“Hey, what’s the matter?” I asked as I stepped away from the garden, leaving Hannah and Caroline to water in their new plants. “Isn’t this great?”
“I don’t know, Bubba, they’re pretty into this. Are you sure this is going to work?”
I shot a glance over my shoulder at the girls in their garden, then turned back to Eryn with a look of wounded pride.
“Come on, honey, I’ve been gardening my whole life. Besides, I’ve got this nailed. Look at what we’re growing,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. “I’ve stooped to radishes, for crying out loud. This is foolproof.”
Only a fool believes that anything in this broken world is foolproof, and so the proliferation of things called foolproof is proof only that the world has fools and plenty. But the troubles in Caroline and Hannah’s garden didn’t start immediately. There was a golden two-week honeymoon during which seeds germinated, plants grew, and we gathered around the heavily armored plot to witness our little garden prevailing, even against daunting desert odds. We had planted tomatoes, squash, beans, sweet and hot peppers, collards, basil, and, of course, plenty of radishes. It was an unambitious, low-risk starter plot—a prosperous, shining little garden upon a hill that would make the desert bloom according to promises of old. We showered our plants with well water and attention and screened them with burlap to protect them from the scorching wind. My fence kept out the cottontails and big jackrabbits, just as I had hoped. As our plants grew we also took more pictures, proudly documenting for posterity the triumph of two little girls’ first efforts at gardening.
Despite Bobby Burns’s admonition that “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley,” around our place the mice have aft done extremely well, while it is only my own schemes that have gang very, very damned agley. One aspect of my garden fortress scheme that was not well laid was my failure to foresee that slack spots along the base of my hardware cloth barricade would be virtual highways to the field mouse, which has no difficulty squeezing through a gap less than a half inch in diameter. So the “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie” got some seeds, as did the long-tailed, chisel-toothed, hopping kangaroo rats (Dipodomys microps) that abound here, foraging nocturnally for just such simple treasures as radish seeds. But this was sustainable damage, and I explained to Caroline that we were just being nice by sharing with our nonhuman neighbors. As an added form of insurance, however, I secretly overseeded the plot, and I tightened the fence carefully in hopes of mending the breaches. Within hours of fixing the fence, though, I discovered a mixed flock of bushtits, chickadees, and sparrows tearing up the seedbeds, and so I rushed to string in a half-dozen aluminum pie tins, which whipped in the Washoe Zephyr and made enough racket to keep out the hungry birds.
The next morning we were happy to find the seedbeds undisturbed, but just as I began to relax into a feeling of satisfaction I noticed that the squash plants had been shorn to the ground. After the time-consuming process of unwrapping various layers of fence, I was at last able to get close enough to the plants to examine them closely. Judging from the size of the lacerated stems and the clean, sharp angle of their cuts, I was certain that bushy-tailed pack rats had been the culprits.
Hope is the coin of the gardener’s realm, but it is a devalued currency, worth increasingly less as it is traded against the incessantly rising tender of the gardener’s despair. It was several days before I made it to town to get plastic bird netting—which I now needed to keep out not birds but pack rats—and by then I was forced to buy replacement seed and bedding plants for the garden, which had already been substantially ravaged by the birds, mice, kangaroo rats, and pack rats. Indeed, the all-you-can-eat salad bar that was once my children’s first garden was now so heavily frequented by rodents that the local great horned owl took up a hunting perch on the peak of our roof. While the final stages of the garden’s destruction proceeded apace despite the owl’s nightly vigil, I now had the additional chore of cleaning from the sidewalk many overlapping bursts of snow-white owl crap, occasionally accompanied by owl “pellets”—a delicate euphemism for a compact, puked-up wad of undigested fur, bones, teeth, and feathers.
During this time the girls continued to water what was left of their garden, and they had a great time playing together in the mud—even as I was constantly humiliated by having to explain to their mother why I, the seasoned gardener, was finding it so difficult to grow a few radishes. The ripe fruit of my gardener’s pride began to wither on the blasted vine of my children’s first garden, and while I was relieved that Hannah and her little sister seemed unfazed by what Eryn had begun to call “the Vegpocalypse,” I had no way of knowing how long this grace period might continue. Grace, like good gardening weather, is welcome when it comes, but you’re in deep, uncomposted manure if your success depends upon it. At some point, I reckoned, this garden must produce.
