Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  Trying to chase away my bad night with java that I brewed a good bit stronger than usual, I stood at the slider door sipping from my mug and awaiting sunrise over my children’s third first garden. At last the ascending Venus dimmed, the sky brightened, and the little plot was bathed in a golden, effulgent light. There it was, suddenly, in all its shining glory, the little garden for my little girls, and I felt that somehow my struggles had been rewarded. Here was the garden I had envisioned, the sweet little plot that would grow with my kids, teaching them to nurture the flower and fruit that bind us to the nonhuman world. Here they would learn the ethic of care that is the highest mark of a moral person; here they would practice techniques of sustainability that would give them healthy food to eat and a harvest basket overflowing with metaphors to live by.

  As I was admiring the garden and contemplating my inspiring success with earth-centered parenting, one of the tomato plants suddenly vanished. I quickly scurried back and forth in front of the slider to make sure of what I was seeing, and then I yanked open the door and sprinted to the garden, leaning over the various fences and pressing my face against the nylon bird netting to get a closer view. In the soil directly beneath the center of one tomato cage, which was still rocking slightly, there was a hole where the plant had stood only a moment before.

  In that moment I did not cry out, like Job, to the unjust heavens to demand explanation for why I was being punished for a crime I did not commit. I did not observe the natural historical evidence before me in search of a scientific understanding of the depredation nature had here wrought. I did not engage in the inimitable brand of breathtaking, blue-streaking profanity for which I have been reviled by some and celebrated by others. Instead, I felt something deep inside me begin to uncoil, some mainspring in the engine of my tolerance for my fellow creatures irreversibly unwinding, the psychic rivets of my identity as a father and an environmentalist popping off as that spring unwound.

  I have only a hazy recollection of what happened next, but Eryn reports that she awoke to see me walking slowly through the house “like a zombie,” wearing only lime-green boxer shorts decorated with orange ladybugs, blaze-orange sound-protection muffs over my ears, and carrying my shotgun. I vaguely recall the muffled sound of Caroline shouting, “Daddy has the fire stick!” as I passed the open door of the girls’ bedroom, but this too remains foggy. I do remember vividly how different the garden looked when sighted down the barrel to the bead, and I recall the feeling of the trigger moving beneath my finger when it popped its furry little head out of the hole where the tomato plant had recently stood.

  It is true that the shot blasted apart the fence on both sides of the garden—creating gaping holes through which other ravenous critters would enter and finish off my children’s third first garden in the days ahead. And it is true that the buckshot perforated the leaves of many plants, which hardly mattered since they were soon eaten by the animals that came in through the fence. It is also true that trying to stop rodents is like trying to dig a hole in the ocean: a bucketful of water closes in where every bucketful is lifted out, forever. And it is very true that no knuckle-dragging human is any match for animals that are so brilliantly adapted to this desert environment. It is further true that the proliferation of these rodents was my own fault—not only because the caloric easy money of the garden drew them in, but also because our presence here created a charmed circle that coyotes hesitated to enter. And it is of course true that gunplay in the garden is not especially consistent with the parental and environmental ethic of care I had hoped the garden would teach my little girls. And it is disconcertingly true that once a pacifist nature lover blows something’s head off with a shotgun, it generates in him a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, which in turn is deeply threatening to the identity said nature lover may have spent a lifetime cultivating. But it is also indisputably true that, when driven far enough, even a father with a firm grip on the ethical steering wheel can rattle off the washboarded road of his own morality and slide into the humbling ditch of hypocrisy.

