I’ve been attacked by animals my entire life. It’s not that I’m looking for a fight. I’m actually a big fan of nature and its inhabitants, but for some reason they really want to bite me.
Just this morning I had a squirrel throw a nut at me. A squirrel’s entire existence is finding and saving nuts. It’s pretty much their only job. And yet this squirrel took one look at me sipping my coffee on the back patio, hauled off, and threw it at my head.
I know on a global scale humans are killing off a lot of the animals and leaving a barren planet in our wake. There isn’t a nature documentary that doesn’t end with sad music, smokestacks, and Morgan Freeman telling us how awful mankind is. But from where I’m standing, the animals aren’t so great either.
And I’m not in Montana or in some national park; I’m staying at my sister’s house in New Jersey. When you hear “New Jersey,” wildlife isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But trust me, they’re here and they’re just as mean and bullying as everyone else in New Jersey.
There’s a fat mourning dove sitting under the eave of the roof off the kitchen. Apparently it’s been there for weeks. There’s suspicion that she’s sitting on an egg and waiting for it to hatch. I went out to look at it and another bird, probably her boyfriend, flew at my head as a warning shot. The mama bird gave me a dismissive look. The squirrel laughed from the fence.
Birds have been attacking me for years. When I was in third grade we moved to a new house. It was exciting, and on moving day, as my parents were doing all the moving, I was running around exploring the house. I was checking out all the important spots: my new room, the backyard, and more important where I’d be watching nonstop TV. I was running, jumping, and filled with joy. And then I went into the basement.
Basements are always a little scary. Something about going down, underneath the life of the house, gives one pause. You can be in the nicest house there is, filled with love and fresh-baked cookies, and you open that basement door, start walking down the stairs, and your heart skips a beat. There’s a reason scary movies don’t take place in the kitchen: that’s not where the evil is—that’s in the basement.
What made this even scarier was that this wasn’t some fancy finished basement with carpeted stairs. This was a cellar. A dingy, musty-smelling cellar where they bury the bodies and the bad guys tie the good guy to a chair and torture him for information. Where Satan himself would patiently wait among skulls and demons for you to visit on the first day in your new house.
I took a deep breath and headed down. Each creaky step was speaking to me in a new way, in a much different language from that of the stairs in my old home. It was unclear what they were saying, but it seemed to have something to do with death.
When I finally got to the bottom I thought I was safe. The fear subsided. It was just a basement. It wasn’t so bad. And then, out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. Something black moving across the ceiling. The kind of image that you think might be a shadow or something in your eyelash. But then it turned and came back in the other direction, letting out a screeching, unholy scream.
Holy demonballs!
It thrashed back and forth across the room. Shrieking in a foreign tongue that it was going to kill me by eating my face and working its way down to my sneakers. I couldn’t move. All I could do was watch as it turned and came for me, hitting me square in the chest. I wet my pants.
I turned and started to run, or rather I tried to run, tried my best to get back up those steps. But I was falling and shaking and screaming a silent scream that would not come out of my mouth. My legs were useless, so I tried pulling myself up by my arms instead. I lost a shoe. I slid back down. I lost the other shoe. The beast cackled and picked up speed.
Frantically scrambling on all fours, fueled by terror, I made my way to the top of this hellish place.
My parents found me in a heap, one sock missing, the other hanging off my foot like a worm. My father yelled at me to stop crying. All I could do was point to the underworld like that kid in The Shining after he met those twin girls.
My father went downstairs, thinking I was ridiculous, and within a second there was another shriek. The beast was upon him.
“Holy shit!” he said. “It’s a crow. A gigantic crow!”
He was right. A giant black crow was trying to escape through closed windows. Its wings, its evil feet, and its murderous face all joined together in hell’s fury and was attacking my father.
I passed out.
This is how it goes with the animals and me. Most people would see a friendly wren or a cartoon hummingbird carrying a flower in its beak. I was visited by a death bird, normally found on top of a gravestone or sitting on Edgar Allan Poe’s shoulder.
I’ve had a seagull take a crap on me at a wedding, a hawk take a piece of chicken off my plate, and some kamikaze bird fly into my helmet when I was taking my motorcycle test. And when they’re not attacking it’s only because they’re watching me from telephone wires and through open windows, devising their next plan.
It’s not just birds. It’s all sorts of animals. As a small child I was sitting in our living room, peacefully playing with my Hot Wheels, when out of nowhere, like an attack from above, a raccoon fell down the chimney and landed with a thud into the fireplace. He was scared. I was shocked. We both started screaming.
