Wednesday, April 21, 2004
The Cantabrigian Skunk, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Wrath Of The Gods
[This is the third in a series of essays on animals. You should read parts one and two first.]
The War With The Animals was a fantasy of mine. It was conceived late one night as I walked home to the cat-infested apartment. Often, returning home late at night, I could smell a neighborhood skunk, and I found the smell quite pleasant: it was one I associated with country roads, with being on vacation and far away from the city. Its intrusion into my daily routine was refreshing and at the same times startling: I felt as though an alien, wild presence had slipped into the ordered grid of the city. I found myself wary on the darkened streets, afraid of tripping over a black and white furball and getting sprayed. But it struck me how wonderfully innocent this fear was when contrasted with the more common range of concerns one might harbor while walking through a rough neighborhood at that hour. I had spent so much of my life afraid of my fellow man -- afraid of being shot, stabbed, robbed, cursed at, run over -- of nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation, government tyrrany, corporate exploitation -- that the fear of an animal was exhilirating. Mankind's millenia-long fight against Nature had been too successful: we had locked Nature out of our cities and locked ourslves in, and now the inmates had turned on each other. We needed an external enemy. We needed Nature to start fighting back again.
Human mythology is full of stories about fearsome beasts sent from he gods to punish men. Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight Inanna's creature, the Bull of Heaven; Meleager and Atalanta kill the Calydonian Boar, sent by Diana; Yahweh sends plagues of locusts to batter the Egyptians. I slept fitfully those nights, hearing the roaring of lions in the streets and huddling with my fellow refugees from the gods' vengeance on the City. The invasion had come suddenly, the streets overrun with ravenous wolverines and rabid gazelles. No one knew where they came from, no one knew why they were attacking us, and no one knew how long the invasion would last. But we knew we had to fight them to survive.
And so we fought them. Great acts of compassion and heroism were witnessed in the city, as businessmen armed with spears drove packs of crazed dingoes away from an elderly woman, as a Pakistani cab driver and two Puerto Rican teenagers brought down a wild boar charging a daycare center. Differences of race, money, religion, and politics were ignored as man reached out to his fellow man and forged a genuine, universal human community bent on survival in the face of the animal horde.
Eventually, the reality of the War seeped into my waking life. I noticed the neighbor's cat staring at me through the window, and I wondered how often it passed intelligence on to my feline apartment-mates. I still maintained my truce with them, even though I knew them to be advance scouts for the invasion. I began to take more and more notice of the small incurions of wildlife in the city. My ears perked up when a friend mentioned being dive-bombed by a hawk while playing tennis. When I heard that a monkey had made a partial escape from the zoo where I had first seen such creatures as a child, I wasn't sure what to think: had this monkey jumped the gun on the invasion, or was he an animal turncoat, breaking ranks to warn his human cousins of the coming catastrophe?
One morning, walking home from an all-nighter on campus, I smelled a strong skunky odor as I turned onto my street. About a block up, I saw a black furry shape run over in the middle of the road. As I thought about it, I realized that I would truly miss the skunk. It was exciting, it added a thrill to my day, it inserted a country smell into my city life. (Is that why we love nature -- because of our associations with it, or because it is good in and of itself? Have trips to the country always been so special to me that I just like to be reminded of them? Or do I really like the country?)
The invasion, at any rate, had been turned back -- the beast's musk no longer haunted my neighborhood. One more smell eliminated from my daily bouquet. The War With The Animals, in this world, has no victor.
The War With The Animals was a fantasy of mine. It was conceived late one night as I walked home to the cat-infested apartment. Often, returning home late at night, I could smell a neighborhood skunk, and I found the smell quite pleasant: it was one I associated with country roads, with being on vacation and far away from the city. Its intrusion into my daily routine was refreshing and at the same times startling: I felt as though an alien, wild presence had slipped into the ordered grid of the city. I found myself wary on the darkened streets, afraid of tripping over a black and white furball and getting sprayed. But it struck me how wonderfully innocent this fear was when contrasted with the more common range of concerns one might harbor while walking through a rough neighborhood at that hour. I had spent so much of my life afraid of my fellow man -- afraid of being shot, stabbed, robbed, cursed at, run over -- of nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation, government tyrrany, corporate exploitation -- that the fear of an animal was exhilirating. Mankind's millenia-long fight against Nature had been too successful: we had locked Nature out of our cities and locked ourslves in, and now the inmates had turned on each other. We needed an external enemy. We needed Nature to start fighting back again.
Human mythology is full of stories about fearsome beasts sent from he gods to punish men. Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight Inanna's creature, the Bull of Heaven; Meleager and Atalanta kill the Calydonian Boar, sent by Diana; Yahweh sends plagues of locusts to batter the Egyptians. I slept fitfully those nights, hearing the roaring of lions in the streets and huddling with my fellow refugees from the gods' vengeance on the City. The invasion had come suddenly, the streets overrun with ravenous wolverines and rabid gazelles. No one knew where they came from, no one knew why they were attacking us, and no one knew how long the invasion would last. But we knew we had to fight them to survive.
And so we fought them. Great acts of compassion and heroism were witnessed in the city, as businessmen armed with spears drove packs of crazed dingoes away from an elderly woman, as a Pakistani cab driver and two Puerto Rican teenagers brought down a wild boar charging a daycare center. Differences of race, money, religion, and politics were ignored as man reached out to his fellow man and forged a genuine, universal human community bent on survival in the face of the animal horde.
Eventually, the reality of the War seeped into my waking life. I noticed the neighbor's cat staring at me through the window, and I wondered how often it passed intelligence on to my feline apartment-mates. I still maintained my truce with them, even though I knew them to be advance scouts for the invasion. I began to take more and more notice of the small incurions of wildlife in the city. My ears perked up when a friend mentioned being dive-bombed by a hawk while playing tennis. When I heard that a monkey had made a partial escape from the zoo where I had first seen such creatures as a child, I wasn't sure what to think: had this monkey jumped the gun on the invasion, or was he an animal turncoat, breaking ranks to warn his human cousins of the coming catastrophe?
One morning, walking home from an all-nighter on campus, I smelled a strong skunky odor as I turned onto my street. About a block up, I saw a black furry shape run over in the middle of the road. As I thought about it, I realized that I would truly miss the skunk. It was exciting, it added a thrill to my day, it inserted a country smell into my city life. (Is that why we love nature -- because of our associations with it, or because it is good in and of itself? Have trips to the country always been so special to me that I just like to be reminded of them? Or do I really like the country?)
The invasion, at any rate, had been turned back -- the beast's musk no longer haunted my neighborhood. One more smell eliminated from my daily bouquet. The War With The Animals, in this world, has no victor.
