Wood, Water and Rodents
“Well, this ain’t gonna get any better,” I mumbled to myself.
I’d spent the last hour trying to record a new guitar piece, and it just wasn’t happening.
“ ‘Clam Fest,’ that’s what I should call this thing. I can’t seem to get through it without making one mistake after another.”
The recording setup in my cabin is very cool indeed. It’s spartan, but functional. For the technophobes out there, it consists of a recording program, Reaper at the moment, a stereo A/D converter, Yamaha NS10s with a sub if needed, a Mackie board and a Crown power amp. My guitar mic is an AKG ribbon and/or two Rode small diaphragm condensers. I’m recording primarily on classical guitar these days.
Powering this setup requires a little forethought. If I am simply recording, I can monitor the result with my headphones. If I need speaker playback, I have to fire up the Crown and NS10s. That usually requires a full charge on my battery/inverter system or my generator to be running – which works fine as it’s a well isolated, mighty quiet little Honda. But none of this stuff was helping today.
Besides, it was chore day and those chores weren’t gonna take care of themselves. Although cabin life’s a pretty simple business, there are a number of things that need maintaining. If you let them go too long, you’re likely to find yourself up the proverbial creek. One visit up said creek took place early in my cabin dwelling life, and it left an indelible impression.
It was in a February of some year or other, and I had stumbled through the door after a particularly long and raucous band rehearsal. Yes, even in the North, bands rehearse.
My guess is it was twenty below – positively balmy for the Yukon border that time of year. The welcome blast of warm air hit me as I entered, and I smiled, like I always do when I walk into this little cabin, warm and cosy as it is in the Yukon winter. It always feels like I just won the lottery.
I stumbled over to the little semi-circular table that has its home next to the front window. It looks out over the porch onto a spruce and pine forest. Tonight, it featured Atlin Mountain crowned with a full moon. I found the paper matches easily in the moonlight and struck one, whipping the glass off the kerosene lamp with my left hand, lighting the wick and adjusting the flame with with my right. After you light a thousand lamps, the process is all of a piece.
These were the early years. Kerosene lamps were everywhere along with water buckets, tin airtight stoves and a slop bucket under the sink – if you had a sink. And yes, paper matches were my first choice for the job of lighting most anything, There’s a reason for that.
Do you remember those strong, bright and efficient wooden matches you could buy at the local hardware store – the ones that struck first time and burned efficiently and consistently down the full length of the shaft? What happened to them?
“I’ll tell you what happened to them!” Harry had opined down at the bar last time I brought it up. “Some bean counter found a way to buy cheaper materials, that’s what. So now we have to live with matches that barely strike and go out as soon as the head’s burned off. And that’s if you are lucky enough not to have snapped off the cheap wood shaft in the process.”
I had to agree. And that’s why, after burning the side of my index finger countless times on the alternative – my lighter – a device never designed for lighting lamps, I had reverted to the simple paper matchbook.
I was beat and ready for bed, and I needed to stack up the stove for the night – one dry stick to one green stick – the old trick for getting your fire to last all night without having to get up at 4 a.m. in your underwear to feed the damn thing. Fortunately, there was enough of both in the woodbox by the stove. Job done, I hopped into bed and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
When I woke in the morning, it was clear my ‘green stick to dry stick’ proportion had been out of whack. The stove had burned through its stack and the place was cold. Not just cold, freezing. I glanced out of the window at the thermometer and it was 33 below. What was left in the water bucket was frozen solid.
Climbing into my rigid long johns, pants and wool shirt, I scampered outside to grab wood from the porch, knowing it was going to take some time to heat the place back up to operating temperature. But the porch sat bare – not a stick of firewood, green or dry, and not a sliver of kindling.
“You idiot!” I muttered.
You see, my woodpile strategy of late had devolved into heading out on snowshoes every few days with my chainsaw to cut deadfall, then hauling it back to be bucked up and split in front of the cabin at my leisure. But I had been taking the whole leisure business a little too seriously lately, and now I was about to pay the price … now I had to climb into my frozen parka, stick on my snowshoes, and drag a chainsaw that was unlikely to start, into the bush to look for deadfall at 33 below … all before my morning coffee.
It only takes once for that lesson to sink in. After that, maintaining the woodpile became part of the essential chore list. Wood and water tops that list followed closely by keeping the driveway plowed, sweeping the chimney to avoid chimney fires, and chinking the logs to keep out the mice.