Returning from town one day, despondent but with plenty of bird netting and extra-hoppy IPA, I once again unwrapped the various layers of artillery separating the little garden from the cruel world, and we started over. I dug out the root balls of the clear-cut squash and removed the hard stems of the limbless tomatoes while Hannah and Caroline gathered the scattered leaves of the savaged sweet peppers. We retilled and replanted my children’s first garden from end to end, and while I was pretty surly about it, the girls remained in great spirits the entire time. Caroline even told me innocently that she wished we could start the garden over “every single day!” When our replanting was done, the girls went in to wash up while I spent another hour reinforcing my defense systems, concluding with the double layer of plastic netting that I draped over the top of the fortress and snapped down with bright yellow bungee cords. Then I called the girls and sat down in my old aluminum lawn chair, with Hannah at my feet and Caroline on one knee, and stared at my children’s second first garden.
I stared, and yet I could see nothing that we had planted. With all the railroad ties, posts, trellises, stakes, tomato cages, hardware cloth fences, burlap windbreaks, shimmering pie tins, panels of bird netting, and neon bungee cords, it was now virtually impossible to see any living thing through the overlapping walls of the garden. I could in fact see no garden at all, but only a hideous monument to my own determination to establish a barrier where my brute neighbors would have none. My children’s second first garden looked like a miniature factory, or prison, or maybe the tangled bones of a steel barn after it meets with the tornado’s funnel. What the hell kind of garden was that, especially for a kid? “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” wrote Robert Frost in his poem “Mending Wall.” I had instead abided by the maxim Frost’s neighbor endorses in the poem: “Good fences make good neighbors.” If the furry and feathered would just stay on their side of the fence, all would be well. It was a simple concept, and I was exasperated by the lengths I was driven to in order to make sure my kids would have the chance to pull a few radishes.
Discouraged as I was, as a gardener I had been toughened by disappointment as well as by wind and sun. Even the Vegpocalypse, I reasoned, wasn’t worse than some other gardening catastrophes I had endured, and as I sat meditating on my failure I was reminded of the heartening words of Thomas Jefferson, one of our most philosophical gardeners. In the garden, wrote Mr. Jefferson, “the failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another.” Perhaps, as T. J. suggested, there would be some yet hidden consolation to compensate for these losses. Just at that moment, however, something tragic and unexpected happened—something that fatally radicalized my approach to gardening in the high desert. As I sat in my bent lawn chair, with Hannah leaning against my shoulder, Caroline sitting in my lap, and one half of my ass poking down through the ripped canvas seat, two tiny white-tailed antelope ground squirrels skittered across the rocky patch of dirt that is our “yard,” raced beneath us, and ran over my right foot in their gleeful sprint to get to our newly replanted garden. There they disappeared momentarily behind the rail
road ties forming the garden box before popping up in the garden itself, wasting no time in starting to crop our squash.
All of this happened in a matter of seconds, but in that moment I felt the swell of failure curl over me in a slow-breaking wave of despair. My gardener’s hubris—that profound, unsubstantiated delusion of superiority without which no gardener could long endure his or her trials—had bitten me on the half of my ass that was exposed to the cruel world. In allowing myself to believe that the replanted and rearmored garden was impenetrable, I had foolishly ignored one of the basic principles of fatherhood, a principle so fundamental that it belongs with such core insights as “The only people who like change are babies in diapers” or “When your kid tells you to cover your eyes, do it with one hand and cover your nuts with the other.” Humility is the alpha and omega of both parenting and gardening. I had failed to be humble, and in failing to be humble I was now humbled by failure.