  Wise Cicero, who wrote that “if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need,” clearly didn’t know about the California ground squirrel, or he would have had a shotgun too. Spermophilus beecheyi is even more remarkable than his little cousin the antelope squirrel, though I did not know that at the time I decapitated him with a fire stick. Almost a foot long, with a tail that can extend another nine inches, often more than two pounds in weight, and a prodigious excavator and vegetarian with a huge appetite, this beautiful monster is a real threat to agricultural enterprises on both the commercial and domestic scale. Females often mate with more than one male, sometimes doing so more than once each season, and may give birth to a dozen or more pups in each litter, a reproductive strategy that keeps them well ahead of hawks and guys with fire sticks. Their digging capabilities are truly impressive. One study found that a single California ground squirrel complex containing only eleven animals consisted of a tunnel system extending more than seven hundred feet, including thirty-three openings, and descending nearly thirty feet below ground.

  The ground squirrel’s tunnels usually protect it from predators other than rattlesnakes, but even here its defenses are daunting. Adult squirrels are actually immune to rattler venom, so when a buzz worm slithers into a tunnel system it is not unusual for a squirrel to harass it, even kicking sand in the snake’s face. And while squirrel pups do not share their parents’ immunity to rattler venom, female squirrels collect sloughed rattlesnake skins, masticate them, and lick the snake-scented saliva onto their pups, thus using smell to trick the rattler into thinking the baby ground squirrels are actually fellow snakes and encouraging the predator to seek elsewhere for its supper. The California ground squirrel is fast, agile, intelligent, and resourceful and has vision as sharp as yours. It protects others of its kind with an unmistakable high-pitched alarm call by which it communicates danger across miles of desert—a piercing, surging, metallic cry that now rings in my ears as the soundtrack to my own defeat as a gardener. Although diurnal like its little cousin the antelope, the California ground squirrel goes into estivation (a period of strategic inactivity) when the weather becomes too hot and goes into true hibernation in the winter—a physiological shutdown so amazingly like suspended animation that the animal’s heartbeat is reduced to a tenth of its normal rate, and it draws a breath only once every few minutes.

  After I learned all this about my neighbor Spermophilus, it seemed clear that, as usual, I was overmatched. He didn’t need to chew through or climb the wire protection around our garden because he could tunnel under from anywhere he pleased and pop up beneath a tomato plant—which, as the literature on ground squirrel crop damage shows, is among his favorite foods. But everything I read suggested that if I didn’t stem this invasion the ground squirrels would overrun the place, undermining the foundation of our house with their tunnels, eating ornamental plants as well as vegetables, spreading fleas that can carry bubonic plague, and perhaps ultimately driving my old pickup to town to buy expensive sour mash with my credit card. They are in fact so destructive to croplands and irrigation systems that it is illegal to release a squirrel that has been livetrapped, and a sense of how far folks will go to try to kill them is suggested by this discouraging remark, which I discovered somewhere in the voluminous antisquirrel literature: “truck-mounted vacuum devices that suck ground squirrels out of their burrows have not demonstrated sufficient efficacy to justify their use.” Still, I made up my mind that if my children were ever to have a first garden I would have to try everything this side of burrow vacuuming.

  Having already become a gun-wielding killer, at first I decided, like Huck Finn, that “I would take up wickedness again” and so resolved to keep blasting away at my scurrilous neighbors. After all, once you’ve crossed the line and become a heartless murderer, what are a few dozen perforated corpses, more or less? But Eryn talked me out of the gunplay, not so much by pointing out its in
compatibility with the environmental values I aspired to inculcate in my daughters, but instead by reminding me that if I was going to walk around heavily armed I wouldn’t be able to drink at the same time—something I prognosticated could become imperative in the battle ahead.

  I began with attempts to livetrap the big ground squirrels, as I had their smaller cousins, but they proved too wily to be snared, and as my traps sat empty, my children’s third first garden was wiped out completely. At this point I could have acknowledged that after three strikes you’re out, but instead I did what my species does best: I chose to believe, foolishly and against all evidence, that nature doesn’t bat last, that I could still somehow win one for the humanoids by knocking it into the bleachers in the bottom of the ninth. Spermophilus had become my white whale. In a weak moment I went online and ordered a case of Wild Bill’s Shure Kill Varmint Hole Fumigating Bombs. I soon prepared a new strategy to defend my children’s garden—which, granted, was now an entirely hypothetical construct—by smoking out my subterranean opponent. On Saturday morning I dressed for the occasion, in boots, long pants, long-sleeved shirt, gloves, hat, safety goggles over my eyes, and bandana over my mouth. Eryn observed that I closely resembled the drunken-looking hillbilly Wild Bill, whose scowling visage appeared on the cylinder of each bomb. Carefully following Bill’s directions, I first located what I felt certain were all the holes to the squirrels’ tunnel system and then began to execute my plan.