•••
Chinking was the item on the list today. Log cabins can be as tight as you like, but the mice in this country are determined little buggers. They can squeeze those little bodies through the smallest crack imaginable. The best material for chinking is steel wool. Their little chompers are not fond of it and it works like a charm until they find a new route … and they will.
But they are benign little creatures, and we co-exist with reasonable harmony. The larger rodents are a different story – pack rats, in particular, coming directly from hell.
Rodents, generally speaking, are not a favoured genus by us humans. They rarely show up in literature displaying noble characteristics (except, perhaps, for the river creatures in ‘Wind in the Willows’). And rats are the bottom of the barrel; pack rats being no exception.
To give you an idea of the moral decay in the average pack rat, let me relay a story that, to this day, is laughed at by all of my so-called friends. They don’t believe a word of it, but I swear it’s true to the last detail.
I was peeling logs in the first week or so of building. It was a long, tedious job with a draw knife under a hot sun, and I was taking a break under a spruce tree, when I heard a plaintive wailing just above me. Crawling up on the bank that rose from north side my road, I parted the bushes, and there he was – a nasty little pack rat, holding down some poor squirrel, both paws on her back, mating like a jackhammer. Interspecies rape, that’s what it was. Only a pack rat would engage in that sort of degenerative behaviour, that’s my opinion.
Oh they laughed. “Oh please … tell us another one”, they said. But I swear … it’s all true.
As it turned out, my relationship with these nasty rodents didn’t end there. Shortly after the cabin was built, I headed south for a few weeks. I had just done some work on the interior and I was quite proud of myself, having just built a raised bed frame with four feet of storage space underneath – a bunk bed without the lower bunk if you will.
I had also decided to saw a hole in the wall behind the stove to allow air to enter the draught through a pipe from the outside. The pipe itself hadn’t been installed yet. Come to think of it, that pipe still hasn’t been installed almost forty years later. Still … I don’t like to rush things.
Anyway, I filled the pipe access hole with artfully assembled wood scraps. Nice and tight too. But evidently not tight enough to foil my my new rodent pal, Johnny.
Now I know it’s unlikely that the very same pack rat I caught deflowering young Priscilla the squirrel was responsible for what happened next, but the lack of a moral compass displayed by both suggests they were one and the same.
You see Little Johnny needed digs – a party house where he could invite his pals and, most importantly, his new conquests, regardless of their race, religion or species. He decided my place would be perfect for the job, and couldn’t help noticing that a new, if blocked, access hole had just shown up in the north wall.
This was nothing to a B and E expert like Johnny, and he immediately began disassembling those firmly packed pieces of wood. Once inside, my guess is he brushed himself off, looked around, rubbed those little paws of his together and squeaked,
“This is perfect.”
Pack rats are the hoarders of the animal world, and once they decide where their nest will be, they feel free to build it as large as the space allows. In this case, that space was the whole area under my bed – a space just slightly smaller than the size of a cord of wood.
When I returned home and stormed through the door I found Johnny’s new home – a mountain of detritus consisting of anything and everything that could be dragged under the bed. It was all there – socks, cassettes and cds, running shoes, knives and forks, toilet paper – anything moveable. It filled the entire space. And it stank.
I was properly pissed, so I decided to try and catch little Johnny in the act, and I had just the plan to do it.
•••
It seems rodents can’t resist exploring a pipe. If there is a long pipe within hailing distance, our little pals just have to investigate. Oh the fun! They run from one end to the other, back and forth, with the fascination of a little kid playing with a big cardboard box.
The first step in my plan was to sort through the collection of discarded chimney pipe behind the shed. Picking a suitable length, I laid it flat on the cabin floor and carefully slid an already set rat trap inside, about half way down its length. I didn’t bother baiting it. If everything went right, once inside, Johnny would whistle through the pipe in that heady yahoo state of his, and barge right into his demise.
Job done, I decided to head down to the cafe to wait the whole thing out. Carefully closing the door I headed out to the truck, but before I had even reached the driver’s door – smack! – the sound of the executioner echoed through clearing. Johnny, fun loving dude that he was, had evidently wasted no time in entertaining himself.
Afterwards, I thought I might skin him and pin his hide to the front door as a warning to any other dodgy rodents in the area. But I came to the conclusion that it would just put me in the same class as he. Not much of a descent I admit, but nevertheless …
•••
Unable to get a recording take, I gave in to the cabin chores. Based on the mouse crap on the window sill, it looked like chinking the front wall was going to be first on the list. Now, if I could only remember where I put the steel wool …