Scents and Sensibilities

or How I Learned to Love Mephitis mephitis, The Striped Menace
or The Bittersweet Smell of Victory
or you can make up your own clever subtitle in the comments after reading this post...

So, I'm going to start at the conclusion by pulling a Tarantino and saying that this long story ended at just the start of an even longer day, but we didn't know that at the time.  It also ended in a slightly less stinky place than it started in (but not much).

But, if we flip back to the very beginning of this saga, we would have to start a week ago Sunday.  Brittany woke me up at around 5:00am, gagging on a horrible smell in our house.  In my sleepy haze, I thought her pregnant super sense of smell was at it again, and that either I forgot to take out the trash or she was imagining things.  However, pretty quickly, I smelled something too.  Britt was pretty insistent that there was a skunk inside, which had clearly filled the entire house with stench, but I wasn't so sure.  We got up and looked around, trying to keep the dogs safely contained in case there was an invader, but couldn't find anything lurking about.  But, as we came downstairs and investigated, the smell got stronger and stronger.  It was horrible!

I will fast-forward through the part where Brittany continued to tell me that what we were smelling was skunk, and I insisted that we were experiencing an electrical fire of some sort - the smell was the worst in the room where both our electrical panel and our brand new electric water heater live.  I may have called the fire department, who showed up a few minutes later, in their truck, in uniform, with lights flashing, carrying gas meters and infrared cameras to detect heat.  But, they didn't find anything that was worth worrying about - they did, however, tell me that they smelled skunk on their way out.  Damn.  I guess you can take the boy out of the city (though, I seem to remember skunks there too - they just didn't smell the same), but you can't take the city out of the boy.  More on this later.

So, a skunk sprayed our house.  And filled it will really awful skunk smell.  And all of our stuff - coats, hats, scarves, gloves, shoes - everything in our mud room, smelled.  We vacated the house for a few hours, but when we got back it still smelled.  And smelled it did for a few days.  It has been 9 days, and I can still smell it.

We remembered a few days earlier, as we were working down our wood pile in the shed, there was some dirt displaced near the wood pile, and a good sized hole dug near the foundation of the house.  I guess now we know who had been digging.  A few days later, we actually found the main entrance to Horace's subterranean condo (yes, we named him) a few feet away - an even bigger whole, in which our new tenant even dragged an extension cord and part of the hose down into.

Luckily, we happen to know a skunk trapper.  Our friend Sean let us borrow two of his traps, instructed us on proper baiting techniques, and also some ways to "process" anything we might catch.  Well, wouldn't you know it - last Tuesday night, about 3 hours after we set the trap, bingo!  We caught one.  A black and white striped skunk, probably around Izzi's size, maybe bigger.  I found it just before bed, making a racket in it's little cell, singing "nobody knows the troubles I've seen."  We let it sleep there overnight and decided to deal with it in the morning.

The next morning, it was clear that neither of us were going to be "processing" anything, so we moved on to plan B - operation "re-home" the critter.  After lots of studying ways to do this (we had been reading about it online for days), we had everything we needed in place.  We snuck up on the trap, quietly put a heavy blanket over it so Horace wouldn't see us, and then gently put the trap in the trunk of my car.  Yes, we realized how Dr. Seuss this was - a skunk in the trunk...  the next great children's tale/tail (that pun may have been intended!).  After driving around from place to place to find a nice wooded spot with no houses around, far away from our house, to drop off our cargo, we had no luck.  We drove and drove and drove, and all of the placed we could think of were just too populated - we didn't want to make this skunk someone else's problem.  Strange, I know, that we couldn't find an empty, wooded area in rural New Hampshire - how is this possible!?!  After about 45 minutes of feeling like I was driving around with a time bomb, saying things to Brittany like "five years ago I never thought that my life would be composed of skunk relocation" over and over, we found the perfect spot for the striped menace to live.  We got him out of the car, managed to open the trap with the help of a few ski poles, and after a couple of minutes, Mr. Skunk emerged from his trap.  He didn't appear frightened or agitated - I think he fell asleep on the long car drive (good practice from crying babies, I'm told).  He looked at us from a distance, sniffed around, and then calmly walked into the woods and disappeared.  Mission accomplished!

We got home, reset the traps, and have caught no more skunks.  I think we're safe for a while.  But, this crazy adventure made us a bit late that morning, and in our rush to get ready and get to work, the next big thing happened.  Brittany slipped.  But, you've probably already read that story.  And that day is why I might need a break or why I might soon have a nervous breakdown.  Or I guess maybe it was just another day in our "new normal".