  For a moment there was a wonderful rush of excitement, as I sprinted from hole to hole amid swirls of fuchsia smoke, dropping lit canisters into the four burrow entrances I had found. The girls stood at a safe distance with Mom. Hannah gave me a two-thumbs-up sign, while Caroline windmilled her arms enthusiastically, like a swimmer warming up for her next event. There followed an ominous hiatus during which nothing at all seemed to happen. As I stood perched over the squirrel hole nearest the house, I finally looked up to see Hannah and Caroline smiling widely and Eryn pointing at something that was apparently behind me. Lifting my goggles from my eyes to my grimy forehead, I turned slowly around. One, two, three, four . . . eleven columns of fuchsia smoke curled gracefully off into the cobalt-blue desert sky. It was a lovely sight, in an Apocalypse Now sort of way. Thus was it colorfully brought to my attention that the tunnel system had far more escape hatches than I knew of and that this superb ventilation system had prevented my aerial gas attack from being anything more harmful than a fireworks show for the girls, who in fact liked it so much that they made me a lovely thank-you card out of fuchsia-colored construction paper.

  Being averse to using poisons, and having now given up on the trap, gun, and bomb, I had but one weapon remaining in my armory: piss. Relinquishing the treasured idea that a mere human could defeat these squirrels, in my desperation I resorted to an unlikely, indirect form of biological control. The ground squirrel used smell to trick the rattlesnake into believing that Spermophilus pups were not what they seemed. What if I could rip a page from the ground squirrels’ own stinking playbook and make the scurrilous beast think I was his lethal archpredator, the coyote? Having failed in my roles as Mr. McGregor, Elmer Fudd, and Wild Bill, I now prepared to transform myself into Old Man Coyote. And how is this trickster, Canis latrans, known unmistakably to his neighbors in the wild world? By his wicked grin and by the reek of his piss. Having become the first person I know of to mail order a jug of coyote urine, I now possessed both the grin and the pee. And while I tried not to think about just how one would go about collecting a gallon of coyote whiz, I did feel a late surge of hope that my final plan had a chance of working because I was now going with the flow of nature, so to speak, rather than against it. If the crucible of evolution hadn’t taught these squirrels to fear gardeners or smoke bombers, it had certainly taught them to dread the loping death that is Old Man Coyote.

  The problem with my “desert doggie wee-wee plan,” as Eryn unsympathetically taught Caroline to call it, was that in order to test its results, we would have to plant my children’s first garden a fourth time, even as I was now virtually certain that after the time consumed by the Triple Vegpocalypse and its attendant skirmishes, frost would kill the garden if Spermophilus did not. And so the girls and I spent the next Saturday replanting the plot from scratch, of course using the most humiliatingly large bedding plants that a raided college savings account can buy. While I experienced the replanting as a Sisyphean labor, big sister Hannah effortlessly preserved a Jeffersonian equanimity that demonstrated a healthy resilience of which I was incapable. Little Caroline expressed her happiness that the squirrels had eaten such a healthy dinner. “Daddy, vegetables make them strong too!” she said, holding up her tiny arms in a futile attempt at a bicep flex. Once replanted, the garden had yet again to be rearmored and in fact now looked even more unsightly, especially with the addition of the hardware cloth patches I had wired in to cover the large holes blown out by the buckshot. None of this bothered the girls, who “made rainbows” while watering their new plants, after which we put up our tools and went inside to wait for late afternoon, when I would administer the final deterrent in my dwindling arsenal.

