Of Mice and Men

           If you live in Hawaii you are going to have encounters with insects and rodents, there is no getting around it.  If you live in a rural area your encounters will increase three fold. However, if you live in an old house with a rusted roof in a rural area then you have passed the boundary of encounters, and are now involved in a forced coexisting living arrangement with various creatures.

            My mother once moved into a brand new cottage in a rural area of Maui.  It was built expressly for her to stay as a nanny for a family of four, who had no spare rooms in their 15,000 square foot home.  Her first night in the new, little studio cottage, the walls still freshly painted, a rat chewed the screen above her bed, and dove through the hole it had made. Flying through the air, a flash of fur, it landed on her bed, skittering off and hiding somewhere in the kitchen.  This, I would call an encounter, an unpleasant one, that left my mom screaming and the man of the estate running from his home to see what could be the matter with the new nanny.

            In my home the sound of rats chirping and squabbling with each other, their tiny feet scurrying through passageways in the walls, and their tails hanging from between the bamboo that was our ceiling was an every night occurrence.  There was a six-inch gap between the bamboo and the single layered, rusted, corrugated roof. The roof was so rusty that my husband had long ago taken to hanging Folgers coffee cans from the bamboo to catch the numerous leaks when it rained.  Gecko’s, thin skinned, gummy looking creatures, not unlike a newt, congregated on the walls clucking loudly now and then.  Giant roaches had installed a whole town in our kitchen and briskly scuttled about their business.  Their business was getting into all our food, the sound of their sharp sticky claws making a dry, crisp sound against the grain of our ply wood floor.  Mice multiplied exponentially, and biting ants marched up and down our furniture, creating a highway across my bed in the afternoon, so that I could not even lie down for a nap, if I so wanted.  Centipedes slithered about insidiously, biting unwitting victims in their sleep.  I had been bitten twenty times in my thirteen years on the property.  Wasps built homes on the outside walls of our house and sometimes swarmed the courtyard.

            My husband was impervious to all of this.  While I complained that we needed a new roof, he sat naked in his armchair, drinking black coffee and looking over one of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  His wide, pale feet were often dyed green from mowing the lawn bare foot.  I tried to do what I could as a mom with no carpentry skills and no money to hire someone.  Much of our belongings were kept in plastic boxes and the food in plastic bags within plastic boxes.  Yet all of this plastic needed to be replaced on a regular basis. Containers would often become soiled with piss and pellet turds ; the hard plastic boxes were chewed through by our rat pests as easily as a soft plastic bag.  The gas fridge was ancient, and barely kept cold, for the lining of the door and the installation had worn out. As a result roaches took vacations among our groceries.  Our stove had a back entrance filled with rough, pink installation, the rats often thought it made a perfect nest, and would sometimes get roasted in their sleep.  Most of this mayhem I was able to hide to some extent when we had guests.  Once in a while a friend might scream and thrash at her hair if she happened to pull down a teacup from our kitchen shelf and a gecko came flying out at her face.

            “Now you just sit over here and I’ll make you some tea,” I would say leading my guest to the safest corner of the house to relax.

            “What are all these black things floating around?”

            “Probably just some loose tea herbs?”

            “No, I think these are ants.”

             My children would have shrugged and fished them out, or just drank it. 

             “Do you mind that there are a lot of ants in your tea?”  I over heard my son ask my daughter, Kailea, who had requested honey.  When she made a face, he generously offered his.

            “I think there are just five in there,” he told her, as he set the tea down.  This was doable.  Five could easily be scooped out with a spoon.