In mute frustration I now reckoned that my daughters’ ultimate happiness—their futures as good gardeners, great women, excellent human beings—was staked on the uncertain success of the little garden these white-tailed beasts were devouring. And, damn it, they had stepped on my foot. Both the gardener and the father in me now felt called to battle. As I sat with my jaw locked, watching my children’s second first garden being destroyed, I could feel that I was about to cross an invisible line—that extraordinary and perhaps violent measures had become necessary. For their part, however, the girls greeted this new problem with screeches of joy. “Daddy! Look at the cute little chipmunks in our garden!” exclaimed Hannah, pointing excitedly toward the ravaged plot. “Hello, friends!” added Caroline, as she held her hands to her face and wriggled her fingers to mimic whiskers.
As the cracked stubs of what were once our plants baked in the heat of a sun whose azimuth had grown troublingly higher in recent weeks, I began a calculated assault on the “chipmunks” that had now become more numerous than flies around our place. The white-tailed antelope squirrel (Ammospermophilus leucurus) is a remarkable creature, one whose adaptations to the grueling excesses of the desert environment can only have been shaped by a zillion evolutionary near misses, each one resulting in a crunchy snack for a harrier or coyote. Until you’ve been in the desert awhile, the antelope squirrel really does look like a chipmunk, though the differences are many and extraordinary. For starters, optimal habitat for the antelope squirrel is sparse juniper, sagebrush steppe, and desert scrub; unlike the chipmunk, it is never seen in the alpine forest. The white-tailed antelope—the species of Ammospermophilus most widely distributed throughout the arid West and the one that was chowing down on my kids’ second first garden—sports a narrow white stripe from shoulder to rump, has white cheeks, and carries none of those unsightly chipmunk stripes on its face. Antelopes have thin, coarse fur that is light brown with a gray or, as in our local population, reddish tint. The infallible means to distinguish them from chipmunks, though, is by their amazing ability to run with their tail pulled up over their bodies, a feat your average chipmunk could only dream of attempting. The underside of that raised tail flashes as white as the rump of a pronghorn in flight, an unmistakable visual correspondence that is the source of the antelope squirrel’s odd name.
The antelope lives up to the name “squirrel” perfectly. Squirrel comes from the Vulgar Latin scuriolus, which is a variant of the Latin scurius, which comes from the Greek skiouros, which gives this family its name, Sciuridae, and which is almost certainly the source of the word scurry. Antelope squirrels are so small—four ounces or so—that you could mail one across the country for about a buck, but they scurry with such inconceivable swiftness as to make sprinting chipmunks look like they are shuffling from couch to cupboard to get a bag of Cheetos during halftime. Once running, the antelope squirrel—unlike its namesake, the pronghorn—never stops or looks back, instead flying across the earth like a white-flagged shot that vanishes into the ground at hyperspeed.
Unlike chipmunks and even other kinds of ground squirrels, the antelope is active throughout the year, which frees it from the need to hoard food in preparation for hibernation. It is not particularly territorial and in fact will huddle with others of its kind to conserve heat during the winter, so you can’t count on them to off one another the way an aggressive, territorial rodent like a pack rat might. They excavate tunnels with multiple entrances, have several burrows in their large home range, construct separate tunnels for food caches and quick escapes, and often appropriate the burrow systems of kangaroo rats, all of which makes them virtually impossible to locate underground. Somewhere in one of those many tunnels the antelope will make a nest six inches in diameter, which it has likely lined with the golden strands set adrift when Eryn brushes the girls’ hair outside on sunny mornings. You can’t easily starve an antelope squirrel, as they are generalist omnivores that will eat almost anything, from seeds, plants, roots, grasses, and fruits to insects, lizards, and carrion, including the flesh of fellow rodents. Virtually invulnerable to dehydration, they need no free water to survive, instead deriving all their hydration from the plants and bugs they eat. Their kidneys are so highly efficient in saving water by reducing nitrogenous waste that if we were as well designed we could go several years without needing a replacement roll of toilet paper. Around here the little antelopes usually mate in late February and are born around Hannah’s birthday in early April—a reproductive cycle that is precisely calibrated to the emergence of leafy annual plants here in the high desert.
