So every day Kris Brown and his team get in their white trucks, some with big trailers full of gardening equipment attached to the back, and head out to some tony neighborhoods that have unwanted guests. The suburban sprawl has altered the natural food chain in the desert. He points to all the lawns as we drive to a job. “People get rid of the rattlesnakes. People use poison. The owls die and go away. There’s not as many owls. So, the pack rat population can kind of get out of control. And so you kind of reach a critical mass where someone has to do something. They’re damaging everything. They’re everywhere. And a lot of times, that’s when people call us. They’ve just reached their critical mass. We’ll go to a job here where there’s thirty-four nests to an acre. That’s not natural.”
There were actually thirty-five traps at that job. It was a beautiful house, situated in the foothills. When you looked up it was all blue sky and red rocks. When you looked down it was all pack rat nests and cactus. The nests look almost like beaver dams of sticks, plant debris, and cactus. Kris’s son and his helper have already sweated through their shirts after a morning of using pole saws to whack through prickly pears in order to excavate the homes nestled underneath the cacti. It was 103 degrees by noon.
The reason the nests have to be destroyed is because trapping the animal alone does little good. If a pack rat is merely evicted, another will readily move right in, start decorating, and continue building. Kris has even seen live animals living with pack rat skeletons in some of the really big dens. Pack rat homes usually have little nests with chambers: one for food, and one for sleeping where you might find cushion stuffing taken from some unsuspecting patio furniture. Kris has pictures of one site where a pack rat took an entire mop to make a nice bed for itself.
As promised, the nests reveal all kind of weird treasures. In one morning we found an Oreo cookie wrapper, a packet of Sour Patch candy, a piece of Styrofoam coffee cup, and a small white ball, possibly from a pool filter. Sometimes a client asks Kris and his crew to keep an eye out for some specific thing that has gone missing, maybe car keys or dog tags. “I made a hundred dollars once!” Matt remembers. He was offered the reward to find an arrowhead that had gone missing from the man’s patio. His father had given it to him as a boy so it had great sentimental value. Matt went to work. Sure enough, there was a pack rat nest fifteen feet away. Matt removed the nest, carefully sifted through all the debris, found the arrowhead, and collected the C-note.
Kris goes from cage to cage looking for critters. Sometimes there are two little eyes looking up at him. Sometimes there are four feet in the air because the pack rat has died from the heat—but never from poison. Kris does not use poison because it will further corrupt the natural food chain. A rat dead from poison means an owl will soon be dead. The other reason is because pack rats often don’t even like to eat the colorful poison—believe or not, they just collect it, like anything else. Kris has found nests full of the stuff. So the rats are either really stupid or really smart. The big problem is if the pack rat takes the poison but he doesn’t make it to the nest with his noxious booty, which happens a lot. “A client called us because her dog ate some of the poison. Big vet bill. The neighbor was using the poison. And the rat would go over and poison his food and collect all this. And sometimes he’d get distracted and drop a piece, which then the dog found.”
Kris uses a simple mixture of oatmeal and peanut butter to lure the pack rats into the cages. The little guys who are caught will be euthanatized and then frozen. Kris donates the rodents to a local avian shelter for wounded owls that are unable to hunt. While at first it seems kind of cruel that these furry folks meet their maker in a toolbox fashioned into a homemade gas chamber, it could be seen as a course correction. Humans have gotten in the way of the natural cycle of prey and predator, so Mr. Pack Rat helps put it back on track.
Prevention is key to keeping pack rats from invading your space. You can’t repel them. They aren’t afraid of much. The best way to not get pack rats is not to be a pack rat. Kris chuckles at the thought. “Just the irony of people that collect junk get animals that collect junk because they create an environment.” That’s right—a patio with stuff on it, an old grill, a shed with stuff in it all look like big FOR RENT signs to these little hoarders. Kris shows me photos of a home where he did an extraction. “This is a person that is creating a problem. They put a sofa on the back porch. And, well . . .” The next photo shows a pack rat nest underneath the couch, cushion material pulled out with a stash of orange rinds and tin foil. In another case, someone who left an unattended BBQ grill slightly open returned to find it overflowing with mesquite beans, hundreds of crescent-shaped pods. The pack rat had turned it into its own bulk supply store.