            “Brian ought to just burn this place down and start over,” Our friend Dean commented dryly.  He opened his own zip lock bag of Double Scoop Fritos for his shell-shocked Korean girlfriend, that he had met in Tokoyo, and brought with him on his visit to stay with us.  Every year he came to stay for ten days or so bringing a different girlfriend.  Why he put these women through the experience of staying at our home, I’ll never know.  Dean’s girlfriends always arrived with visions of luxury resorts and coutour shopping instead they got the Maui version of Beverly Hill Billy’s and ABC shopping.  Just moments before Dean’s sarcastic comment, his girlfriend had pulled a Dorito’s bag out of our food cabinet that was not stored properly.  When she put her hand in the bag to take a few chips three cockroaches flew from the bag and raced up her arm.  She screamed and began jumping and thrashing about while, Mekila, five-years-old, at the time, stood watching her calmly.

            “You’ve never seen roaches before?”  Mekila asked.

            “Apparently she has never seen roaches running up her arm from a bag that she thought contained chips,” Dean said, helping his hyperventilating lover over to the kitchen table and sitting her down.

            While Brian was neurotic about everything being in it’s place, and looking neat on the outside hidden funk fell right off his obsessive-compulsive radar.  A toy lying out or an unwashed plate received his deepest disproval, but hills of termite dust, and rat skeletons found among the back dishes were OK.   I spent my first six months living with him in a whirlwind of deep cleaning.  Upon first entering his bedroom, one might see a neatly made futon on the floor, some paintings he created on the wall, an arm chair with a colorful Mexican blanket folded and tucked neatly over the chair cushions, a wooden, shuttered closet door, and a sky light over the bed that lit up the room in a friendly, inviting way.  Upon closer inspection, it would become apparent that the walls were covered in dust and that the bed when sat on emitted plumes of more dust.  The closet was full of old clothes and shoes dating back a few decades, the fabric moldy and full of holes from the roaches that like to eat cloth as well.  It was clear that this room was decorated back in the 1970’s, and than never used again.   When I was just my husband’s housemate I would catch him snoozing in his armchair in the living room taking two-hour catnaps.  I never saw him go up to his room.  Once I became his girlfriend, I was given free rein to get rid of what ever I liked.  I took complete advantage of this opportunity.  Like a game show contestant that has just won a supermarket, shopping spree, I ransacked the house filling up dozens of black rubbish bags with most everything I could lay my hands on.  Moldy clothes, old giant stuffed ninja turtles that belonged to my stepsons, but hadn’t been glanced at by the boys for several years, odd bits of junk that filled all the drawers of the house went into the bags. I pulled back the arm chairs in the living room and found a thick layer of mulch courtesy of the pet rabbit that lived in the house and liked to sharpen it’s teeth on the dry wall and anything rubber laying around.  My daughter once left her Barbie out and found it later, half it’s face chewed off, giving the doll a grotesque quality, not unlike what a woman might look like if half her face was chewed away by a wild animal.  The mulch, thick and stinking of ammonia having been fertilized with, no doubt, rabbit piss, I shoveled up and put outside in the compost where it belonged.  Carpets were dragged out of the house where I beat them over and over again with a broom, as they hung airing from the clothesline.  With no electricity or running water I was living out my early 1900’s farm wife fantasy, but it wasn’t quite as romantic or fun as I had imagined.  Yet with all the cleaning beetles were dismembering the dried out bamboo that was our ceiling into fine powdery dust and flakes of rusted roof misted our home everyday, like a cold morning frost. I longed for pet cats that would gobble up the rats and mice, but we already had a dog that chased cats. 

            Fed up one day, I drove to town and bought a large can of raid.  I returned to our house armed with the poison and marched up our stairs to the bedroom I shared with my husband.  I would spray this room first and kill everything.  I would close the door after I sprayed, I thought, and let everything die!  With visions of dead insects, I sprayed clouds of the stuff throughout the room.  After ten seconds I began to cough, and something was falling on me.  I looked up to see roaches emerging from everywhere, they seemed to materialize out of the walls, and were raining down into the room, falling in my hair.  Centipedes began to slither from crevices and wasps were swarming into the room.  My eyes were watering and through my coughing fit, I tried to wave away the cloud of raid, but it was too late, my room had turned into a swarming, scuttling aquarium of arthropods.  I ran out the door and gasped at the ever-growing body of wasps that were swarming the living room.  Gathering up the children, with no time to spare, we ran outside, where a cloud of wasps were angrily congregating in the courtyard. 

