Damn Gophers

The California Pocket Gopher is the king of burrowing pests. Voles, rabbits, ground squirrels, and moles do not even compare with it. That is what John would tell you. The first battle began right in his own front yard. Since he had a dog he did what so many people do with dog feces. He stuffed it into the gopher holes. Although this gave him some place to dispose of the obnoxious material, it did not seem to bother the gophers at all. They either did not mind digging through it or they worked around it. He did not know which. The next time-honored remedy he tried was flooding. He jammed his garden hose into a hole and turned the water on full blast. It was Saturday and he went into his house to watch a ballgame on television as the water ran. Two and a half hours later he went out to inspect his yard. He expected to see water bubbling out of the gopher holes, but it was not happening. Where was the water going? It was a mystery. He thought that the holes must be very deep and the tunnels extensive. He turned off the water, consoling himself with the thought that he had probably drowned at least some of the creatures in their holes.

The next morning he pulled out the lawn mower. When he finished mowing the front yard he took the mower into his back yard. There he discovered several new gopher holes. He also discovered that the veracious creatures were destroying his flower garden. Actually, they were destroying his flower gardens. The flowers in his front yard had also become gopher food. This was disheartening because he had put a lot of time and effort into planting those flowerbeds. There was no getting around it. This was war, and he was determined to win it. Unfortunately, the next battle would have to wait until he got off work tomorrow.

He drove to the high school on Monday morning. He was one of the physical education teachers there. He was trying to put his war with the gophers out of his mind, but it was impossible. The moment he stepped out onto the baseball diamond he saw several gopher holes in the outfield. The grounds keeper walked over to him.

“Looks like we have gophers,” the grounds keeper said.

“I have them at home too, and they’ve nearly destroyed my flower garden.”

“Try putting wire mesh around the root balls.”

“Thanks, that’s a good idea.”

“I’d love to poison the little bastards, but I’m afraid the district won’t allow it.”

The thought of poison gave John a brief glimmer of hope, but he quickly dismissed the idea. He did not want to risk poisoning his dog or the birds.

“I’m afraid they’re right about that,” he said.

John waited until the weekend to continue his struggle against the gophers. On Saturday morning he went to the garden shop and bought replacements for the flowers the gophers had eaten. He also bought wire mesh to fold around the roots of his new plants. He spent all morning planting them. On Sunday afternoon he stepped out onto his back porch just in time to see a gopher emerge from a fresh hole in the flowerbed. The gopher climbed up above the wire mesh and bit a new flower off at the stem. John dashed over there, but the gopher darted back into the hole before he could reach it. Obviously, the wire mesh was not protecting the plants, but it was making the gophers attack the plants above ground. John thought this would allow him to spray the vulnerable part of the plants with something gophers might find intolerable. He whipped up several concoctions, including dish soap with cayenne pepper. He then sprayed the different concoctions onto different plants in order to test their gopher repellent properties.

The gophers ignored all of John’s repellents and absolutely devastated his new plants over the coarse of the week. Many new gopher holes were also appearing in his lawn and in the grass of the baseball field. He saw Ben, the grounds keeper, kneeling down in the outfield. John walked over to Ben to see if he had any more ideas for thwarting the beasts. Ben was planting a particularly nasty looking trap in one of the gopher holes.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“A rat trap, but it should do the job. It slams the rodent into a spike that skewers it.”

John was not vindictive by nature, but skewering gophers certainly had its appeal.

“Let me know how it works.”

“Will do.”

As John turned onto his street that night he saw a gopher scurrying across the road. He swerved in an effort to run over the creature, but a car coming from the opposite direction made him get back on his own side of the road before he could get his wheels lined up on the varmint. He glanced in his rear view mirror and saw that the gopher had escaped the other car as well. John was not a man to use profanity, but he could not help uttering a very heartfelt “damn it!”

“How do you kill a gopher? Poison!” he thought. His heart, his soul, every fiber of his being was telling him to poison the sons of bitches. He told himself it did not have to be a poison they would ingest. It could be a gas. “That’s it. Gas them! Bug bombs ought to do the trick.” He could keep his dog and his children out of the yard long enough to accomplish that.

