the dog got him– full force teeth to the side and Henry was no longer. Henry 2.0 was a little thing. But he was still a groundhog and still had a weakness for wild strawberries.  I guess our neighbor was sick of his dog barking and growling at the back door every morning, but I am only assuming. I was only made privy to the situation when 2.0’s corpse was out with his garbage. Henry 3.0 should be safe from such assaults as those people have moved out.  Plus, I have been smuggling him wrinkled potatoes and carrots all winter. Gemma sometimes chases him up the fence line to his hole, but for the most part, this groundhog chooses to avoid all contact with us. Which is probably for the better. He should share his idea with the rats and opossums. But maybe rooting out tasty bits of wrinkled tubers will entice him to stick around and continue to put up with our nonsense.

Our interactions with the rats– I think it might just be one particularly daring brown rat– and opossums have been much more personal.  And much more invasive– like slinking up our laundry drain and climbing up the inside of our walls kind of invasive; there might be more opossums in my house than people invasive; my husband killed his brother with a hammer and left his body as a warning, but he still came back invasive.  Now, I am not advocating for sharing space with wild animals, but there is no need to remove them if they are not hindering our way of life. They are living beings too and were probably here before we moved in.  Just because humans made this structure, doesn’t mean we have sole rights to inhabit it. But that is enough about the rights of vermin – honestly, I find it hilarious that the opossums moved into our space.  They, with their thumpings and scufflings, are just one more way nature is reclaiming our house and urban space.  

Before we had Tristen, my husband lost his job and we were forced to leave 10th Street for about 4 months.  The previous two summers left The Abandonment teaming with life– wild flowers, grasses, mystery plants that seem to need no water and cannot be killed with Round-Up, butterflies, bees, wasps (huge, mean black wasps), flies, spiders (Larry the living-room-ceiling-spider, Bartholomew the bathroom-corner-spider and several others from the wolf spiders currently squatting in our basement to tiny little spiders that make delicate webs in the hall corners), snakes, mice, rats, raccoons, skunks, opossums, feral cats, things that wondered in from the rail road tracks. Life was in that lot.

Life that depended on our cast-offs, on the changes we made to their environment.

We re-rented the same house in the end of September of this year and came back to a surprisingly void of life lot. Our sunflowers had been ransacked by wind and rain. We did not plant our garden. We did not supply any garbage to pick through, lick calories out of yogurt containers, scrape calories from tin cans. The life left with us.

We are the only porchlight surrounded by abandonment. We are their cash-cow. We have influenced their evolution.

Now, I toss carrots, potatoes, and sketchy-left-overs over our fence into The Abandonment in an effort to tempt them back– as if to apologize for leaving, as if to say: come, share our prosperity.  Come back to The Abandonment.  

  Our Marsupial Overlords

We still do not know how they got up there, but we know there are more than two of them– opossums.  They have made the space above our bathroom and back hall their home.

We hear them playing in the evenings: a thump, thump, scuffle on the drywall that rattles our light fixtures.  

I can only imagine what Gemma hears when she and our two cats are home all day.  

They have no shame– they sleep in our house, pluck the grubs from our grass, lick all the goodies from our trash then re-decorate The Abandonment with it when they are done.

And honestly, it amuses me more than it bothers me.

Or maybe it’s just the temporary way that I see this house that makes these things so funny: It’s only a rental, nothing to worry about.  We’re moving soon.  Let’s all just get along.

I commend the opossum who figured out how to get up there. Justin went out to investigate when we first heard them– there are no external entrances to this spot. And if there were, she (mama opossum) would have to climb a barely attached gutter or use a tree down the block to gain access to the roof then run the length of the rowhouses to get back to ours and still figure out how to get into the space under our roof.

I have a theory: our bathroom and back hallway were an addition, part of this addition was a really crappy crawlspace for lawn supply storage.  This space has a door, but it is only a wooden box built to connect the back wall of our house and the addition. There is no access to the inside of the house from this little storage space, but there is access to the inside of the walls.  My theory is that this mama opossum found her way into our storage space and realized that she could get up into the heated part of the house by climbing up the walls. That makes it fairly earned. She can raise her brood above our heads.

These opossums aren’t hurting us– far from it. Actually, we are benefiting from hosting these marsupials.  We have not seen nor been bitten by a tick since they moved in. By having so many of them so close to us and our pets, they probably have saved us more than they realize– just by being opossums and eating ticks. The New York Times even dubbed them “environmental vacuum cleaners” stating that they also eat mice and other nuisance critters. The National Opossum Society describes these guys as having 50 teeth, excellent climbing abilities and as being nonconfrontational.  Justin calls them our Marsupial Overlords (our unmentioned roommates).

  Surrounded by (Black) and Yellow

When we first started dating, Justin, would never use or carry a yellow Bic lighter.  He claimed that they were bad luck – every time he was in a car accident he had a yellow lighter in his pocket; flipped his car doing donuts on a gravel road: yellow lighter on the floor board; found out his parents had euthanized his childhood dog in secret: yellow lighter in his pocket– every bad thing that has happened to him was attributed to the color yellow.  And as I sit on our porch with Tristen and Gemma enjoying this fluke moment of sunshine, I am starting to think he was right.  

The Abandonment is surrounded by yellow– the rowhouses that create its left and front most sides are made of yellow brick, our sunflowers cast their golden reflections on the cement, tattered yellow caution tape still flutters in the burnt-out house across the alley to our right, graffiti reading “Cory” glitters warmly golden on the garage facing our yard, the grassy areas will soon be stippled with fluffy dandelion heads, 10th Street is paved with yellow brick, even the tiny flowers that will bloom on the tangled mess of American bittersweet nightshade swallowing our house have yellow centers.  Yellow fills up this rewilded space.

