All I Can Remember Are the Rats



Three-and-a-half foot pit.

Yeah, sure I’d spent a week in California’s quiet high desert, only a stone’s throw from Mt. Lassen. I’d helped to painstakingly excavate three-and-a-half feet of dirt from an archaeology pit. I’d held in my hand gem-precious artifacts –smooth, cool obsidian points and perfect grinding stones. Awesome to behold.

I’d watched the sky immediately turn from playful white puffs to fearsome kingdom-come storm clouds. I’d listened to birds and bugs zip and buzz across the summer-yellow meadow. I’d discovered that a sage flower is really the sum of its zillion tiny blossoms. The stuff of poetry.

 Yes, I’d heard and seen all of these rare and beautiful things.



There's a rat incisor in my screen!

But now all I can remember are the rats –



common, pervasive, repulsive rats. Carriers of disease. Destroyers of car wiring. Rats skulked around the edges of my life during the week I spent last summer on an archaeology dig in Mapes Cow Camp near Susanville.

Unit #1, where I worked, was a beast, the energizer bunny of archaeology pits. All week it produced fine obsidian pieces, grinding rocks, and nice ranch-era metal, buttons and buckles.

Then weird things happened. Way down in the pit, beyond the turn of the last century, bits of plastic showed up. After some head-scratching, we determined that the plastic had been dragged down there by rats who’d created a little rodent love nest, which was confirmed when we found a yellowed rat tooth. Yuck.

And then, on my final day in Mapes, hot, tired, filthy, ready to head home, my car wouldn’t start, the victim of a rat invasion. Yeah, nice. They’d chewed at the insulation around hoses and wires, and even left behind their mobile nest on a ledge beneath my battery.

Hey, rats, way to ruin my romantic-high-desert-wind-swept-bigger-than-life notion of archaeology.

It's not all glamour out there.

What struck me about that week is that rats have always been among us. They refuse to live quiet, secluded life, but choose to skulk near human populations, making our lives a misery. And we’ve always battled them. We poison them, trap them, chop them in half with shovels, sic dogs on them, and puncture their eardrums with sound waves, but they live on and on and on nerve-damaged and deaf.

Why don’t more pleasant species, like butterflies or the polar bear, have the survival skills of these vermin? Why indeed. Read on.

 Rat facts that will make your lip curl in disgust:

·         They’re, of course, responsible for the plague and a number of deadly fevers.

·        They’ll eat grain, macaroni, pizza, scrambled eggs and their own feces for nutrition. Yes, their own feces!

·        They can survive a flush down the toilet and three days treading water.

·        They reproduce like the Brady Bunch and can pop out 2,000 rats each year.

Why, as a society, we’ve tried to make peace with rats by making them loveable is beyond me.

·         Mickey Mouse will slap you with a lawsuit if you as much as appliqué his image on a kitchen hand towel.

·         3 Blind Mice just play on our sympathy.

·         Tom and Jerry’s chases, poisonings, and head slams are adorable.

There’s really not a moral in here somewhere. Being sneaky and destructive pays, just look at Wall Street. Eeekk!