Week 4

Mark feeding cheese rinds to my rats. The dumbo (bottom) is Constance Chatterley. The top (with the darker brown fur) is Charlotte Bronte. You can see Jane Austen's tail near the blue- and green-colored rope.

Whenever I tell people I own rats—more often than not reluctantly, as I know the reaction is going to be one of disgust—normally the second thing I am told (after the first, which normally is a question like why rats?) is I would fit perfectly in New York City.

I have never seen a wild rat, an undomesticated one. I have three domesticated pet rats, each covered predominately in white fur. Wild rats are normally larger, browner, and they live only half of the lifespan of a lab rat. Nevertheless, a rat is a rat to people. Either is a pest and filthy.

On our recent New York City trip, when Mark and I descended the stairs leading to the subway, Mark’s friend Bryan says, “So I heard you like rats. There’s plenty down here.”

In the subway station, Mark and I obediently stand behind the yellow line (a way to avoid falling over and being hit by a train; ‘don’t be a statistic!’ a sign will say on the subway car). Bryan is blending in with the other city residents and peering dangerously around the tunnel corners looking for the car lights, and I can’t help but look down to the subway railings littered with garbage.

“Where are the rats?” I ask, trying to get as close as I can to the edge without crossing over the yellow line. Mark holds onto my hand tightly and has to keep yanking me back.

“Down there, normally,” Bryan says nonchalantly. He glances over the grime below. “See? There’s one right there.”

I am excited and stare hard, willing any street vermin nearby to make a sudden recognizable movement. But I don’t see anything. They blend in well, and I don’t blame them for learning to be sneaky: people are not kind.

A subway car, its screech of breaks and rush of wind echoing and stunning our ears, quickly goes by. The debris below flutters. I am amazed and try again to look for rats, but still can’t find anything.

How can any creature tolerate such threat and noise? Rats have sensitive hearing, a sense heightened because of their poor eye sight (albinos have even worse eyesight), and they have very sensitive tails, which are not only for balance but also temperature control. I can’t imagine being such a creature, scrounging around thrown-away McDonalds, dodging thrown Mountain Dew bottles, scarfing down food as subway cars fly above you. One false move and either its your toe, you tail, or your life.

On our way from Brooklyn to Manhattan, we wait for a subway car near an office, the West 4th Street Supervisory Tower, where people actually sit and, presumably, monitor the subway cars. I look around me; we are nearly two stories below ground, and this place is filthy, filthy enough and maintained as such for rats to be fed, plump and happy (as I’ve been told the rats here in New York City are quite large). I can’t imagine using the transportation system occasionally, let alone working down here daily.

West 4th Street Supervisory Tower. I don't know if I was allowed to take a picture of it. But they didn't stop me, so...

Needless to say, I am horrified by this but also disappointed I don’t get to see any rats.

Later in the day, as we journey back to Bryan’s place, the subway car stops long enough for me to see a sign that reassures me that “CAUTION: This area has been baited with rodenticide.”

I am equally horrified by this effortless killing of animals deemed pests, by chemicals no less, until I notice the date on the bottom of the sign: 11-9-01.

January 1st, 3:10 p.m.

It’s another gloomy Pittsburgh day. It doesn’t help that it’s the first day of February. While I was attending Pitt-Greensburg for my undergraduate studies, I dreaded this month, trudged through it and saw no end in sight to the cloudy days, wet snow that clung to the grass and just refused to melt and simply go away, and the need to keep on my jacket even while inside. 

It is a permeating cold, and I just want to will it away.

Despite the fact that the arctic cold has left us and the weather is somewhere in the fifties, I nevertheless feel cold again. 

Mark asks me earlier this morning if I’m okay. I tell him I feel like shit.

“Shit as in sick, or shit as in depressed?” He looks at me concerned, and I tell him my throat feels horrible. Now that I am outside, I think my answer would be ‘shit as in depressed.’

Inside the apartment, it is cold—62 degrees to be exact. Mark asks me to keep the temperature at that.

“I’m poor,” he says when I pout. “And the heat vent downstairs has fallen off. Ian told me this happened before. It’s cause the landlord used wood screws for the stone wall and stone screws for the wood.”

He makes it sound like it’s obviously a bad choice. I don’t get it, don’t know why each screw is different. After a trip with Mark to Home Depot in which I opened and closed every drawer with little plastic baggies of different screws, I decided I wasn’t ever going to get it.

I am outside now; my car says it’s 54 degrees, but it feels much warmer. Even in my winter coat with no gloves and only one pair of socks on. Mark has left for work ten minutes ago, saying as he walks to his car, “It feels like spring! You should come outside.”

