Squirrels in the Attic

It seems like æons ago that I lived in rural New Jersey. It was without question, as the saying goes, a former life — different employer, different house, different spouse. (To distinguish her from The Missus, I will refer to her as The Former Missus.)

Our house was situated next to a dairy farm; our municipality, a couple of centuries old, was called Tewksbury Township. Across the road from us was a big old Victorian, a former farmhouse (although the property by then was too small to do any farming on) which still had a barn in the backyard. In the barn lived a horse and a cow which, as one of our neighbors said, “seemed to be quite sympatico.”

The house itself was what was called an “expanded Cape Cod.” White wooden clapboard siding; black shutters on either side of the windows. Only the first floor was finished, but there was an attic.

An attic in which a complete family of squirrels lived.

I could hear them, you see (yes, as long as I was wearing hearing aids). So could The Former Missus. Where they were most audible was in the corner of the master bedroom where my own dresser stood, and as I was getting ready for work in the morning, or emptying my pockets after returning home, or getting ready for bed — at any time of day, most days, I could hear them:

skritch… skritch skritch… skritch

Yes, any time. The damned things seemed to work in shifts, always chewing whatever it was they were chewing. Insulation. Rafters. Peanut brittle.

I think it bothered me more than it did The Former Missus. But in any case, on one night, on one of her business trips out of town, I determined to do something about it.

I’d been thinking* about the matter, you understand, for weeks. Maybe even months. I had little experience with wildlife, none at all with wildlife control, but even so this seemed a problem which called for the superior firepower of human intellect. After all, I had no traps. I had no weapons. I had no poison. And I wouldn’t have any of those things even if I could have, because, well, of course they’d hurt the poor things. I didn’t want to hurt them. I wanted to make the attic thoroughly unpleasant, enough so that they’d pack their bags and simply leave, by whichever route they’d entered (but never seemed to leave).

(And that was another problem: How had they gotten in? I’d circumnavigated the house with a ladder, checking the attic vents and the eaves. No sign of forced entry or, for that matter, of revolving doors. Maybe they’d always lived up there? They couldn’t be mice; we’d had a pest control company handle any potential mouse problems, and in any case what would mice be doing in the attic instead of our pantry? Mysteries, mysteries.)

So anyway I applied the firepower at my disposal, to wit, my pre-frontal cortex. I was going to creep up to the attic — you should probably sit down for this next part — equipped with a flashlight, a racquetball racquet, a hammer, and…

…a smoke detector.

[Pause for breath, and to emphasize: I am not making any of this up.]

Here’s the scenario I envisioned:

• I didn’t want to turn on the attic light, because I didn’t want the squirrels to simply duck out of sight behind some old boxes, giggling their furry asses off as we played hide-and-seek. I wanted this to be as gentle an incursion as possible. Hence the flashlight.
• …and yet, and yet: This was night. Did I have any idea how territorial squirrels might be, or if their territoriality varied with the time of day? No. (And no Web to check back then, either.) Suppose they had a guard posted at the attic door? Hence the racquetball racquet. I was a good enough racquetball player, I figured, that if something jumped at me, even from the shadows, I’d be able to parry it without killing it. (Disposal of a dead squirrel was nowhere on my radar.)
• The real solution to the squirrel problem, however, was bound up in the hammer and the smoke detector:
  • When I got to the top step, I would open the door and leeeeean forward, without actually setting foot on the floor. (This was a secret mission, remember; I didn’t want any creaks to betray my caution.)
  • I would place the smoke detector on the floor, upside-down (i.e., so the mounting holes were against the floor rather than pointed up at the ceiling).
  • I would push the “Test” button.
  • I would lay the hammerhead on the “Test” button so the detector would continue to shriek.
  • I would carefully close the door and creep back down the stairs, suppressing my mad-scientist laughter…
  • …and then I would leave the house, go to a diner for something to eat, and go to a bookstore afterwards.

****

I figured, see, that I’d be gone for a couple-three hours. The smoke detector would be howling holy hell all that time. The squirrels would try to cope with it for maybe 15 minutes, a half-hour tops, covering their tiny ears with their tiny and utterly ineffectual paws and perhaps stuffing their ears with insulation. It wouldn’t help. A screaming smoke detector can cut right through that stuff. (Not that I’d tried it; this just stood to reason. Brainpower, right?) And eventually they’d pack their little suitcases and run for the exit, wherever it was. Generations later, grandfather squirrels would be telling their little pups about the insane humans who once lived on the hill…

Astute readers by this point will have formulated a variety of quite reasonable questions. If these readers are polite, they will start with the most innocent question of all: Why was I doing all this hugger-mugger secret-intelligence-operative shit in the first place? Why didn’t I just go up to the attic in broad daylight, shove boxes around until I had at least actually confirmed the presence of squirrels — little piles of sawdust under chewed-up rafters, say?

Thing is, I had already done just that. Which really ticked me off, because I could find no such evidence. And yet both The Former Missus and I could hear the damned things up there, day after day, night after night: skritch… skritchskritch…

Simple questions aside, one other practical question did occur to me while I was browsing the racks in the bookstore. Which went something like this:

Do you really have any idea what you’re going to face when you return? Suppose alarmed neighbors were out on their distant porches hearing the unanswered smoke detector, and called the fire department? Suppose the scream of a smoke detector is sufficient to pierce squirrels’ eardrums, and they’ll be lying on the floor, writhing, when you get back?

