How to Fight Mephitis

You may not have noticed this, but it got dark really early this fall. I mean, one day things were fine; the sun rose in the east and set behind the ridge at perfectly rational times, and then – bam—terminal darkness. This made it difficult to walk the dogs after work. Even more difficulties were raised by the onset of hunting season. Usually this is fine; my neighbor Bob, who lets me walk the dogs on his immense property, is pretty good about keeping hunters off his land, mainly so they will avoid shooting his cows. But this year, Bob’s son Mark decided to impart the joys of hunting to his offspring. He has three children, ages ten, eleven, and twelve. And now they have guns. I got up early one Saturday to get a jump on the little hunters, and was halfway up the skitter trail when I saw them, a line of Elmer Fudds, trudging across the cow pasture. I turned the dogs around and headed home, grumbling. This was when I decided to start walking the dogs after sunset; that is, after it’s legal for ten-year-olds to be toting around guns.

At first, this was nice. Crisp fall evenings, a misty moon, a few stars, the dogs and me. It was pleasant. The dogs snuffled around ahead of me, and I leaned back and looked at the stars in their friendly little groups, clustered together in chatty constellations like freshmen around their lockers in the morning. There was Pegasus, and Orion, and Ursa Major, and eventually, the smaller and probably invented constellations that became my friends: the Little Pyramid, Laura Ingalls Wilder Flying a Kite, and the Fish Jumping Out Of The Tenor Saxophone. The fish’s name, I decided, was Fritz.

Fritz, Laura, and I enjoyed each others’ company immensely. Walking in the woods at night, alone, as a female, does of course present challenges. Most of these challenges lie within the imagination: is that a mad ax-man behind that big rock? Are those coyotes howling out of joy of being canine and alive, or because they think I’d make a nice snack? Walking in the dark does not pose many problems that walking in daylight cannot match, its main claim to fame being the inability to see where one is going. I counteracted this problem with an enormous police-brutality-sized Maglite that not only illuminated my way, but offered me the option of clubbing anything that decided to step out from behind a tree. With such protection, I immediately dismissed the possibility of dangers out there in the dark. This was, I found, a major mistake. Because I’d forgotten my two biggest childhood fears.

When I was about eight, my parents would drag me off cross-country skiing in the woods near our home. I didn’t mind the skiing, but I was convinced that major dangers lurked in the woods. I did not fear bears, or wolves, or mountain lions. I feared skunks, and I feared porcupines.

Skunks, I was sure, laid in wait in the woods with their nearsighted little faces buried in the snow simply in order to become startled enough by our presence to spray us good and proper. Porcupines did essentially the same thing, but their plans were to shoot quills at us, like riflemen, once we came within range. My parents disputed my fears time and again, and they seemed to be right. We never saw either creature.

Fears, I find, like it when you forget about them. They like it when you’re wandering around in the dark, gazing up at your friends Laura and Orion and Peggy, and suddenly OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP you’re in the worst discomfort imaginable. It’s not a smell. It’s more than that. It is despair, ground entirely throughout your being like a marinade.

When you pass a dead skunk roadside, your nose warns you. Your nose says, burned rubber. Smoke. Oh, a skunk. And then your car whisks you onward and you go back to singing along to “David Duchovny, Why Won’t You Love Me,” on your radio. When you walk directly into a skunk’s spray, your nose tells you, Death. Garlic. Plague. Your nose says, you should probably run, but there’s not a lot of point, baby. And so you run.

It is, of course, too late. A skunk doesn’t unload on two dogs bearing down on it and miss much. This explains why I was on my front lawn at 9:00 on a school night, standing under the light on the front steps, shampooing my dogs in a futile manner as my hands became numb under the hose, knowing that all I was doing was adding “wet dog” to the bouquet of scent emanating from them. I washed all my clothes, my hair, my hands, obsessively. But I could still smell it.

The striped skunk’s Latin name is mephitis mephitis, which essentially means “stank stank.” (Mephitis is also the name of a Roman goddess; she’s the personification of the gases that rise from swamps. Imagine being the goddess who showed up late on Divine Titles Day and got that role. “Okay, here I am. Wait. Venus gets to control sex, and I’m… gas? Oh, man...”) The word “skunk” itself is from a corruption of an Abenaki term meaning “one who squirts,” which I find to be slightly misleading. The Abenaki apparently never felt the need to describe exactly what Mr. Segonku is squirting, or where he’s squirting it from, perhaps imagining a hearty laugh to be had on foreigners: “He squirts Indian beads, just like a gumball machine. You’ve just got to go up to him and yell real loud. By the way, thanks for the smallpox.”

Abenaki names aside, the rest of the world seems to agree on the unpleasant aroma, which some refer to as a “musk,” and which I feel is like calling the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand “a trifle vexing.” The chemical composition of mephitis mephitis’ spray is, according to Humboldt State University, of a complex nature involving seven major components, around half of which are responsible for the most, well, mephitic, smell. The key to de-skunking, then, is to combat these thiols by changing them into compounds that have less odor. The problem lies in the fact that while these volatile compounds can be battled and changed with something like hydrogen, the less offensive—but still smelly—thioacetate derivatives of these thiols are actually strengthened when combined with water. This, of course, explains the fact that a skunked dog will remain a skunked dog every time it rains for the next three months.

