Mole Worlds
Earthworks are the best sign of mole presence. In urban places, moles usually surface in lawns, where their dotted tracks are difficult to spot, and even experienced trackers rarely find mole scats. This is a cross-section of a typical mole’s tunnel system. Mole runways can be close to the surface, leaving raised ridges or soft ground, while pocket-gopher tunnels are not visible. The molehill is rounded when viewed from above, and the exit hole is usually indistinct (though you can find it if you dig around with your hand). Pocket-gopher hills are more crescent- or heart-shaped.
As with most perceived pests, moles are with us because we create a perfect place for them. The soil around our homes and parks is soft, free of big rocks, and, in the case of gardens, nutrient-rich, with layers of mulch and compost that encourage the insects and grubs that moles love. Overall, a mole in a garden is far more beneficial than harmful. As insectivores, moles eat insects and their larvae; devour slugs, cutworms, and white grubs; and sometimes even prevent harmful insect outbreaks. The molehills and tunnels we see are just the surface of mole activity; beneath our beloved grass and flowers, they work in the depths, turning, tilling, aerating, and fertilizing the soil.
In the great majority of cases, the perceived damage by moles is just visual—molehills in the grass. These are distressing, to be sure. We strive to make something perfect or, if not perfect, then at least how we want it, and then a mole comes and digs it up, damaging our lawns and unsettling our psyches. A friend of mine, gardener and writer David Laskin, put it well: “Moles are punishment for the hubris of gardening.”
Even so. Our crazed response to the presence of molehills could be perceived as disproportionate. Simple initial efforts to eradicate moles become obsessions, and efforts escalate from traps and poison to propane and sometimes even dynamite. Gardeners lie awake, figuring, plotting. All to kill a small handful of mole. All to make the garden fit into a preconceived sense of the beautiful, to keep it just how we made it. It’s only a seven-inch mammal, really, the mole. And the damage? The proverbial molehill. But let’s give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Surely something more is going on, more than just molehills—something deep-rooted, maybe, prerational, primordial.
Not long before dying of tuberculosis, Franz Kafka produced a masterful story fragment, “Der Bau,” or “The Burrow,” in which a molelike creature exists within a maze of tunnels and is menaced by the scratching, unseen presence of another animal. The creature attempts to create a sense of calm safety for himself by tending to his burrow, but he cannot escape his agitation over the unknown presence, and it is in fact this very unknown-ness that causes his anxiety. The mole creature spins downward in a spiral of self-doubt, fear, and a kind of horrified resignation. The whole treatise is one long, growing scream, and when I read it, all I can think is Oh God, poor Kafka, as it presents such an undisguised window into the writer’s brilliant, manic-depressive mind.
I’ve had a personal entrée into the horror of “Der Bau.” In the summer, and often into the fall, if weather permits, my family and I sleep outside in a tent with a screen ceiling. It is near autumn as I write, and last night at about two in the morning, unable to sleep, I was startled by a scratching, clawing sound coming from beneath my pillow. I had been so cozy—ear upon flannel, sky overhead, nestled in the plaid weight of my big sleeping bag—that I hadn’t even minded my insomnia. But this was unsettling. I thought at first it was Tom or Claire snoring, or perhaps I was fidgeting, and the vinyl air mattress was moving a little in response, making frictiony sounds against the tent floor. But no—we were all perfectly still. I recalled that earlier in the week I’d been tidying up in the tent and had stepped on a worrisome lump of something under the fabric floor. Had a squirrel or young opossum ventured beneath the tent and suffocated there? I’d explored further with the underside of my bare foot until I felt safe peeking under the tent to confirm my suspicion—a molehill. Of course. And in the middle of that dark morning, I began to realize—under my pillow, right under my ear, a mole was digging. “Tom!” I shook him. “A mole! Listen!” Tom sleeps like a dog, and I could barely wake him, but I dragged his ear over to my pillow. “I ’on’t hear nuffin.” He rolled back to his own side (and claimed to remember nothing the next morning). I stayed awake, listening with a mixture of happiness and dis-ease to my mole. I mean, on the one hand—what were the chances? It had the entire yard, the entire world, and yet, this mole was exactly beneath my pillow. How wonderful, and how rare. But the mole was unexpectedly loud. And the sound wouldn’t stop. Eventually I was sleepy, and pounded on the earth. The mole desisted for about four seconds before carrying on. I was mole-scritched to sleep, and woke with more sympathy than ever for Kafka’s harrowed creature.*
I cannot discover that Kafka had anything but metaphorical experience with moles, but “The Burrow” intricately mimics the almost crazed anxiety moles incite in suburban, grass-laying humans. Look, just look what can happen. Here is our sweet garden, the garden we created, cultivated, tended, the garden in which we find beauty, refuge, rest. And now a mole has turned up—unwelcome, unpredicted, and uneradicable. It is the hidden, unseen thing. The thing beyond our ken, yet still scratching at the surface. The thing that is coming or not coming. It is the weather, the fault line, the economy, the illness, the mental depression that tosses us into an abyss we didn’t even know existed. It lives in the dark, in our dark, but can corrupt the light. It is that which we cannot control.
