It got cold, and the rats came inside.
Every evening since I moved into my little seaside shack in mid-July, the rats would come out at sunset. They'd rattle the fronds in the palms, and shake the limes out of my single backyard citrus tree.
Milo the White Trash Terrordog had a grand old time pacing them along the top of the old wooden fence that marks the property's western border, and sprinting back and forth under the power lines as the small dark shapes scurried back and forth from treetop to treetop. After dark, I couldn't keep him inside; every time I went out for a smoke, he'd bully his way between my leg and the doorjamb, and stand rigidly attentive at the fence, staring at nothing, waiting for something to move.
Then Hurricane Wilma came, sort of but not really, dragging in its wake a week's worth of significantly low temperatures. I turned off the air-conditioning unit and opened the windows, and caught what I hope will be my only real, debilitating cold of the winter.
And the rats disappeared.
Milo the White Trash Terrordog still bolted outside every time I opened the porch door for a butt, but had to make do with an array of chewable, drag-able, tossable sticks felled by the winds for fun. Now, when he was seemingly staring at nothing, he really was staring at nothing. He couldn't find his little vermin playmates.
I found them the night before last — while I was sitting on the toilet.
Now I'm no stranger to living with rats. If you live in any part of the Bay area that's old, or reasonably near water, or comparatively flush with foliage, then you live with rats. In Hyde Park, I lived on the second floor of a house surrounded by trees; the linoleum surrounding the dog's dented aluminum food dish in the kitchen was riddled with holes from BBs, fired at marauding scavengers while we half-watched softcore pornography on Cinemax in the dark.
In Port Tampa, I sat on a ruined pool table in a musty old billiard room, pellet pistol and beer close at hand, waiting for whiskered faces to show themselves. In St. Pete, rustlings and darting furry blurs were my constant companions while I emptied garbage cans and mopped floors at the State Theatre after last call.
But there are fewer places where modern man feels more vulnerable than sitting on the can with his pants and boxers around his ankles, taking care of a little personal business. You don't want to think about rats at all in that situation, because you immediately begin thinking of all the stories you've heard about rats attempting to exit sewer pipes via toilet bowls blocked by human asses.
And that's exactly what I thought of, when the trip-trip-trapping started above my head. I didn't even know I had an attic; apparently I do, and, sitting there with a catalog from a mail-order music shop in my lap, it sounded as if that attic had been colonized by a stealthy gang of baby elephants that had let their toenails grow long and sharp, or maybe just a gaggle of opossums that had been exposed to mutagenic radiation.
I mean, I immediately knew it was just the rats, but if they decided to chew through the ceiling and rain down on me in a torrent, what was I going to do? Fend them off with my stinky toilet brush? Trip over my own undies trying to get to the door, and die the most undignified of deaths, being partially eaten while I writhe on the floor of my tiny bathroom, one spastically kicking leg still waving shorts like a flag?
I hear them every night now. Not just when I'm in the bathroom; now I can hear them skittering overhead while I'm trying to get to sleep, or when I go barefoot to the kitchen for a glass of water.
According to William H. Kern, Jr., a specialist in Floridian urban wildlife, I've got roof rats. Those of us in Tampa Bay who've got rats all have roof rats, Rattus rattus, aka fruit rats, aka citrus rats, aka black rats — arboreal immigrants from Asia smaller than the more well-known Norway rat, which is rare in Florida. Roof rats love the citrus, but as with most vermin, they'll eat anything, from wild sugar cane to stored grains to your pet's food stash (sometimes they chew right through the bag).
Roof rats are an immense pain to get rid of, which is why we've all seen or heard them at some point. Put traps or poison in your attic or crawlspace, you get smelly rotting corpses, and more roof rats later. Put traps or poison outside, on your fences or trees, and you injure diurnal animals like birds and squirrels.
In some areas, snakes and birds of prey help keep the population down, but in developed neighborhoods, what snakes mostly do is get killed by cats and rakes. So what we mostly do is live with the roof rats, hope they stay outside, and try not to think about stuff like bubonic plague (according to Kern's literature, roof rats were the carrier).
Milo the White Trash Terrordog seems to find them engaging company, in any case. And they haven't yet made an appearance in the shack proper — Milo's food goes unmolested by anything but Milo. I've got plenty of limes on the tree outside. As for the little guys who get up to cruising around the attic after the sun goes down, well, I can be a pretty deep sleeper.
A pretty deep sleeper.
Deep enough that I might not hear the gnashing of teeth or feel bits of drywall drifting down before the vermin begin picking crumbs out of my facial hair, for instance.
Maybe I should look into picking up a new BB gun.
And some snakes.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2005.