As if to complement all this yellow, someone has added a new piece of graffiti to the rowhouses on our left, on their side facing one of the many paper streets that break up The Abandonment– I am not sure it if says “goRe” or “EoRp” or something, but it is black and yellow. The characters appear to be filled with turbulent holes and are surrounded by a black bouncy-looking cloud-shape.  I hope it says “goRe” because then it would at least provide a commentary for the burnt-out house which it faces.  The same house they removed three bodies from and have not been back to since that day in December. “goRe” complements the caution tape and the too-decayed-to-be-of-any-use buildings that inhabit The Abandonment and its un-killable plants that form its jungle groundcover in the summer months– a four-foot high welter of arrow-head shaped leaves, red-purple thick stalks with knobbed joints and deep roots, sprigs of green vine, ruffled purple leaves, burs, skunk cabbage, thorns, wild strawberry, coal, concrete, broken glass, railroad rocks, scratched marbles, brown-black city dirt.

On a whim, I decided to investigate these plants– to see what species inhabit this brown-black coal strewn dirt. Jimsonweed seems to have taken over the rocky section towards the middle– it reached six feet high that summer we barely had any rain. Its reddish stalks stand tall with barbed triangular leaves and spiky seedpods.  London rocket with its tiny yellow flowers and thin rocket-ship-leaves grows towards the pool and out by the television grave yard.  When its dry, the only color is the rusty-red stalks of jimsonweed and the purple leaves of something that looks like rhubarb with short stalks and oblong ruffled leaves.  When it is dry the ground stays brown-black and sun baked, letting only the jimsonweed grow.

When the ground stays wet mustard, pinweed, clover, milkweed bloom yellow, pink, white and the nightshade berries turn red and stink adding to the dankness coming from the ever-flooded marshland that will soon support McKees Rock’s entire mosquito population, landscape of scattered tires and liquor bottles, the rare shopping cart.  

The Abandonment owns “goRe” as if a fragrance.  With the weather warming, I cannot help but remember the summer smells: cat poo (its mostly cat poo) and dirt and decay and that moist rotting smell and mud and green– that smell that foliage has that just smells green and alive– and stagnant water and rust and wet wood and alcohol and marijuana and cigarette smoke and pizza and baking bread and car paint and spray paint and car exhaust and concrete.  It is nature in the city. It is city in nature. The Abandonment is where they meet and eddy together like how the Allegheny meets the Monongahela to form the Ohio– blue churning together with brown to form turbulent green waters. Here the city churns together with nature to create this brown-black dirt– this mixture of what humans made and what made humans.  

  The Truce

Yesterday night, I was awake in the odd hours between Tristen’s hungry cries when I saw his tale slither behind my crockpot. Our nightly marauder– a common brown rat. Rattus norvegicus, the most common rat species in North America thrives in urban areas and on ships.  Rattus norvegicus seems to have evolved beyond their Asian-plains-origin to live alongside us, or rather this brown rat has.  He chose our home for his foraging ground.  Locked in our silent agreement, we are participating in one of the oldest human-animal relationships: we gather surplus food, he eats off that surplus, and eventually our cats will eat him. But right now, he wants to eat their food.  

Our kitchen was dim– lit by a nightlight shaped like Darth Vader’s head– but I could just see the outline of his round body and two little ears. He was definitely hiding behind the crockpot. Probably waiting for me to sleepily wander past him.

Maybe I have done this before. Maybe he has waited me out countless times this winter. Waiting in the snug little space behind our crockpot and next to the heater vent; tucked up underneath our butcher rack and away from the cats’ reach.  Just soaking up the warmth and waiting for his chance to dart across the kitchen.

I imagine his little belly is grumbling and that he is cussing me out for delaying him.

Or maybe he is a worrier and is doubting his whole plan. Thinking that darting back into the basement and making a run for the drain pipe is a better option than waiting me out.  

But then I remember we are talking about cat food here– carbs, protein and fat– he cannot pass this up. It is too cold outside to go back with an empty belly. So he waits.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t know I have seen him. He doesn’t know that I know he has visited before.  He comes in through The Abandonment – the two-inch drainage pipe from our laundry room pokes out of the concrete block and out into the mess of jimsonweed and garbage. He climbs up rusted metal, lifts the drain cover, scurries up our stairs and into our kitchen.

He doesn’t know that we have chosen not to poison him.  That my husband and I are allowing him into our home. We have come to an agreement with this urban nature. This wildness that seeks us out.

We have drawn a truce with nature. Once cities sought to conquer the natural world with their brick and glass and metal industrialization but with each drop in our economy, in the housing market, in the job market, in the value of the US Dollar, nature takes a little back. She sinks her tendrils deeper into that rotting wood, wriggles her roots further into our sewer systems, pummels paint from siding with rain and wind. Broken windows let her into old homes wetting their dry-walled and plastered ceilings, caving them in to let birds and squirrels nest in the rafters.  Urban re-wilding is as natural as a fallen tree turning to mold. Nature conquers all that is put before her. Why should McKees Rocks or Stowe Township be any different?  Why should concrete divide what is human with what is natural when humans came out of nature. These animals have adapted and overcome the harsh environment humans have put before them.  They are evolution at its most basic.

We are the bridge between survival and defeat.  We destroyed the natural habitat, the rich riverlands, and put up our concrete-and-wood dwellings poisoning the land so we must to pay restitution: the choice not to poison our little marauder, in letting the opossums share our space, in planting sunflowers, by tossing wrinkled potatoes over our fence, by being lazy with our trash we participate in our ecosystem and contribute to the urban wild. We are the only porchlight in The Abandonment.