            “Quick to the car,” I ordered.  Wide eyed, the children ran as fast as their little legs could go to the parking lot where I opened the car door and we all retreated inside watching, astonished, as our home slowly disappeared in a cloud of flying, whizzing things.  My husband didn’t bat an eyelash when he came home that night from his gig and I recalled the whole gruesome tale to him.

            “What you need are glue traps,” Trevor, our friend from Jamaica told me regarding the rodent problem. Trevor lived in Sweden and like Dean came almost every year bringing a new Swedish girlfriend.  Unlike the Japanese girls, European girls are earthy and nature loving, and their vacations are longer, so Trevor was usually with us for a few months or so.  Trevor was a John Henry with a machete.  Give the man a machete and watch miracles happen.  As the story went, at one time our almost seven acres of property that we shared in a 60/40 split with Brian’s brother Bill was covered with hau bush.  What is hau bush?  You the reader might be inclined to ask.  It is a bush, of thick, springy wooden braches that twist and intertwine into sometimes an impenetrable fortress.  My step-daughter Nia once got lost in it when she was five and while Aunty Rosa and I could hear her plaintive cries, it took us half an hour to find her. 

            At one time hau was highly revered in Hawaii and was used for almost everything.  Canoes, bowstrings, fasteners for lauhala baskets, hula skirts, shoes, you name it, and it was made from hau.  The hibiscus flowers that grew from the hau were just as useful in a medicinal sense.  But by 1978 when Brian began clearing the property to build a home, hau was just a nuisance.  Hau grows fast and ferocious like the evil thicket of thorns and branches that sprang up in the story of Snow White.              Brian met Trevor while building his home.  Up on the roof, he looked down to see where he had placed his hammer and found Trevor smiling up at him, hammer held out helpfully to my husband.  The two became fast friends.  On the following year of Trevor’s second visit to Maui he showed up with a black man from New York, a city slicker, and a completely bewildered guest.  This New Yorker, much to his dismay found him self put to work with a machete along side Trevor and Brian for several days to clear the hau bush. I can imagine what a horrifying maze of tough knurled wood they must have been dealing with.  Pausing from his work delirium, Trevor’s friend commented, “I know hau, I just don’t know why.”

            My first recollections of Trevor are of a large, naked black man with a machete, working from dawn until dusk, clearing bushes, digging up things, fixing wires, and laying down piping.  It was Trevor that diverted the water from our larger catchment tank to the house, so that I did not have to lug buckets across the yard to bathe four children, while seven months pregnant with the fifth.  Trevor also installed solar lighting in our outhouse. There was a collective gasp and a sacred hush that fell over us as he flipped the switch from in the house and we saw the little outhouse from the kitchen window glow with light.

            After observing the out of control rodent problem, Trevor showed up from town with a bag full of glue traps. 

            “Those don’t work on the rats, and their now too clever for the traps.”  I told him.  He winked at me.

            “It’s for the mice, we’ll figure out the rats later.”  I helped him peel the covers off the glue traps and we placed them everywhere.  In the food cabinets, behind chairs, under the children’s bed. 

            The next morning as I made coffee, I heard Trevor yell.

            “Wow! This is beautiful, look at this.”  I came running to see the beauty that he was staring at in our cabinet and saw the four glue traps we had set down the night before, teeming with mice.  He slapped me on the back beaming.  “Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”  He asked.  I could quickly think of a hundred more beautiful things from the top of my head, but I was pleased.  The children came to look and my son, the most empathetic, compassionate person you could ever meet, asked sadly if the mice would have to suffer long with their mouths and feet stuck to the glue.  I rounded up the children and sent them out to play.  Without their judging scrutiny I gathered up the traps of vermin and tossed them in the rubbish.  At this point I would have happily shot them all to bits.