And it does, even as I sit in the shade of this house, my boots having collapsed through the still white slush of snow. But I don’t move them, let them nestle there in the cold. Just as I sit down on the concrete tire blocker, I see a squirrel, huge and fat, his fur more red than grey. He dances across one of the fallen trees quite calmly. Maybe he is dancing for spring, for the warm weather. Maybe he isn’t a he and is really a girl.

I hear a cough and turn to see four professionally dressed cyclists, heads down and flanks off of their seats, glide up the hill. It reminds me of my dad, how he woke up at five every morning to cycle for two hours before he’d have to come home and get ready for work. It also reminds me of the Pitt cycling uniform my mom got him once in honor of me. He never wore it.

I feel as if there is movement out of the corner of my eye, yet there is nothing when I turn my head.

I hear many more birds—it’s actually overwhelming how many birds I hear, many sounding shrill and high-pitched like chicks—and hear the wet slop of snow melting off of things, houses, trees.

I see another squirrel. This one is grey, quite tiny, his fur put together a little more compactly compared to the first one I saw. He tries to leap half-heartedly from the ground onto a fallen tree trunk but misses, his paws instead on the edge. He stands there, doesn’t seem embarrassed by the miscalculation.

He hops fully onto the log and disappears before I then see him climbing, hugging it seems, another tree. He is perched now, near the top, his head turning, then still. His tail hangs off of the branch he is on.

I see what looks like a tiny magpie without the plumage—tiny, tiny, grey and black. Then more birds dive across the air; they look like little specks.

The largest of the trees I now can see has dark outside rungs against a lighter bark; it might be a birch of some kind, but it’s hard to tell because of all the hairy vines. The next largest tree looks like an oak of some kind with thick vertical cascades of bark.

I hear the squirrel as he climbs across a rickety branch, chasing playfully another squirrel, who moves through the winter creeper leaves in no hurry, then to another branch, and then gone from my sight. I can still hear the squirrels, am amazed how they hurl themselves across branches—I wonder what it’s like to effortlessly go through the trees.

A car pulls up where I’m sitting; it’s the middle-house neighbor.

“Hello,” I say as he slides out of his car without any jacket on, wearing a bright green t-shirt.

“How you doing,” was his reply, almost as if he didn’t care enough to form it into a question.

I feel like a dork now. 

I see a squirrel far off dig into the snow, chew on something with his two front paws, then run up a tree.

It has gotten warm enough for most of the snow to melt, leaving way for the ivy to bounce up again. I can hear the ivy scrape against the trees, its leaves a deep reddish brown with light green veins. I can see the leaves that died and fell in October. They have all flattened and melt into each other like a blanket. (The winter creeper’s leaves are a consistent green, even in the previous arctic chill.)

There are no hints of the animal tracks I found last week, as the tires from my car and the warming temperature have obliterated most of them. Thank goodness I took pictures.

The animal tracks I have found nearly all show a migration from one side of the road to the other. Nearly three deer (I am guesstimating here, as I honestly couldn’t tell how many there really were) crossed from the other side of the road, which I forgot to mention is quite a busy bend many go past the 30 m.p.h. limit. At the time I found these tracks (Tuesday or so), the snow was still thick on the ground, so I had to peer into the holes to see the two hoof marks.

There were wide arches, scraps against the snow from the deer having to lift and swing their legs around the height of the snow only to fall into it again. 

The other two tracks I found, the first from weeks ago, make the same journey from the woods at the bottom of the backyard of the abandoned house up, hugging the house and the ivy attached to it, to the driveway to disappear across the street. 

The first set of tracks occurred overnight while it had flurried (they weren’t there the night I drove there and appeared in the morning while I was getting ready to leave for work), so I was able to see a nice outline of the five plush toes and wide heel of the paw. It resembles a cat’s paw in a way.

Skunk prints! In the bottom-most print, the left one is the back leg (because it's larger and has that scrape to it in the back).

Deer tracks

Raccoon prints

From the nocturnal nature of the animal with the print, I immediately assumed it was a raccoon, yet it was strange how the paws were: two lined up equally at an equal distance, like someone had lifted the animal up and left clean prints every so many inches.

After much Internet exploring, I found that the tracks were from a skunk, the black bodied kind with the white stripe. Yet it didn’t make sense how the prints were so neatly in pairs. But it wasn’t until I looked closer at the picture that I realized one paw, alternating every print, was larger than the other, suggesting a back leg rather than two front ones. Mystery solved.

The other set of prints I noticed from this week were most definitely a raccoon’s: long, thin heel and four little fingers in the front that climbed quickly up the hill to rest on the cement block only to then race across the road.

I look at the disintegrating snow where these prints were clearly marked earlier in the week. My feet are too cold for me to ignore now. I go back inside Mark’s apartment but not before I linger around and try to find any dry place to sit and any excuse to stay out longer.