Getting Skunked and the Lord of the Lies

The best way to clear out your house after a party is to have your cat sprayed by a skunk. As me how I know.

When you and your guests are mostly Italian-American, it’s very difficult for anyone to leave. The Italian Goodbye is the opposite of the Irish one, and involves stopping every three feet to start another conversation, hug each other, be given some food to mangia on the ride home—I’m just gonna throw it out—perhaps have another drink, and then start all over again.

It was a hundred degrees Fahrenheit that day, so Louie was not allowed to mingle with the guests; we had the garage doors open to have more shady space for a buffet table, lovingly festooned with lumpia, ube cake, and other delights brought by our guests, and we couldn’t risk Louie sneaking into the front yard and the street. So it was dusk when I finally relented and allowed him to roam the yard.

And I was in the middle of one of those Italian goodbyes when I realized it was near dark and my neighbor had mentioned seeing a skunk wander through our yard at night while she was smoking on her deck.

The skunk was half again as big as these, and Louie would kick this cat’s ass.

In hindsight, if I hadn’t gone out there, things probably would have been better off. When stepped outside, I saw Louie touching noses with a young skunk, probably a yearling. Louie was lashing his tail, but seemed more curious than aggressive. The skunk, like most of its kind, did not have two shits to give. When it saw me, however, it hopped away from its new friend and left a little thank you note.

Thankfully, it was not a full spray; Louie was not blinded, and didn’t even seem to notice. I barely noticed myself, until I picked him up and carried him inside, and started smelling the delightful odor of butanethiols. Luckily, we had hydrogen peroxide and soap, the first of which “neutralizes” the smell, and then the soap removes the oils and lets them be washed away. I got most of it off of him, but the scent lingered for another day, because you don’t want to “air out” your house when there’s a heat index of 110. The MERV 1200 filter on the HVAC took care of it, eventually.

Louie still smells a little bit around the neck. He doesn’t care and neither do we. We began to joke that he was only stinky because he was getting too frisky with his stripey friend, because Louie is not the friendliest around other animals. He has stood his ground against large dogs, and when the neighbor’s family brings over their boxer, which loves barking through the fence, Louie charges and attacks the fence. At the vet, we had to sedate him, because they can’t roll him up in a towel like a burrito to give him a knockout shot. He’s seventeen pounds of flabby tabby who has nearly caught squirrels numerous times. He ignores birds; he used to chase moths, and has learned that things that fly are too clever for him.

I think he chased the same skunk last year when it was a kit. Then, it was a little bigger than a kitten, and I blocked him so it could escape through the carport. Now, it’s the size of a small cat, probably half Louie’s size. I’ve seen the adult skunk that I think parented these; it is bigger than Louie, and has an enormous lush tail, and looks nearly all white when you’re in a hot tub drinking margaritas and it decides it is going to check for fallen peanuts under the bird feeder. I’m glad he didn’t meet that one.

Louie keeps checking behind the shed for his new friend. There’s an old groundhog den under the slab, that the skunk may have commandeered. (We haven’t seen the groundhog since they fell in the pool.)

That was this week’s adventures. The day after, I went for a bike ride to see the prickly pears in bloom, and was not disappointed. I also met a North American Wheel Bug, which I mistook for a tick on my neck. I think I broke one of its legs, but it was mobile when I found it on the ground.

Prickly Pears and Wheel Bug

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Lord of the Flies and how it is complete and utter bullshit. Now, Golding had his reasons; his book was a response to other popular books that suggested that lost British boys, left to their own devices, would reinvent civilization in a fortnight and retake the world for the Empire. Debunking that is fine, but the popularity of the book has made us think that without police and government, we would all turn on one another. That remains to be seen, but one thing we do know: a group of six young boys who were marooned on an island for 15 months did not split into warring groups and fight, they helped each other, kept a fire going, and kept watch for ships every day until they were found. These boys were not British but Tongan, and their story is remarkable.

True, these boys had been taught some island survival skills and were better prepared than many would be; but they escaped from an Anglican boarding school for a joyride in a boat, and one might think they might quarrel. They certainly had arguments, but they worked them out, and even splinted a broken leg well enough that the injured boy walked on it once healed. This documentary from 1966 had them reenact some of their story; they made some money from the film rights, and repaid the owner of the boat they stole.

I learned about this story from two podcasts; Hidden Brain by Shankar Vendantam had Peter Gray on to talk about how we don’t let children play unsupervised anymore, and how that affects their ability to solve their own problems. They mention this story, so I found it again. I’ll be reading Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind, from which the excerpt of him finding Mano, who was one of the castaways, and Peter, the sailor who eventually rescued them. The other podcast was Chinwag with Paul Giamatti and Stephen Asma, which can be very entertaining, but when they remembered this story, the boys were Dutch. It would have been cool if they Googled it afterward and corrected it in the epilogue.

As for unsupervised children and The Lord of the Flies, I think it depends. I was a free range kid and explored by foot and on bike; we ran into bullies and jerks sometimes, but mostly we got along. Bullies look for places where they can get away with it, where you can’t just leave and not play with them. These people gravitate toward positions of authority; the two bullies on my street both became police officers. Perhaps in a British boarding school where hierarchy was literally beaten into the children, there is no escape, and bullying was simply a tool to enforce the rigid class structure, the children would have acted that way. In the case of the Tongan castaways, the children escaped from an Anglican boarding school, and they worked together. Tonga also had a king at the time, but perhaps their social structure had something to do with how they cooperated to survive.