The woman at the vet told me to make up a solution of hydrogen peroxide and dish soap. I doused the dogs, and for about ten minutes, they smelled beautiful. Not only was the skunk gone, the wet dog smell was replaced by a general aroma of clean. I rejoiced. Hooray for hydrogen; the thiols were at bay. But then, predictably, it wore off. And Wet Dog and Skunk, my two new companions, returned like a couple of joyful ferrets, romping about the kitchen, rubbing up against me and asking if I’d missed them.

The smell of skunk became so much a part of my life that I stopped differentiating between skunk and other smells. The odor of my green tea as I drove to work made me flinch; how had Skunk gotten in the car? When kids came to ask me questions in my classroom, I’d interrupt them to say, “Do you smell something?” with an urgency most people save for situations slightly more pressing than the due date of the most recently assigned sonnet.

Wet Dog and Skunk, however, ended up taking a back seat pretty quickly. They were replaced by Phineas, our grumpy neighborhood porcupine.

Here’s what happens when a dog sticks its head into the backside of a porcupine. A lot of quills come out. And they’re not all long and easy to see, like some Mohawk necklace. They’re little and black and hard to get hold of. And they don’t just go into the nose. They go up the nose. They go into the lips. They go on the inside of the lips. They go into the tongue. They go into the gums. They go into the roof of the mouth.

Once the quills are in, though, they don’t just stay put. The barbs on a porcupine quill are fashioned to draw the quill further into the attacker’s flesh, so that every muscle’s motion is a further invitation to jab a few millimeters closer. You can eventually die from this, if you really want to. And even after you die, the quills can continue to work their way in, though it seems to me that by this point they’re wasting their time.

Here’s what else. The dogs have no idea that this has happened. Here’s their take: they see a funny looking rock. It starts to move. They move in for a closer look, and suddenly, a tail shoots out. And while they’re busy yelling, “Hey! Come back! I just want to talk to you!” their crazy owner starts yelling at them. They get dragged home and then, for absolutely no good reason, they are subjected to torture. For doing nothing. That’s my main complaint about porcupines. They have serious design flaws. Because dogs don’t learn. The pain comes later, and is totally disassociated with the actual animal. The actual animal is Phineas, the short and portly chap who sits under my apples trees and eats windfalls with both hands. He makes a sound like an outboard motor if you get too close, but he never stops munching on his apple. This is not a creature you would associate with pain. This is a creature who looks like he should be wearing a waistcoat and pocket watch. The pain is associated with, well, me.

And here’s another thing. Guess how much fun it is to remove porcupine quills from a dog’s nose by yourself. Not much, that’s how much fun. The golden retriever was not a problem; she was monumentally unhappy, but she has a militant sense of rank; she knows that I’m alpha, and if I want to rip things out of her nose, well, that’s my perverse prerogative. The process involved some heart-wrenching whining, and she was upset too, but the whole thing was over fairly quickly.

The lab, however, was a different story. First. They tell you that it’s easier to remove quills if you cut off the tips beforehand. This is only true if you’ve numbed the dog’s entire face. Because otherwise, you’re just messing with a sore spot twice rather than once. So I gave up on that idea fairly quickly. My lab does not have such a great sense of who’s in charge, which means that I was wrestling with an 85 pound dog on my kitchen floor for, well, a while. I came out ahead in the first round, sitting on her back with my legs wrapped around her shoulders and one hand pressing her chin into my knee. I have students who take Jiu-Jitsu, and I’m fairly certain that they would have been proud.

This worked for the outer portion. But then there were the quills under the lips. There were the quills on the gums. And there was the quill at the back of her throat.

For those of you who may someday need to single-handedly remove a porcupine quill from the back of a dog’s throat when the dog is nearly your size and already fairly displeased with you:

Don’t try sweet-talking the dog, because she stopped trusting you the first time you tried, as she sees it, to rip out her tongue. Just tackle her. Once you’ve established who gets to be on top (you want this to be you), grab your pliers. Don’t drop them in the scuffle, because then you’ll just have to crawl across the floor for them, which will cause you to loosen the grip your knees have just purchased around the dog’s neck. You will also need an oven mitt. Wrap your top leg around the dog’s body and use your other leg to kneel on her jaw. Hold the dog’s jaw open with the hand that holds your pliers, and use your teeth to pull on the oven mitt. Stick the mitted hand into the dog’s mouth to force the jaws open wide enough for you to see the inch-long Goddamn-motherloving-useless-piece-of-crap-why-does- God-hate-me-so-much quill suspended from the back of your dog’s mouth. Open the pliers just enough to grasp the quill. Tell your dog, in the most soothing tones you can muster, to stop the histrionics, which will involve a long string of curses and attempts to kill you with a baleful stare. Reach in. Grasp the quill. Yank.

Now yank again. And again. Because a quill covered in a gallon of ropy dog spit will not come out on the first try. Or the second, or the twelfth. But just keep trying. You’ll get it eventually. And your dog will let you keep trying, because it’s not as if having someone try to haul out your uvula is a bad thing. Right?

I did finally get the quill, and the dog did forgive me. The smell is gone from everything, and I’ve finally stopped stepping on random quills that remained on the kitchen floor. Life is good. It’s only two months until the days start getting shorter again. Next time I will be prepared. If anyone wants to help me, we can work a deal. I’ve got this great supply of Indian beads I’ll trade you….