And we can’t. When we remove or kill an urban-wild animal, we are often just opening up space for a different one of the same species, and this is especially true of moles. Mole territory is little understood by the typical gardener; it is generally believed that when there are lots of molehills in the yard, there are also lots of moles. But moles are both territorial and solitary. They space themselves nicely. During breeding season, males and females will briefly associate, then part quickly after an unromantic copulation. After a forty-two-day gestation, the young are born, and females will stay in small family groups with their three, four, or five tiny mole pups, caring for them for a couple of months before the young disperse to solitary adult lives. But a typical suburban lot is populated, tunneled, and mounded by just one male mole, or perhaps by two females (females are a bit less fussy about slight territory overlap with another of their own sex). When a mole dies, or simply leaves our yard, it is likely that another mole will come. Unless we want to live vigilant, outlaw, mole-killing lives forever, we might as well just keep the mole we have.
Human psychological distress over mole presence has spawned a vast, imaginative, fantastical, and ineffectual mole-control arsenal. We clutter our lawns with feeble plastic windmills. We fumigate mole tunnels with chemical gas cartridges and aluminum phosphide. We bait moles with strychnine and chlorophacinone pellets. We try to frighten moles with electric, magnetic, and vibrational devices. We stuff mole holes and tunnels with razor blades and broken glass. We stand guard over heavy metal bayonet traps, harpoon traps, choker traps, cinch traps, and scissor traps. We broadcast cougar urine or castor-oil repellent over our entire lawn. We hover over mole tunnels with propane torches or pitchforks, ready to strike. Mole biologists caution us: few of these methods are effective, and the official line regarding mole eradication is “generally not practical.” But many swear by their personal anti-mole methods (my literary agent deploys an underground torpedo-shaped device that emits a constant high-pitched signal, believed to annoy moles). I would not argue. But here is what the experts say: Moles regularly come and go; they shift territories, or just tunnel in different areas, from week to week or month to month. The lack of mole activity in a place where there were recently fresh mounds allows mole eradicators to rejoice in the illusion that their mole-elimination method has been successful, when in fact there has just been a coincidental confluence of attempted pest control and a mole’s moving on, producing a kind of mole-deterrent false correlation. And the methods that truly do seem to work (the m
edieval traps, for example, really will bring forth dead moles) only create space for another mole to set up mole life. And after that mole? Another mole still.
The one method I know of that works indisputably is a drastic horizontal structural barrier recommended by my father, Jerry, who, in a successful sequel to the Great Wall of Mole episode, restored the small cemetery at St. Placid Priory, the women’s Benedictine monastery where I often go to think and to write. (At about the same time my tireless dad moved to a fifty-five-plus community with a tiny yard, I saw a sign posted at the priory saying the sisters needed a volunteer to do grounds maintenance, and I knew it was a match made in heaven—so to speak.) Jerry removed every gravestone, leveled the entire cemetery, covered each grave with several inches of crushed, tamped gravel and a layer of metal hardware cloth, spread just enough soil over the whole thing to anchor sod, then laid the sod and replaced the gravestones. This is a sort of lateral version of the Great Wall of Mole, and it really seems to work. After two years, the sisters’ graves are un-moled, though of course the grassy rows between graves, where there is no buried metal fencing, have been discovered by a mole.