  I should admit that as the day wore on I became increasingly nervous about the outcome of my looming experiment and that I drank a fair amount of whiskey in an attempt to knock back my growing uncertainty. Eryn, who is both more sensible and more intelligent than her husband, thought the “desert doggie wee-wee plan” absurd, which seemed inauspicious. I had of course failed in every other attempt, and my poor track record suggested that I was the only creature in my local environment completely ill suited to inhabit it. What could it signify that in my hour of greatest need I had resorted not to the dual consolations of acceptance and prayer but rather to the twin elixirs of bourbon and coyote urine? If I failed in this last and most desperate attempt, I would be forced to admit that I was not only a humiliated gardener, an environmentalist pariah, and an ineffectual father, but also a half-drunk, first-order, second-grade, third-string, fourth-first-garden-planting, gas-, gun-, and pee-toting five-star vigilante.

  By late afternoon I was sufficiently lubricated that I should perhaps have reconsidered my plan to resume work in my children’s fourth first garden, but I knew that the garden would soon be gone without some form of protection, and I still had a spendy Jug O’ Whiz with Spermophilus’s name on it. I drained one last whiskey, fetched my secret weapon, and approached the garden with the jug clenched tightly in my right hand. I climbed up onto the garden’s railroad-tie frame and balanced myself there, slowly wrapping the fingers of my left hand around the jug’s screw-top cap. I paused, taking one last deep breath before cracking the seventh seal.

  I still remember how lovely the girls’ newly planted garden looked in the glow of the low-angle afternoon sun, how the light breeze rippled the leaves of the tomatoes and squash, how moist and fertile the seedbeds seemed, how neat and well tended the plot appeared. I vividly recall feeling that I was witnessing a perfect garden in a perfect moment, though this transcendental epiphany was no doubt intensified by the blush and tingle of the hooch that had by then loosened all my muscles. I remember how lovely that moment felt, how hesitant I was to twist that cap and lose the wonderful feeling that little garden had raised in me. I remember, with a dreamlike sense of distance, an overflowing feeling that, despite the many trials it had presented, this tender plot was a noble monument to my love for my daughters and for the earth. Maybe, I recall thinking, there is some cosmic plan within which this struggle has been an indispensable part of my own journey both as a father and as a gardener. Then I twisted off the lid.

  There can be no word in any human language that even begins to suggest the overpowering, unspeakable stench that exploded from the jug the instant that lid came off. Nothing in human evolutionary biology could have prepared me for this reeking bomb, the first whiff of which instantly flooded my eyes with tears, filled my mouth with a choking metallic tang, and set the whiskey roiling violently in my gut. I felt as
if my body had suddenly become a permeable membrane through which the worst stink in the universe was blowing at gale force, carrying off my flesh as it howled through and reducing me to a shattered pile of smoldering bones. This was not just the urine of who knows how many very angry (and presumably catheterized) coyotes, it was a highly concentrated gallon of the stuff, and it had been stored for who knows how long in this vacuum-sealed container. I now held, at the end of my quivering, hyperextended arm, a vessel of the kind of stench that could make a gagging human hope to be sprayed by a polecat just to cover it up.

  Of course this all happened in a flash, but in the instant that I recoiled from the revolting stink, which blasted out of the jug and attacked my face like a swarm of yellow jackets, I heard that signature metallic chirp of victory ring out from the sagebrush behind me. It was Spermophilus, either laughing at me or warning his kin that a thousand coyotes had just simultaneously taken a huge leak. Spinning my contorted face away from the jug and toward that piercing cry, I suddenly felt my boot sole begin to slip on the edge of the railroad tie atop which I was perched. And it is at this moment that time seemed to slow almost to a stop, and I experienced the next few seconds in that frame-by-frame fashion that the human brain reserves for only the most unimaginable of accidents.