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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (March 21, 2018)
Wednesday, March 21, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon Craig Rullman Columnist The Greenhouse Mouse I have been at war with rodents for most of my life. I am presently doing battle with a particularly clever mouse in the greenhouse, who has, in full disclosure, managed to outwit my con- siderable efforts to end his life early and with extreme prejudice. This lifelong, low-inten- sity fight for dignity against rodents has resulted in vari- ous demonstrations of comic folly, such as the time I cor- nered a Norwegian rat while cleaning out our garage in Solvang, California. I chased him into a corner in the raf- ters and zapped him with an entire can of bear spray, only to have him leap wildly onto my chest and knock me off roommates do. I was lucky not to have missed and hit the five-gallon propane tank he was perched on when I shot him. It was truly an indefensible act of stupidity, but had I missed the resulting explosion would have created quite a conun- drum for an arson investiga- tor as he struggled to explain how a buckaroo in the middle of nowhere blew up his own bunkhouse. A really good arson investigator would solve the riddle, but probably no one would believe him. Those were really great days, by the way. My first paying job was trapping gophers. The local ranchers paid two dollars a tail back then, and if I didn’t blow it all in on comic books and baseball cards I could save up enough money to buy a new pair of Levis to wear to the county fair, which seemed important at the time. There is a certain weak- ness in my anti-rodent philos- ophy because, as Napoleon noted, it’s important to win the moral fight before step- ping on the battlefield. But my crusade against rodents exists in something of an ethical and ecological gray area because I know that in the grander design mice, rats, moles, gophers, etc., play an important role in the big environmental equation. But I simply cannot bring myself to any level of tolerance. I really do hate mice, in particular, with an unrea- sonable passion, but unlike Vladimir Putin and Bashar Al-Assad I don’t use poison on my enemies. If I can’t trap them, drown them, or stab them with a ski pole, they get to savor a temporary victory. We have employed one strategic über-weapon, a vicious bobtailed barn cat named Nikita who has unleashed her own Soviet style of hell in the barn, where the life expectancy of a mouse is about the same as that of a Russian expat living in London. In the Marine Corps, which continues to sacrifice luxury accommodations in favor of actual warfighting skills, my platoon lived in a World War II-era flattop barracks. It was routine to return from the field to find our wall lockers inundated with nesting mice. But in the on-going effort to improvise, adapt, and overcome, we put our small-unit tactics to use by building bucket traps and killing dozens of them — and I really do mean dozens — and then depositing the corpses in a disgusting pile in the Lieutenants’ hooch. EXTREME CLEAN Extreme Clean Do you remember how exciting it was to move into your place when it was new, fresh, and clean? Extreme Clean can help you reinvigorate that feeling. A clean home is a happy one and a clean office is a productive one. By enlisting our services, you’re not only getting a new lease on your place, but you’re also removing potentially dangerous or allergy-inducing elements. What’s in your vents is in your lungs. With van- mounted machines and the “Ram Air” system, which uses compressed air, Extreme Clean can thoroughly and safely clean all your air returns, vents, furnaces, filters, and dryer vents. Those dryer vents should be cleaned every year to prevent fire. In business since 1989, Extreme Clean is a family- owned-and-operated business with a professional appearance and demeanor that reflects the care and commitment with which they approach their work. Continuing education and training ensures that you get the best when you call Extreme Clean. Before It was an infantile pro- test really, something like Ensign Pulver tossing Captain Morton’s cherished palm tree over the side of the USS Reluctant in Thomas Heggen’s tragically under- read novel “Mr. Roberts.” But it made us feel much, much better. Historically, inunda- tions of mice and rats played havoc with early explorers of the West too. The American Fur Company posted Francis Chardon to Fort Clark on the upper Missouri in 1834. By 1836 he was keep- ing a monthly tally of rats killed around the post, and the numbers are truly staggering. Chardon’s own fight for dignity had clearly developed into a kind of obsession, way out there on the lonely fron- tier, which is always a dan- ger for those of us looking to avoid the kind of rodent- driven mental condition that created Bill Murray’s charac- ter in “Caddyshack. “ As of this writing I have PID — military jargon for positive identification — on at least one insurgent mouse in the garage. But the green- house mouse is my top prior- ity because I am not a good loser and also because I refuse to share my food with the cheeky bastard. INC The Bunkhouse Chronicle the ladder where I landed, humiliated, in the pile of dis- organized detritus below. That actually happened twice in the same evening while my wife was away at a dinner party. Up the ladder with a can of bear spray and a ski-pole — he was in a deep corner and my plan was to stun and then stab him. 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