Sandy: I want you to kill every gopher on the course!
Carl: Check me if I'm wrong Sandy, but if I kill all the
golfers, they're gonna lock me up and throw away the key...
Sandy: Gophers, ya great git! The gophers! The little brown
furry rodents!
Carl: We can do that; we don't even have to have a reason.
- Caddyshack (1980)
My puppy is a vizsla and it turns out that besides low
self-esteem and separation anxiety, one major characteristic of this breed is
that they like to dig. And by dig, I mean using her webbed feet to gouge a
hole deep enough to put her entire upper body inside and then to continue
digging the leading edge of the hole thus making a meandering trench that can
exceed 10 feet in length. We affectionately call it digging to China, even though if you dug directly beneath my front yard through the middle of the planet you would actually end up in Afghanistan.
Thanks to a colony of gophers, my front
yard used to look like a miniature scorched WWI battlefield complete with craters made
by small bombs, and the dirt thrown up around them by the impact. The good news is that since
we got a dog, the gophers that have pretty much taken over the neighborhood,
have moved to greener pastures. The bad news is that now my front yard looks like a
miniature example of a once-pristine mountain somewhere in West Virginia, with great
swaths of brightly blooming oxalis separated by tracks of excavated barren ground gouged out by a strip mining machine the size of an apartment building.
As she digs, the dog more or less fills in the trench behind
her with the dirt excavated from the front. The finished product looks like it
had been plowed with a rototiller operated by a drunken blind man on speed. The
front yard is continually being re-graded and re-planted by the dog who can do
this until her lovely pink nose turns black and she’s snorting and coughing
from the dirt she’s inhaled. Charming.
The other day though, things took a darker turn: she caught something. I’d figured that the
moles inhabiting the front yard had long since all evacuated the area. I may have been wrong. I don’t know if the mole she generously delivered to
my feet was a corpse abandoned months ago by gopher refugees fleeing for their very lives,
or whether the happy puppy had just murdered it. I was not in a mood to conduct
an autopsy.
To be clear, while I am an enthusiastic gardener who enjoys
almost all the flora I have in my yard, I have a rather uncomfortable relationship
with fauna. Bugs are yucky, those tiny ants are demons from hell. When it comes
to anything bigger like gophers, ground squirrels, tree rats and mice, the
sound I make upon encountering such fauna can best be described as that of a
little girl in a lace encrusted gown hosting a tea party for her teddy bears,
who is suddenly interrupted by a pack of ninja warriors silently wielding those sticks
connected by a short chain.
So imagine my reaction when being presented with such a
lovely gift by my enthusiastic dog who only wanted to offer me a token of her
unconditional love. My instinctive theory, formed in an instant of blinding
clarity, is a corollary to the ten-second rule about food dropped on the floor.
Clearly, the quicker I could dispose of this thing, the less likely I was to be infected by yersina pestis.
After using one of the many hopeless
commands to drop it that she apparently understands to mean “let’s play”, I
finally managed to work the prize from between the puppy’s beautiful white
teeth and toss it outside the fence and across the driveway into the deep
ground cover of the unfenced part of the front yard. I may have broken the
sound barrier in my haste to make the yucky dead thing go away.
This heroic action was, of course, followed by a complete
breakdown of all pretense of control, and a very long sentence consisting
mostly of vowels, while compulsively wiping my hands on my pants. At the same time though, the small part of my lizard
brain capable of a more nuanced and reasoned response was slightly proud of my
heroic initial reaction. It makes me confident that should ninjas ever crash my
tea parties, I will save the teddy bears first.
(The first picture is from the cherry tree in my front yard. The second picture is the western redbud in the Water Conservation Garden.)