And, most terrifying of all:

Suppose the smoke detector doesn’t chase them off, doesn’t pierce their eardrums, doesn’t outright kill them. Suppose it drives them mad. Suppose they’re all waiting, deranged, hallucinating that they are not nut-eaters but carnivores?

The prospect was too horrible to imagine. I fled the bookstore without buying anything, hopped in my little white Toyota station wagon, and took off.

On the way home I tried to calm down. Animals don’t turn insane from loud noises, I told myself. The blaring of a smoke alarm won’t pierce their eardrums any more than it would pierce the eardrums of, uh, well… cats, right? Smoke alarms couldn’t possibly hurt household pets, right? What about hamsters? I didn’t know. We didn’t have any pets.

Stop it, I finally said — maybe even aloud. You’re still a pretty good racquetball player…

Nevertheless, boy, was I jittery when I opened the back door. If you’ve spent any time here at all, you know I’m not one to court adventure — and this seemed like the worst sort of potential adventure, one fraught not with danger but with embarrassment.

The maddened squirrels had not broken through the attic door, I could see from the foot of the steps.

And I could still hear the smoke alarm, although the battery was pretty much shot by then. Meh, bleated the alarm weakly, as though exhausted by its ordeal. Meh. Meh.

I got my racquet again. No flashlight would be needed, because I meant to turn on every light available upstairs. (I didn’t care about stealth anymore. Insane, dead, or rolling around on the floor with blood leaking from their ears, the squirrels knew the game was on. We’d have no more secrets between us, the squirrels and me.) Besides, I might need to switch the racquet back and forth, from one hand to the other, if I were attacked from many directions at once.

(Meh. Meh.)

At the top of the stairs I hesitated one last time. (Meh.) I took a breath. (Meh.) I gripped the racquet (meh), and in a single smooth motion I openedthedoor-meh-leaptthroughthedoorway-meh-andthrewthelightswitch.

Crouching, I whirled left and then whirled right, the way I’d seen many many TV cops whirl left and right when entering a likely hideout. (The cops, of course, were armed to shoot. I was armed merely to lob. But the principle was the same.)

Nothing. Nothing.

Meh.

All right, not nothing, exactly. Still wary, looking side to side, I crouched. I pushed the hammer off the smoke alarm, and there was a little thump as it hit the wooden floor. The noise drew no response from anything, living or — ha ha — dead.

Trying hard not to lower the racquet, I swept through the attic, turning on lights and pushing boxes probably more or less back to the locations they’d been in before my last daylight raid.

I found nothing. No sawdust. No chaws of insulation, soggy with squirrel spit. And — yes! no squirrels, no bats, no mice, no disoriented owls, no bugs. Nothing.

Just to be sure, I made one more circuit. I couldn’t believe my luck and yet I couldn’t not believe it, either. The attic was squirrel-free.

Shutting all the lights off, closing the door, back downstairs I went, my arms full of tools and weaponry.

****

Boy, I couldn’t wait for The Former Missus to call that night. Wouldn’t she be surprised when I told her I’d fixed the squirrel problem? All on my own? Me? I thought I might even leave the exhausted battery in the smoke detector as evidence. In the absence of squirrel corpses, sawdust, anything else, at least I’d have the bleating alarm to prove I’d once been both manly and clever.

Later that evening, before The Former Missus called, I was in the bedroom at my dresser. I paused, listening carefully. No sounds from upstairs. (Thank God.) I removed a pair of socks from the top drawer to set them out for the morning. My blood raced with triumph—

To my right, the window curtain fluttered.

My heart leapt to my throat, as they say. I didn’t have my racquet or any other such device within reach. Maybe I could use this pen on the top of the dresser… I reached out to whip the curtain aside, praying (by now I really had started to lose it) that maybe I could simply stop the creature’s heart with surprise. Just as I was about to touch the fabric, there it was:

skritch… skritchskritchskritch… skritchskritch…

Stunned, I looked up as though to look through the ceiling. And that’s when I saw it.

Our house was about 20 years old, and still had the original roof, windows, and such. The windows had no doubt been high-quality expensive things once, their moving parts sheathed in vinyl, but by now little imperfections had been creeping in: the double-paned glass in one window might have lost its pressure, so it was always lined between the panes with moisture; another window might have warped a tiny bit, not quite sealing itself in the frame properly.

Another window, in short, like the window I was now facing. The one in the master bedroom, next to my dresser. The one with a roll-up window shade in the top half. The window shade which had rolled up slightly cockeyed, so that it scraped randomly back and forth against the frame as wind puffed through some minute misalignment between frame and window. The window shade going, randomly, skritch… skritchskritch…

Not exactly thinking clearly in that moment, I still had the presence of mind to raise the window shade. I unlatched the window, pulled the top window down, slammed it back upwards, relatched it, pulled the window shade carefully and straight down.

Silence. Everlasting silence.

When the phone rang about a half-hour later, I was on the sofa in the living room, watching TV, savoring a bit of brandy.

“You’ll never guess what I’ve done,” I said to The Former Missus.

“Uhhhh,” she said. (She sorta knew what I was like.)

“I fixed the squirrel problem.”

“You what? You–”

“Yep. I closed the window.”

For the rest of our days in that house, no more squirrels ever set foot in our house — no animals of any kind. And I never played racquetball again.

_____________________________________________________

* Many of my scariest confessions start with those words.

Further note: The photograph at the top of this post, needless to say, was not taken in the attic of that house. It comes, in fact, from a quite different post on someone else’s blog entirely. It’s not clear whether that guy solved his real squirrel problem. I hope so. The little bastards can be tenacious.