The Family Downstairs © 1993 by Chris Wood (reprinted with permission) The owner had been waiting for a buyer like me. He led me quickly through several small, dark rooms until we left the house and stood on the hill above with a splendid view of the distant mountains. "There are several people interested," he told me. "I think it will sell tonight. My wife hates to leave. I'm selling cheap because she'll change her mind if she has time to think." It was a litany of real estate cliches. I raced back with the earnest money. His wife seemed pretty cheerful. The next morning I left to earn the balance of the down payment and didn't return until moving day. For a week I studied the house. The side walls were only six feet tall, framed 1 1/2 in. thick and sheathed inside with boards, tin scraps, cardboard and wallpaper. The floor joists were 2x4s, spaced 24 in. apart. I thought the house had a partial foundation, then learned the difference between a foundation and a footing. The house was built on a partial footing, with untreated sills on - or just below - ground level. My intent was to build a foundation that summer, but I postponed the project. A foundation under such a house would have been pearls below swine. The short walls, and shorter doorways, provided friends with an endless source for dwarf jokes. They laughed heartily, then clobbered themselves on the way out. I looked forward to months of remodeling, and entertained visitors (each with a lump on the forehead) with my visions for the future. I enjoyed the view and bent over often to look out the windows. One spring evening I was in the kitchen, with a cake baking in the oven and a cold beer in my hand, when the air suddenly turned the texture of warm molasses. It was thick and sweet, yet putrid and suffocating. For a moment I froze, nearly nauseous, then bolted for the door. Outside, the smell was familiar: skunk. It was bad, like nasal meltdown. I took a deep breath, rushed inside, turned off the oven, grabbed a sleeping bag, and left for the sanctuary at the home of friends who welcomed me to sleep on the couch, after asking that I undress outdoors. In the next six months I became expert in the folklore of skunk prevention. I used chicken wire and screening to close gaps under the house, and discovered that skunks can both climb and dig. I doused the perimeter with vinegar and lemon juice. After hearing that skunks avoid brightly lit areas, I put more light under the house than I had indoors. I sprinkled flour in suspected areas and was able to monitor their traffic, but I couldn't affect it. I learned that some neighbors had hired a trapper who charged $30 per animal to catch and dispose of skunks. He caught nine for them, and they had a foundation. My budget just didn't permit a full-time trapper. Other remedies didn't seem to work on them; in fact, nothing deterred them. I even placed a large speaker face down, blocked it slightly off the floor to maximize sound transfer, and played "Help, I'm a rock" at high volume for six straight hours. Judging from the sprinkled flour, they never went out that night, choosing instead to stay in their private, well-lit skunk disco. To prevent them from digging their way in, I surrounded the part of the house that lacked a footing with cedar stakes, 356 of them in all, pounded into the ground at 3-in. intervals. One night I returned home to find two skunks pacing around the outside of the house, pawing at the cedar pegs. Under siege indoors, I sat and listened into the night and eventually heard them scurrying under the living room, where the soil was just six inches beneath the floor. To add insult, they began to make a sound I'd never heard, an eerie whining - the sound of skunk love. With a sledge hammer I attacked the floor, but they moved under the next room and continued their whining passion. The thought of skunk procreation put me over the edge. I grabbed a packet of firecrackers, went outside and began tossing them under the house from all sides. It was 3 a.m. and I was blowing up my own home. Neighborhood relationships would never be the same. I was at war, and the skunks had scored a major psychological triumph. A new round of flour tracking reveled that they were passing under the house between two stakes placed 3 1/4 in. apart. Incredulous but determined, I went around the house and pounded a new stake between each pair - bringing the total to 712 - and bought another sack of flour. For two days there were no tracks in the flour that surrounded the house. But indoors the smell of skunk persisted, so I knew they were trapped in the crawl space. I could have starved them; my humane instincts had been smothered months earlier. For weeks I had daydreamed about a 220-volt food dish. Though cruelty was no obstacle, a third of the crawl space was inaccessible. There would be no way to remove them if they did starve. They had to stay alive unil I found a way to get them out. The old dwarf jokes had long ago turned into dwarf skunk jokes, and I forsaw a new genre of humor springing from the cat food that I now tossed under the house every morning. I never saw the skunks, but the food disappeared. I wanted to open an escape hole but feared that their friends would move in, once they heard about the cat food. Finally, necessity mothered a one-way skunk exit. It was fashioned from ten 16d nails, each sharpened on a grinder and angled through a board three inches apart, so that the points protruded. At a spot where the skirt of the house nearly reached the ground, I pounded a line of skunk stakes flush with the earth and attached the board with its spikes angled at 45 degrees down and away from the house, leaving four inches between the sharp tips and the ground. I then cut off their food, and that night my skunks squeezed past the nails and never returned. Story Index