Pack rats aren’t dangerous themselves. They can attract some unwanted guests, though. The kissing bug is a common parasite that enjoys a pack rat, and the bug’s bite is very dangerous for 2 to 4 percent of the population. Also, rattlesnakes are attracted by pack rats. But mostly they just annoy people.
So Mr. Pack Rat’s calendar is full. He is always busy, because at this point the rats aren’t going anywhere and people aren’t going anywhere. “Pack rats are native American rats. And they’re wild animals. They are not commensal rodents. But they’ll take advantage of anything we give them. But they don’t need us to survive. They survive just fine on their own. But we’ve moved into their territory, and what pack rats need more than anything, because everything in the world wants to eat them, is shelter and protection. So, they build these sometimes elaborate nests. . . . And part of their survival is they reuse those same nest sites generation after generation.”21 The fact that Neotoma albigula have been around for tens of thousands of years has helped members of the scientific community in an unusual way.
Kate Rylander is a biological technician and paleobotanist with the US Geological Survey, the USGS, in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m working on Nine Mile Canyon, which is a project up in Utah, where we’re trying to figure out the last fifty thousand years of vegetation change.” She is a bubbly blonde with a soft, high voice who gets very excited about a hardened piece of a pack rat nest, part of what’s called a midden. Midden means, quite literally, garbage pile, and it is the term used to describe the pack rat dens lodged in crevices and all the matter around it. As she shows me around her lab, there’s a lot to be found in a nondescript beige trailer.
“It doesn’t take much to do science. All that you really need is a microscope and a question.” And the questions for Kate and her peers are What is in the nest? and When was it put there? What looks like a bunch of sticks or a piece of hardened mud to a civilian eye is a trove of information for scientists like Kate who spend hours examining the material through a space-age microscope. She rolls her desk stool from station to station to stare at slides with tiny portions of what some pack rat packed away thousands of years ago. “I start identifying it. You’re learning what kind of botanical material is collected. It also has pieces of bones, perhaps from the rat itself, families that have lived before. Sometimes, it even contains archaeological material. It contains insect material from anything that flew in and got stuck in the midden while it was being made. And then we do all the analysis and we come up with an idea of what this particular sample looked like. We take the material out, and we date it for radiocarbon dating.” Because pack rats don’t venture farther than three hundred feet from their homes, the matter inside is from the immediate area. That is how the middens give scientists a proxy record of the time about specific material found at a specific site.
Kate loves to teach schoolchildren about it. One part of her lesson about how middens survive for thousands of years almost always results in a room full of gigglers because it involves a certain bodily function. “What happened is, the rat went into the cave, collected lots of food for itself, nesting materials. It climbed up into a crevice, made that area really nice, and then started peeing on it, as animals would. Because the pee is of a quality that allows it to preserve t
he botanical materials, he pees on it over time and eventually leaves. It takes on a very hard and rocklike appearance, but it’s preserved like that in caves and crevices all throughout the southwest, South America, and so on, for thousands and thousands of years.”
I am like one of her students, minus the giggles, and my interview with her has turned into a field trip to her lab. Kate has a microscope, a petri dish, and some tweezers all set up for me. She urges me to look through the instrument even though I’m not sure what I’m looking at or looking for on the slide. She wants me to see what she sees and why it gets her so excited. “So, what you’re looking at is about three thousand yeas old.” That is pretty cool. Still, the sample looks like tiny twigs and leaves floating on the bright white backdrop. Each one is a little bit different from the next. The pieces of debris are small even with the powerful microscope. “I’ve done it, like, seven-x power, but it goes all the way up to seventy-five power—seventy-five times the image that you’re seeing. I’ve got everything from Juniperus osteosperma, which is a particular kind of juniper tree, to the Pinus edulis or the pinyon, to saltbush, which is Atriplex. Also, it’s a cactus. Now, that’s a pinyon needle.” Once she shows me what each individual piece is she hands me a small, pointed wooden stick and tells me to start sorting. It is wild to pick and choose pieces of ancient plant life from thousands of years ago. While it is a forensic mission for scientists, to me it isn’t that far off from rummaging through that three-hundred-mile-long yard sale looking for a great discovery.
