mountains out of molehills
You live in the country out here on the island, you find out the real population is not human (no offense to my Republican friends), it’s an ever expanding group of citizens who live underground (no offense to my artist friends, who burrow and bore (no, not borrow and bare, no offense to my indigent pals) and who seem to be building an entire infrastructure beneath our lawns without bothering to get building permits (no offense to our current commissioner). I’m talking moles. Interstate highways rolling just beneath the surface rhododendron to garden, the little buggers tirelessly tunneling their way from grub to grub. Who the hell knows what they’re doing? And who really cares? At least until they decide to come up for some air. In the morning those beautifully manicured suburban lawns look like small mortars were exploded by Libyan insurgents. Ugly piles of dirt and rock sit atop the weed-and-fed fescue and explode in gravelly shrapnel when the John Deere riders hit them. You better believe this is war.
Moles, at least to me, are like mosquitoes, a plague to be borne, not warred on. In the end the human race will die off and yes, Virginia, there will still be skeeters and there will always be moles. Tell that to my neighbors! They have incredibly complex military strategies plotted out, staged, implemented and studied when they fail. One retired Seattle police sergeant sat in a lawn chair and simply waited with his service revolver. When he heard them surfacing, he undid the safety. When they poked their little pink nose up into his space, ka-boom. Underground crime dropped 50% that year, but it wasn’t long before new recruits tore up his lawn. They’ve tried traps and poison, they’ve stuck dried blackberry cane with one inch thorns poking into their sensitive little feet so they’d bleed to death in the hole, they’ve stuck high pressure hoses into the tunnel, they’ve hooked their muffler exhaust to the exits and revved the engine on old trucks to kill them silently. And the neighbors with noise. They’ve cursed and they’ve stomped, they’ve bought high frequency noise repellants, they’ve tried the power of prayer. Nothing works. They’ve even dumped raw gasoline into the caverns, let the fumes slowly move thru the network, then they’ve set a match to it.
Don’t try this at home! It is extremely dangerous, not only to yourself, but to the neighbors too. The moles, not so much. I think they move quickly along when the odor of gasoline makes the tunnel obnoxious even to them. They probably set up little lawn chairs over by the azaleas and watch when the whole thing detonates. Nothing quite it like it, really, when the sod lifts suddenly from its mooring, and smoke and debris pour out of the mole holes. Probably loosens the soil nicely for further excavations, is what I figure. Probably not so great for the perfectly manicured lawn. At this point, of course, we aren’t thinking rationally, are we?, we’re thinking revenge.
There are lessons here for all of us and I don’t just mean West Point strategic planning. The truth is, when all the assaults have proven futile, when the inordinate time spent is ultimately not worth the goal, when the expense is beyond anything sane, sometimes you just have to learn to co-exist with the varmints you live next to. The moles, I mean…..
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