            Getting rid of the rats was another matter.  To me they were bigger pests than the mice, partly because they’re larger causing more damage and when they ran at you in a panic of disorientation, it was truly frightening.  My husband and I had experienced not being able to start our cars because some rat had chewed the wires.  There were also the unpleasant experiences of having rats die under the hood of my car, and turning on the heater only to have the car fill up with the smell of a decaying rat carcass.  With our dogs multiplying, cats were out.   Many of the rats were savvy to the way the traps worked.  We devised all sorts of mechanisms, but most caught just one rodent and many times not even that.  It was at this time that Brian announced he was going to hire a service to have someone come out with poison on a regular basis.  Seeing Trevor and I trying so hard finally inspired him to take action.

             A week later the exterminator drove up and knocked on our door.  He had with him a stack of black plastic boxes full of bright green poison pellets.  Each box had a nifty little hole for the rat to squeeze through and eat the pellets to its furry hearts content.  We were all delighted and followed the exterminator around, watching with heightened joy as he strategically placed the boxes in various parts of the property around our home.

            “You folks have a lot of fruit trees, which is part of the problem. That’s what really draws the rats.”  The exterminator told us.  It was true. There were guava bushes galore, lilikoi vines, and bananas.  After the exterminator was finished the whole family, as well as Trevor and his girlfriend, stood in the yard and waved goodbye to him, it was like we were saying farewell to Santa Claus.

            Days later there was a huge storm.  Trade winds ripped through the ridge that we lived on at 40mph rocking the house violently.  Parts of the roof that was most unstable, slammed up and down creating a crashing sound in our home, and nearby branches of trees scraped the outside walls, the effect was eerie and ghost like.  Lightening flashed from the sky and the wind howled and shrieked through every crack and crevice.  I ran about with bowls setting them on the floor in various parts of the living room to catch the rain that the Folgers coffee cans weren’t getting.  Unfortunately when I went to bed that night, rain had leaked through the sky light and my side of the bed was soaked.  I went back downstairs and slept with the younger children in their bed.

            The next morning the storm had passed.  It was unusually quiet, not even a bird chirped.  The sky was clear and once again I could hear myself think.  As I set about making breakfast, I heard a whoop from Trevor, who had emerged from the guest building.

             “Come see!  But this is lovely.”  I was a bit leery this time, as Trevor’s idea of what was lovely and beautiful were, I was finding out, quite different from my idea of the same adjectives.  I opened the door and stepped outside to see Trevor standing shirtless and in his ashram, wrap around pants.  He was pointing at something, and I followed the direction of his finger to see a drowned rat in the middle of the footpath leading up to our home.  But as I looked around I saw that there were drowned rats everywhere in the glistening, damp grass.  “Wonderful! Wonderful!”  He said, laughing out loud, showing off his white, healthy teeth.  The rats, it appeared, found the poison, and gorged themselves.  As they hemorrhaged from the inside, and became disoriented they had wondered out into the storm?  Strange, I thought.  “Come, let’s shovel them up,” Trevor suggested, a bounce in his step, as he went to the shed to grab the shovels.  You would think our yard was littered with gold.  He returned shortly with a shovel for me, and one for himself.  My three-year-old daughter, Viva, had wondered from the house in her nightgown to see what all the ruckus was about. 

            “Careful,” I told her.  “Watch your step, there are dead rats everywhere.”  Her large blue eyes grew larger, as she surveyed the situation.  Fascinated she watched me scoop up three dead, carcasses, the fur matted, and slick on the flattened bodies.  I walked with my daughter, following, across the front yard, through the driveway, across the dirt road, and to a cliff where I tossed my first batch.  Trevor followed, whistling to himself.

“Mom?” Viva said. 

“Yes, my love.”

“Those rats are yuck.”  Yes they were.  They were the most yucky, wonderful things I had ever seen.