The Squirrels

Squirrels were an easy animal to take for granted; to ignore as background noise on a flippant  summer afternoon amid the billowing shades of the mighty elms in my Minneapolis boyhood front yard. Yet now that I have pulled up stakes to live among the boulders and cacti of Utah, I find I miss their constant chit chat among the branches. I have to settle for an occasional horned toad, silently blinking at me in an impertinent manner before scuttling away.  

They made fine targets for my slingshot -- but I hasten to add that I never got close to hitting one, or even nicking the branch it was squatting on. Slingshots, like pocket knifes and BB guns, were great status symbols for a boy to possess -- ownership of such deadly devices gave a boy a certain cachet, an aura of danger and excitement. Which is why, I suppose, my right to carry a slingshot was constantly revoked by my mother for the least little thing. After all, who needs perfectly solid windows -- what’s wrong with a few obscure ventilation holes in ‘em? I saved up for a pearl handled pocket knife, and when I finally got it I immediately began carving my initials into every available surface. This was alright for tree trunks, fence posts, and telephone poles,but when my mother caught me hefting my pocket knife while looking thoughtfully at baby Linda asleep in her crib, she assumed the worst and confiscated said knife -- which disappeared into the Forbidden Drawer; the kitchen drawer where matches, lighter fluid, and Victor mousetraps, among other things, were kept. The drawer had no alarm rigged up to it, as far as I could tell, but whenever I happened to pull it open my mother would yell from wherever she was inside or outside the house: “Shut that drawer, young man, this instant!”  Which is why I’m pretty sure to this day she had some gypsy blood in her that caused such devilish second sight.

I began to take notice of the squirrels, the rotten gray squirrels, when I planted my first garden at the age of seven. We had a sclerotic swingset in the backyard, fully oxidized into rust, that finally collapsed of its own decrepitude, and I begged mom for the chance to dig up the spot for a pumpkin patch. Seeing no possible way I could turn such an innocent pastime into a melodramatic farce, she acquiesced. And it was a stellar year for my pumpkins; the Jack-o-Lantern seeds I planted sprouted with unabated vigor and took over nearly half of the backyard before the frost began nipping them back in October. Rubbing my hands together like a stage miser, I gloated over the fortune soon to be mine when I went door to door selling pumpkins for Halloween. But when I began harvesting them I noticed that nearly all had a puckered nick or two on their undersides -- the result of squirrels taking an exploratory bite. These blemishes cut into my profits at a murderous rate.  

The next year I steered clear of pumpkins and planted tomatoes. Once again, the crummy squirrels just had to take a single bite out of each green fruit, causing them to shrivel up and fall off prematurely. My third year as a gardener I planted sweet corn, and declared war on those dastardly tree rats. I had read that dog poop spread around a garden would discourage marauding squirrels. Since my best friend Wayne Matsuura had a Boston terrier, there was no problem in getting a sackful of doggie dust. But the squirrels seemed to revel in it -- they clambered up my corn stalks and began chewing on the tender green corn like nobody’s business.  Old Benny, down the street, told me that a dead squirrel trussed up over the garden would keep the critters out. He just happened to have a few dead squirrels in his garage at the moment (how he got them and what he did with them I decided were things I didn’t want to find out) and offered me a prime carcass. Any corpse in a storm, I say -- so I took the cadaver home and strung it up amidst my defenceless corn. The depredations stopped, by golly, but as the squirrel decomposed it attracted a convention of huge black flies that buzzed around the back yard like dive bombers -- landing on my mom when she wanted to sunbathe and inviting themselves right onto our hotdogs when we grilled. So my older brother Billy cut down the dead squirrel to toss in the garbage, and immediately its live cousins were back -- with sharper teeth and appetite than before. I did not harvest a single ear of sweet corn that year.

I gave up my horticultural dreams after that. But when my mom put in a bird feeder on a metal pole near the kitchen window I became enamored with identifying all the many different types of birds that showed up for the free eats -- blue jays, cardinals, grackles, robins, juncos, and sparrows. But then those pesky squirrels had to get in on the act! They climbed up the metal pole to raid the bird feeder several times a day. This was an out and out act of criminal theft, and I determined to stop it. In our garage was a discarded pan of ancient black crankcase oil. Into this I mixed a can of cayenne pepper. Then I coated the bird feeder pole with the deadly oil. I must say I enjoyed the sight of those fat pompous squirrels shinnying halfway up the pipe and then dropping to the ground to roll around in discomfort. Round One for Timmy!

Being of an unforgiving and unforgetting nature, I carried on my warfare against the squirrels to even more determined, and whimsical, levels. Years later, when I was with the circus and came home for the Holidays, my dad got a big bag of walnuts still in their shells. He had no use for them (since the only thing he ever cracked was his knuckles) so I was able to abstract the whole bag for my nefarious anti-squirrel plan. In our backyard we had a majestic willow tree. I taped walnuts to the very tips of several very pliable willow branches -- then sat back to watch the fun. First the squirrels tried jumping up to reach the walnuts -- and I was infinitely surprised at how high they could jump. They got most of that first crop I put out. So I taped a second batch of walnuts to the ends of willow branches that were higher up. And now the squirrels were at a standstill. Ha-ha! They tried crawling out to the tip of the willow branch, but the thin yellow branches would not support their weight -- and off they would fall deep into the snow. Maddened by the nearness of this holiday feast, the squirrels just kept trying -- and kept falling, twisting in midair in the most comical manner as they plunged into the snow drifts. I was really enjoying myself at the kitchen window, watching this spectacle. Then the phone range. Back before there were cell phones, the landline phone was usually installed in the kitchen. When I answered it turned out to be my old circus pal Tim Holst, calling from balmy Florida to see how the Holidays were treating me. I told him things were fine, in fact great. I was watching the squirrels falling out of the willow tree trying to get at the walnuts. After a pause, Holst asked:

“What’s that about walnuts and squirrels in your willow tree?”

“I tape a bunch of walnuts to the ends of the willow branches so I can watch the squirrels fall out of the tree -- I been doing it for the past couple of mornings. It’s a lot of fun!”

“Tork, I thought you said you were gonna go ice fishing or sledding or something. Did you get frostbite of the brain or something? Whaddya mean you tape walnuts to your willow tree?

“It’s true! They crawl out to try and grab the nuts but the branches are way too thin, see?”

“Uh-huh. You think I’m gonna believe that?”

“Just a minute, you doubting Holst! I’ll get mom to tell ya!”

I yelled for mom to come to the phone to tell Tim Holst about the walnuts taped to the willow tree.

“Oh, hang up that phone and go out to shovel the walk!” she yelled back at me. Mothers are such unhelpful creatures at times.  

For the rest of his life, whenever we ran into each other at odd intervals, Holst greeted me with “Well, well -- if it isn’t old Walnuts in the Willows himself!” I never could think of a good comeback for that.