He bought four bug bombs. He enlarged a gopher hole in his front yard, pointed a bomb at it, set the bomb off and stuffed it into the hole. He repeated this process until two bombs were spewing gas into holes in his front yard and two bombs were spewing gas into holes in his back yard. He then took his children and his dog to the park where he waited until the bombs were empty. He threw the expired bombs into the trash when he returned to his home. He was feeling pretty confident the next morning. He pulled his car out of the garage and glanced over at the flower garden in his front yard. Much to his chagrin, he saw a gopher pulling one of the few remaining flowers down into its hole.

“The gophers might eventually die from exposure to the gas of the bug bombs I tried, but they’re very much alive at this time,” he told Ben. “How’d your traps work?”

“The little bastards nudged them out of the holes without setting them off.”

“It looks like we have a war on our hands.”

“No doubt about it.”

“What’s the first rule of war?”

“Kick the crap out of the enemy before he kicks the crap out of you!”

“Ah, but you have to get to know him to do that. You have to know his favorite thing to do and his least favorite thing to do. You have to find out his weaknesses and use them against him.”

“Research?”

“Research.”

That night John went on the inter net to find out everything he could about gophers. They are very talented subterranean engineers. You cannot gas them because they use water traps to protect their nests. You cannot flood them because they construct dams with spillways. It is very difficult to trap them because they are very cautious and quick. The article he was reading said they had one weakness. “A gopher will not tolerate any breach of his main tunnel.” The author recommended placing a box trap in the gopher’s main tunnel. “The trap is cylindrical in shape and has a small hole at the business end to let in a beam of light. The gopher will climb into the trap from the other end, and it will be so intent on investigating the light that it will not notice the spring-loaded mechanism until it is too late.” The author also said: “Gophers are solitary creatures. A gopher will defend its territory and drive away all other gophers. In other words, you should not have to kill that many to get rid of them.”

At long last, John had found his weapon. He bought four traps. One should be sufficient for each of his yards, but he would use the other two to compensate for any error he might make in regard to finding the main tunnels. Using the traps would mean digging holes in his lawns, but that was a small price considering the holes the gophers were already digging. The next day John found a gopher in one of the traps in his front yard. That night he found a gopher in one of the traps in his back yard. He killed both gophers and buried them in the holes as the author recommended. Now this was progress!

He and Ben then set similar traps at the school. Those traps also caught gophers. The problem was that new gophers replaced the old gophers within a few days. This happened both at the school and John’s home.
 
“Solitary, my ass!” Ben said.

This rapidly turned into a war of attrition, and the other side seemed to have an ample supply of troops. It was beginning to resemble a scene from the movie “Caddy Shack.” If these were new gophers rather than a family of gophers that already lived there, there were bound to be new main tunnels. So the men and the gophers were constantly excavating. To say this was frustrating for the men would be an understatement.

John was almost at his wits end when he went to his other job that Saturday night. Baseball season had started at the park, and John worked as an umpire there. This night he was the first base umpire. The pitcher had just finished warming up. The first batter was walking to the plate when it happened. A gopher popped out of its hole on the infield grass between the pitcher and the second baseman. It was confused by all of the people on the field, and it stood frozen in place.

“Time out!” John yelled. “Get the gopher!”

Everyone just stood there looking at him.

“Kill the damn gopher!”

No one moved. John walked over to the gopher and delivered a kick that sent the hairy eating machine sailing halfway across the infield. There was a collective gasp from the stands, and the fans booed him with all their might. War is never pretty, but he could not believe that people would actually boo him for attacking the enemy. Furthermore, the spectators continued to heckle him throughout the entire game.

As he was leaving the field after the game he was approached by a man who was wearing a parks and recreation department shirt.

“Good kick, Ump!”

This was not something John wanted to hear after suffering so much abuse from the fans.

“Yeah. Well, don’t judge a man until you’ve tripped in the gopher holes of his lawn,” he said.

“That wasn’t a criticism. I’ve been trying like hell to get rid of those pests, and it really was a good kick!”

Both men smiled and shook hands. This helped some, but John was still smarting over the way the fans’ had reacted to him kicking the gopher.

At last he reached his home, his refuge, far away from the judgmental people who could not seem to understand just how much grief the damn gophers were causing him. He took a beer out of the refrigerator. He then walked into the living room and turned on the television to watch the late news. His timing could not have been worse. There he was, on the screen, kicking the gopher and getting booed for doing it. This made him more determined than ever to win his war against the gophers.

“You can’t tell me they wouldn’t have done the same thing if they were going through what I’m going through,” he told his wife.

“They probably would have done much worse,” she said.

First published in macsbackporch.blogspot.com on May 20, 2009