Even before we moved into this house, we heard the neighbors talking about the animals. Deer, of course, but also coyotes, owls, seasonal javelina, and an occasional sighting of a bobcat or mountain lion. Foxes used to come to the creek to drink, but now they are gone. The rest remained at a safe enough distance. I liked to watch them from my window. Ah, there are still animals, I would muse. The world has not gone completely sterile. But wait, what is that? A packrat? Eating the wires of my 2019 Prius? My beautiful life just evaporated.
Packrats, never mentioned as one of the indicator species of the area, are nocturnal reclusive nibblers, venturing little more than 150 feet from their nests, which look like giant mounds of sticks. Inside their nests are chambers full of cactus for food and shiny things, because who doesn’t like that? Fortunately for them, detritus is easy to come by. They live in a midden, which is basically a garbage dump, so that just goes to show, it’s all in the perspective. They create dens lined with their own urine to keep all their special things preserved. Unfortunately for me, they also like the flavor of environmentally friendly car-wire coating, which has been made from soy on most cars since the early 2000s.
Once the rats started eating the wires of my car, I discovered that I am really not as compassionate as I thought I was. In fact, like most humans, I can be vicious. I tried essential oil sprays first, then a rather barbaric bucket system in which the packrat is enticed with peanut butter and eventually drowned. I even tried some gruesome sticky pads that once resulted in capturing only a tail. Relocation, certainly the most humane choice, is labor intensive, more so due to packrats’ keen desire to live their whole lives at their birthplace. So, if you don’t walk them miles away from the car, they will beat you back to it.
I am not usually unkind, especially when it comes to the unhoused. I want everyone to have a home, including the packrats. But these painful (meaning expensive) encounters have forced me to contemplate what these rats are saying to me. Did I go wrong at some point? Am I not a good neighbor?
Compassion is an act of jumping off the wheel of karma and having a pause of understanding, an insight beyond time. It is an ability to see a person (or a packrat) in the middle of it all. My moment of understanding came after serious contemplation of locking a cat in the car. For weeks, I spent my days going back and forth to the Toyota dealership, new error codes popping up on my dashboard every other day, and at times, the entire electronics system threatening to give out altogether. But compassion happens when enough distance grows between myself and an act, so that I can see it clearly.
One summer day, as I was riding my bike up the driveway, past the newly rebuilt heap of sticks – I mean, nest – I remembered in a flash how I had needlessly destroyed it a few years earlier. I recounted reluctantly the way I had dug through that giant mound of sticks and dirt and packrat urine, and remembered that once, maybe briefly, I had thought it beautiful. The doorway was revealed. This was not guilt, but a painful understanding. What is important here is the recognition, not why I did it (ignorant fear) or whether packrats know revenge (I think they do), but that this action I was remembering was an opening for seeing inside myself, a loosening of the web, revealing myself to myself just as I had once opened the packrat nest to reveal its contents. I knew I needed to ask for forgiveness and make a few offerings of shiny things, showing reverence for the rats. Couldn’t hurt.
As I age, these moments of insight happen more frequently. Lucky me. So many chances to see the error of my ways, moments when I can either say, “yes, thank you, I am humbled,” or remain blind to my own experience. For now, I say thanks. ~~~
Kristina Kenegos is a retired teacher, currently taking classes at Western New Mexico University and pursuing her creative dream of studying painting and drawing. She a member of Gila Friends Meeting in Silver City, NM (IMYM).