But the very best mole control also happens to be the best method for our neighborhoods, for our wild cohabitants, for our psyches: How about letting the ecological wasteland of urban/suburban lawns die a slow, or even a quick, natural death? Across the country, there is a movement to replace lawns with food gardens, native plants, or, in the permaculture movement, a mixture of both. When a molehill appears in a more natural landscape, it is both less noticeable and an indication that the soil is rich, and soft, and all things good—a sign that a wild animal sees fit to grace your yard with its odd, invisible, uncontrollable presence. What if a typical response to fresh mole evidence was not a sinking stomach and a crazed gnashing of teeth? What if it was a beatific Mona Lisa smile that intimated something like Oh, look what that silly mole did now? If we don’t like where the hills are, we can tamp them down a little, remove the soil, or spread it with a garden rake; new grass will grow with the spring rain. We might delight in our newfound tolerance—moles are singular creatures from a subterranean world that surface unseen in our yards. A punishment for the hubris of gardening? Well, a reminder, maybe. That when we move and till and beautify the soil, we must do it by working alongside wild nature, not by overriding it. That any other approach is misguided and might also make us insane.
Pocket Gophers, Real and Imagined
Gopher has become the colloquial catchall name for over a hundred species of ground-dwelling or burrowing rodents and rodentlike creatures, most of which are not actually gophers but ground squirrels, moles, and even prairie dogs. True pocket gophers are small, burrowing rodents with extensive tunnel systems; there are about thirty-five species in North America (give or take—taxonomists argue about the number of species and subspecies). They are named for their stretchy fur-lined cheeks, which they use to carry collected plant foods to their larder hoard. Pocket gophers have yellow incisors that are always visible, even when their mouths are closed; like most fossorial mammals, they have small eyes and poor eyesight. Their tails are short and furless but highly innervated and sensitive, to help the gophers navigate when walking backward through their tunnels. The fur is a shade of brown, somewhere between dirty gray and almost black, usually matching the soil where the gopher lives. Most pocket-gopher species are hand-size, between six and twelve inches long. As with moles, gophers themselves are rarely seen; we see the mounded signs of their presence, the hills of soil created when they press to the surface. Gophers are known for their agricultural damage, but they can do garden damage on an urban/suburban scale as well, consuming and uprooting cherished plants (moles eat mostly invertebrates, but pocket gophers eat only vegetation). Gopher prevention and elimination is a dubious undertaking. In small-scale urban gardens, favorite trees and shrubs can be protected by a mesh barrier buried eighteen inches around the plant. Because the gophers’ damage is visible and the benefits they provide are not, the good that gophers (like moles) can accomplish is typically given little consideration. A single pocket gopher can move more than a ton of earth to the surface every year, an exchange of wastes and plant material that creates soft, aerated, nutrient-rich soil—gophers basically do our double-digging for us. Amphibians like salamanders and toads, whose populations are plummeting, find refuge in the cool, moist burrows that are abandoned by the gophers.
I happen to be working on this chapter at the priory. It rained yesterday, and along the trails on the monastery grounds, I have found a dozen fresh mole-made heaps of soil. He was busy last night, happy, as far as mole happiness can be determined, with the soil’s malleability after a long and rainless month. The mole’s dependence on the soil, its life within the earth, is absolute. And so, I realize in contemplating these soft earthen mounds, is my own. Gratefully, I do not live a tunneling existence, but I am no less dependent on the health, the flourishing, the life within this soil than the mole. The Rule of Benedict, penned in the sixth century and grounding the life in this monastery, emphasizes a sense of positive humility in our everyday lives. The word humility is intricate. Humility, rooted in the Latin word humus—soil, land, the turning Earth itself. Remembering humility, we remember our creatureliness, our lovely dual nature as humans, who live in culture but remain rooted in the soil, indigenous and at home in the lively wildness of biological life. In humility, we enter this essential condition, this earthen grace.