For scientists the purpose of sorting any one of the thousands of samples in Kate’s lab is to be a detective. Many times they are trying to find out why a certain species disappeared over time. Kate gave me this sample for a reason. “We have this particular kind of juniper, but I also have three other kinds of juniper. But today, in the area, there’s only one kind. Why did the other three disappear? So, you’ll want to know, OK, so where did Juniperus scopulorum go, say, in a particular midden series? It likes usually a little bit cooler, moister area. So, it’s not there today. What could that mean?”
Kate and like-minded scientists from both private industry and from funded labs believe these middens can help provide some clarity about shifts in climate.22 One of the scientists in this camp, ecologist Dr. Kenneth Cole, suggests that “plants responded rapidly to climate change if they were able to move uphill, but plants migrating northward took up to ten thousand years to adapt,” and “the rate of warming now is very similar to what it was then. What we see happening in the middens is happening to the world.”23
At this remote and quiet USGS facility Kate takes me to a temperature-controlled room where there are industrial shelves full of plastic bins that in turn are full of plastic-bagged samples from middens all over the country. There are samples from Sheep Creek Canyon in Wyoming, Cottonwood Canyon in Utah, and Rhodes Canyon in New Mexico. Many samples were collected by Julio Betancourt, a leading expert in the field, and his colleague Tom Van Devender, who also collected samples housed at this lab. And collected means these researchers climbed up onto the rock faces to find and remove these middens. Now experts, like Kate, painstakingly work through the samples, cataloging, comparing, and analyzing the data. “You’ll be able to take the materials that you see in these middens and do the analysis, find out what’s in these middens, and perhaps say something about the future based on what you saw in the past.”
The more you learn about pack rats, the easier it becomes to draw parallels between their actions and those of humans who also like to bring home shiny things. While there is limited funding for work like Kate’s, it is probably impossible to earn a grant to study the relationship between Neotoma species and the Homo sapiens species—though it could be worthwhile. Rats are consistently used in scientific experiments related to human beings because they are biologically and behaviorally similar. As one scientist from the National Institute for Health said, “Rats and mice are mammals that share many processes with humans and are appropriate for use to answer many research questions.”24 Is it fair to compare a person with a clutter problem to a rodent? It is tempting: A pack rat picks up random things it likes, stores them for no other reason, builds a bigger home over time for its things, and will continue to do this in its home or anyplace it calls its home. How different is that from someone with a storage unit full of Beanie Babies? Are we like pack rats, adapting to our new environment that allows us to buy more and store more? Is someone who buys a case of pasta from a big box store all that different from the pack rat that crams mesquite beans into an open car trunk? Is there a similarity between a pack rat bringing dangerous poison into its nest and the hoarder who continues to fill an already dangerously packed house?
I asked three different experts if “pack rat” is an apt description of someone who holds on to a lot of stuff. They all said yes. “Sure,” said Kris Brown, Mr. Pack Rat. “They’re hoarders. And just like people, some rats are lazier than other rats, so they may not care.”
3
JUNK AS ART
Q&A WITH VINCE HANNEMANN,
CREATOR OF THE CATHEDRAL OF JUNK
* * *
“An ongoing (and climbable!) backyard sculpture that turns one man’s trash into everyone’s treasure.”