The thing you have to know about raccoons is that they have human hands and are smarter than most teenagers. As I stood there in shock, holding two toy cars, he slowly climbed over the fireplace fence. His eyes were staring me down, telling me not to say a word, and when he knew he was in control, he took off into the kitchen.
When you hear your mother screaming for her life in another room, you worry about her. When you see her run past you in the living room and out the front door, you worry about yourself. When she pokes her head back in the door and yells for you to run, you do as you’re told.
I ran outside and she slammed the front door closed, locking the raccoon inside. “The cookies!” my mother yelled.
“Nooooo,” I cried.
Slowly, we went back inside and thankfully the raccoon was gone and the cookies were untouched. Had he used his human hands to climb back up the fireplace? We were confused, but we were safe. We hugged and laughed and just as I reached for a cookie, he jumped off the top cabinet like a ninja and slammed onto the tray. My mother screamed. The raccoon screamed.
I wet my pants.
Eventually my mother got him out of the house with a broom, and without thinking that we might contract rabies, we ate the cookies and drank some milk.
I’m surprised I never got a disease from all these animal encounters. There was ample opportunity to come down with something. It seems like every other person I know has Lyme disease. The entire East Coast is crawling with deer ticks that burrow through your skin and into your bloodstream just because you dared to leave your house.
A tick is smaller than a sesame seed. Not a sesame-seed bagel, a single seed. And you have to check yourself every time you come back inside to make sure that you don’t have one digging through your skin and swimming around through your bloodstream for all of eternity. Enjoy your hike.
You might get lucky and have the bull’s-eye-shaped rash on your body, which is how your body reacts when a tick decides to live inside you. It’s a red ring with a bull’s-eye center. But if you don’t get lucky and detect it early enough, you’ll end up with Lyme disease, lose all your energy and your mind. That’s fun.
The deer in New Jersey, who carry the ticks on their bodies like jewelry, are staging their own takeover. They’re everywhere. Driving around my sister’s neighborhood is like going through some weird animal haunted house where deer pop out from behind every tree.
I don’t have a great history with these creatures either. I was attacked by a deer at a wedding when I was younger. (See Book I.) My girlfriend and I hit a deer with her car, and for years they would charge at us as if the rest of the herd hadn’t forgotten about it.
There’s no way around it, the animals hate me. I’ve been bit by a crab on my crotch and stung in the face by a jellyfish. I had a moose chase me down a hiking trail because I came too close to its daughter. I once woke up with a cockroach in my mouth. I’ve been stung by bees and wasps and bitten by spiders all in the same day. I wouldn’t be surprised to come out of my house in the morning to find a group of wild dogs stealing my car.
The lesson I’ve learned from all these attacks is that we shouldn’t underestimate the animals. Nature is tough to stop. Even in New York City. Pigeons are an unstoppable force, ducks and seagulls are all over the parks. And of course there’s the main animal, the one that occupies even more space than all the people in all the buildings: the rats.
Rats are everywhere.
No one is making a documentary about the rats with the sad final scene of the humans doing them in. That’s not happening. The rats are dominant. The rats are growing. The rats will outlast us. The polar bears would do well to spend some time with the rats.
They’re everywhere. Every restaurant in New York has a rating on its window, a letter grade that tells customers how clean they are. All those letters really show is how the owners are doing in their battle to the death versus the rats.
They ride the subway, they eat in cafés, they crap on sidewalks and in utensil drawers. They work alone, they work in pairs, and they roam the streets in gangs. They are the ultimate recyclers. There’s no such thing as garbage to a rat. Nothing goes to waste when the rats come to town.
I’ve seen entire streets that at first glance seem to be moving, that were really just covered with rats. My wife walked by the iconic New York Public Library steps where the proud lion statues sit out front, covered with rats. It was as if the rats were letting everyone know that in this urban jungle there was a very different king.
We are the visitors. The animal kingdom ain’t no joke. And what about germs? Are we counting germs? Those microscopic beings who are quietly getting stronger and fighting off all the antibiotics we can come up with? Flu bugs, allergy bugs, they’re everywhere, and all the antiseptic hand washes and antibacterial lotions are just pushing them to the side for a moment. They float in the air, dance on handrails, and fly right up your nose.
As far as I’m concerned, the animals win. I give up. And you should, too. Let’s make a deal. If they want the outdoors, they can have it. We’ll stay inside the air-conditioned safety of a restaurant and watch them through the window as long as they agree to stay out there.
But I don’t trust they will.