What is most amazing about the antelope ground squirrel is its astonishing ability to keep itself cool in the brutal desert heat. Unlike the nocturnal foragers whose lifestyle seems more compatible with this scorching environment, the antelope is diurnal, cruising around above ground even on the hottest days. It has a number of tricks that make this marvelous feat possible. Its water conservation strategies help, of course, as does its habit of keeping its back to the sun and shading its body with its tail and its ability to climb into bushes to catch a breeze. Most important, the antelope doesn’t cool itself evaporatively, as humans and most other mammals do, so it isn’t water stressed by cooling. For this little squirrel, keeping cool is literally no sweat. Instead, it is so well adapted to the desert environment that it can allow its body temperature to rise to an incredible 110 degrees Fahrenheit—a thermal load that would cause brain damage and likely death in an adult human. When it begins to overheat, it returns to its burrow, splays its legs, drops its sparsely furred belly against the earth, and lets the ground pull the heat right out of its body—after which it pops up again and resumes razing our garden. If they happen to be well hydrated when they heat up, they will also use the neat trick of rubbing saliva on their faces to cool themselves, a behavior that makes me suspect Caroline may in fact be a ground squirrel.
The antelope squirrel’s adaptive strategies are so many and so effective as to give it a daunting home field advantage, and as a beer-guzzling mammalian biped with few effective adaptations to desert life I do not feel myself a worthy opponent. After driving to town to buy several live traps smaller than those used to nab pack rats, a backup case of IPA, and a large jar of crunchy peanut butter (which I labeled NOT FOR KIDS), I began my attempt to capture the cute little antelope squirrels. Following some misadventures in which I trapped and released a piñon jay, a kangaroo rat, a bunny-sized desert cottontail, and my own fingers (twice), I did at last discover that the wee squirrels like Uncle Crunkle’s Old-Fashioned Peanut Butter at least as well as they like squash stems. During the next two weeks I captured sixteen antelopes—many of which I released on public lands far from my children’s garden (some studies claim that this six-inch-long creature will find its way home from several miles away) but some of which received swimming lessons in my improvised pack rat dunk tank.
Having more or less succeeded in my efforts to remove the antelope tribe from the neighborhood of our garden (there was one smug little urchin I never did catch), I raked together w
hat was left of my gardener’s self-respect and helped the girls put on their gardening boots and gloves. We completely replanted our plot yet again, which was perfectly fine with Hannah and Caroline, even as I feared that the seasonal window would slam shut on our plants before they could come to fruition. I was now sufficiently desperate that I hatched a plan to photograph the girls next to the plants as they grew, later interpolating these shots of their third first garden with the earlier ones of them planting the actual first garden so as to create the appearance of success where in fact there had been two complete failures. The fact that I had sprung for larger, more developed bedding plants this time would help support the illusion. When I suggested to Eryn that some photo editing might also help out where evidence of the Double Vegpocalypse was inadvertently revealed (for example, I had carelessly planted a pepper where a tomato had been), she smilingly dismissed my idea as only the most extreme of “the many clear signs” that my obsession with my children’s first garden had become desperate. Undeterred, I insisted that the plan would work and so took a raft of pictures of my children’s third first garden, which really did look quite nice. We then put up our tools, got out the old lawn chair, and sat together, admiring our neat little garden as Venus arced toward the serrated summit crest of our home mountain.
The next morning I awoke before daybreak with a deeply unsettled feeling. I had experienced a disturbingly vivid nightmare in which I stood in my children’s garden, leaning at a slight angle but with arms straight out, like a scarecrow, immobilized by a strange paralysis as rodents of every kind crawled up and down my body, even clinging to my beard with their claws as they grinned directly into my bloodshot eyes. In the dream I was in a state of heightened sensory awareness, and I could not only smell the dank fur but feel the tiny whiskers and even the quivering breath of the mice, voles, moles, pocket gophers, kangaroo rats, pack rats, and antelope ground squirrels as they clambered over me. When I awoke I was just beginning to lose sight as one especially enterprising antelope squirrel nibbled on my exposed, unblinking eyeball.
Raising Wild Page 17