—LONELY PLANET, ON THE CATHEDRAL OF JUNK IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
AT NEARLY THREE STORIES high and an estimated sixty tons, the Cathedral of Junk is a creative, chaotic colossus. Every inch of it is made from interconnected pieces of junk. It’s a three-dimensional collage of found objects. If I listed each item it would fill an entire book. It has the appearance of a funky fort. You can walk in it, wander through it, and climb on it and never have the same experience twice. The cathedral is visual pandemonium, yet it inspires a surprisingly serene scene. While visitors try to take it all in, they tend to speak in whispers if they speak at all. There is an undercurrent of worship going on at this shrine of stuff. Most people just look—up, down, and all around.
The Cathedral of Junk lives in Vince Hannemann’s backyard. He is its creator and keeper. Tall and thin, he wears thick, square black glasses and has brown wavy hair. The rangy, loose-limbed artist has distinct knuckle tattoos reading J-U-N-K on one hand and K-I-N-G on the other. When he holds his fists together and outward, he silently announces who he is.
Hannemann started building the cathedral in 1989 when he was in his mid-twenties. Initially he used objects he found on his own. As the story spread about the guy building a temple of scraps and castoffs, people began to bring material to him. He has told reporters that he once received a chainsaw in the mail and someone even donated a prosthetic leg.
The Cathedral of Junk has become an attraction for the imaginative traveler who wants to experience more in Austin than the Sixth Street music scene or the LBJ Presidential Library. The online reviews from Yelp and Google are revealing.
Amanda, TX
Oh what a magical wonderland that inspires child-like awe & gives a new perspective on our throw away society.
Deb, UT
Who it is “cool” for? Visual Artists. This is ART. Not just a junk heap in a yard. There is a method to the madness, a color theme, vignettes of items that belong together and a juxtaposition of a few that don’t.
John, CT
One of my favorite finds were a giant batch of old action figures from the 90s, which included WWF wrestlers, the original Ninja Turtles, and Trolls. There was also a large shrine dedicated to cats. Also found a couple cool old motorcycles and kept finding old surfboards everywhere. On our way out, we talked to the “Junk King,” who was a relaxed, really cool guy.
Jane, CA
This is a joke. The owner is an asshole and definitely not worth the ten dollar “donation.” So unimpressed with him and his yard full of junk.
Russ, CO
I was so impressed by the Cathedral of Junk that I wandered in a stupor-wonder the whole time I was there. It is impressive. It is arty. It is inspirational. It is unique.
&nbs
p; Karina, Washington DC
This place is a palace of old crap you’d find at the city dump—and that’s not a [totally] bad thing! It’s amazing how everything is held together—concrete, wire, duct tape, who knows what.
David, CA
A placid refuge in a residential neighborhood where the residue of technology and commercial culture is carefully piled into a tranquil and provocative shrine. Once you get by the curmudgeonly owner/artist, breath deep, relax and take it all in.
Paul, TX
This is a neighborhood of single-family homes with children and dogs and we would love it if you would go to Disneyland instead of coming to our neighborhood.
Hannemann claims that at one point he had over 10,000 visitors a year from all over the world, which works out to about 30 visitors a day. If he is even close in that estimation, the narrow residential street where he lives has seen a lot of activity. The cathedral has become in demand as a venue for plays, photo shoots, and even a Bank of America commercial.
When Hannemann started the project, his backyard abutted a field. Now there are houses all around. Some of the residents in the south Austin neighborhood felt overwhelmed by the crowds, and in March 2010 someone filed an official complaint with the city. For seven months it seemed the cathedral might be closed down. An inspector was dispatched to the property to take a look at the tower. The city decided Hannemann needed a building permit, a certificate of occupancy, compliance with setbacks, and to follow standard public assembly code enforcement.
At one point Hannemann became so disgusted with the bureaucracy that he told reporters he was going to just dismantle his work because the rules were changing what the cathedral was. His position raised an interesting question: what is the project? Is it a piece of art? Is it a sculpture? Is it a building? Is it an external expression of one man’s mind?
Junk Page 6