Turning to the mole for guidance on how to live our human lives may seem too far a stretch, but in a Romanian creation myth, even God seeks counsel and assistance from the soil-dwelling creature and its quiet, mole-ish ways. In the story, God has made the heavens and is using a wondrous thread to measure the space that will hold the Earth. Mole offers to help, and God hands him one end of the thread and asks him to let the thread out as needed, as if God were a great kite. God goes about the creation of the Earth, weaving its patterns with the shimmering thread. But as God weaves, Mole is distracted by the beauty of the unfolding Earth and lets out too much thread; the Earth becomes too large for its space. Embarrassed and afraid, Mole hides beneath the soft new soil. God needs to mend the oversize Earth and desires to consult Mole about the best way to go about it. Mole, ashamed and abashed before God, will not come out, so God sends a friendly, unintimidating bee to speak with Mole directly. Still, Mole will not come out. The bee, clever in her own right, pretends to go about her business, gathering pollen from nearby flowers, and as she works, she overhears Mole grumbling to himself. “If I were God, I would squeeze the Earth. Mountains and valleys would form, and the Earth would be smaller, just the right size.” Bee flies straight to God and reports Mole’s musing advice, which God takes immediately. With the help of Mole, the Earth is formed in perfection and beauty.
St. Placid Priory sits on a peaceful, forested property, but over the years, the surrounding area has fallen prey to urban sprawl—lot after lot of architecturally barren chain stores surrounded by endless expanses of asphalt parking lots. I passed one such stretch on a walk this week and noticed that at the edge of the parking-lot asphalt, some pleasant, imaginative people had decided to install a little park. It was a simple thirty-foot-square patch of grass with a bench. The grass, surrounded on all sides by asphalt as far as the eye could see, was decorated by nicely spaced molehills. Because the grass was so fresh and green and new and otherwise perfect, the molehills stood out like crazy and made me laugh. They must have made the grass-park people furious! But I wondered: How did that mole get there? How far did she have to tunnel, and for how long, attempting to surface—how many times?—and hitting her soft mole nose against deep hard inches of asphalt? Yes, yes, I know. I’m a Seattle eco-hippie mole-hugger. But still. Humans may cover the Earth with asphalt, but all of us, human and wild, man and mole, are just looking for a place to dwell, to rest, and occasionally to surface in the soft green.
Raccoon
Tracking Ourselves
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sp; One night some years ago, raccoons climbed our fence and killed our flock of four backyard chickens. Or mostly killed them. I remember looking out the window in my big fleece robe the next morning and seeing Tom standing in the run surrounded by feathers and holding a sledgehammer, his tool of choice for finishing off the not quite dead. Forlorn, we buried our dear hens, shed our tears, and left on the camping trip we’d previously planned. After Claire was tucked into her tent-nest for the night, three raccoons appeared at the edge of our campsite, standing up, balanced on their haunches in that cute raccoon way. Normally, I would have been keen to watch them, maybe waking Claire up to have a look. But this night? I threw rocks.
That same summer, raccoons popped Claire’s inflatable swimming pool. I loved that pool, which was small enough to inflate with a bicycle pump but big enough for a whole mom to stretch out. I am sure the raccoons played in the pool before destroying it, as there were muddy tracks everywhere and striped fur in the water puddles left in the heaps of torn plastic. My friend Sheila told me that she saw a huge raccoon floating on its back in her kids’ pool. (I love the image—like an overweight, hairy-chested tourist in his condo pool at Waikiki.) After going through two pools in this way, we switched to a slip-and-slide for water play, and we brought it in at night for good measure. The first (and last) time we forgot to take it inside, we came out the next morning to find an expanse of yellow sliced to ribbons, clumps of telltale striped fur clinging to the wet plastic. How did the slip-and-slide get torn from one end to the other if the raccoons hadn’t been sliding on it?
Human-wild interactions are often ambiguous, but more than most wild animals, raccoons draw us into a profound, almost willful misunderstanding that seems to be based on entrenched oversimplifications running in opposite directions. For many, the raccoons’ primary defining characteristic is their cuteness. Furry, black-nosed, stripe-tailed, inky-eyed, doing the most astonishing things with those busy little paw-hands. Standing up on their hind feet, sometimes right there at the back door, asking for food just like our dogs at the dinner table. Slumping around with that loping walk, mother raccoons turning up in the summer with tiny versions of themselves, little hairs sticking out straight. And masked. Masked with vertical black and white stripes down the middle of their foreheads that make them look a wee bit anxious, as if they can’t quite think up the next bad thing to do but have to get to it right away.
The Urban Bestiary Page 6