Doomsday Whack-A-Mole

The best monsoons boil up from Baja.  A mountain of black clouds rolling across a desert sea.  Turning the sun burnt blue sky into a vengeful watercolor of black and gray that crackles and roars.

When the rains had washed the rind of dust from the world and the cacti are plump and green my Dad and I would venture from our squat ramshackle home.  We were on a mission, a hunt, and we we’re armed.

My father with a gas can and propane flame thrower and I with a shovel.

Everything living in the desert has to be a survivor.  Pack rats are just assholes about it.  They chew through walls to get into your pantry.  Nest in walls and abandoned cars, safe in engine blocks.  They produce and an absurd amount of feces and they carry the Hantavirus and the Bubonic Plague.

Assholes.

Our prey had a nest in a Prickly Pear.  A cactus with tear shaped pads sprouting like fungi or coral from the sandy earth.  Every year we’d collect over a hundred pounds of spiny fruit and my Nana would stand over boiling pots for three days to make two dozen jars of the sweetest jam you’ll ever taste.

The rat’s nest was in the base of the plant, burrowed in around the roots.  Identifiable by the mass of dirt and trash strewn around the half dead cactus.  Pack rats are like white trash dragons, any bit of shiny will do.  Copper wires included, bye-bye lights, hello house fire.

My dad would douse the nest with gasoline and spark up the flame thrower.  The wet wood would crackle, the cactus would hiss and split, boiled from the inside, roasted from the out.  And I would stand at the ready, shovel held high.  Waiting for the vermin to run smoking and screaming from their burrow so I could dispatch them with a heavy thwack.  

Doomsday Whack-A-Mole.

It wasn’t until some years later when relaying this tale to a table of shell-shocked teenagers during lunch one sunny high school afternoon did it occur to me that this was an odd thing for a ten-year-old to do.

It’s as I said though, everything living in the desert has to be a survivor.  We were just assholes about it.