Tails from Ibbetson St.

When I was 22 years old and a new college graduate, broke and working a mindless job while I tried to figure out what it was that I was going to do with the rest of my life, I lived with three roommates in a falling-down triple-decker apartment building at the top of a hill and had adventures.  

We moved in the week after college graduation and found that the previous tenants, all graduating law students, had left most of their furniture behind. We were pleasantly surprised; after four years of campus living, none of us had any furniture, nor did we have the money even for a frugal trip to the nearest Ikea. It didn’t matter that the sofa was uncomfortable, or that one of the kitchen chairs repeatedly fell apart at random when sat upon.  

We quickly made friends with our upstairs neighbors who were also recent college graduates. They were four men to our four women and, like us, hailed from far-flung places. In a testament to how small the world has become, one of the guys was dating a woman who turned out to be the childhood friend of my Singaporian roommate. The discovery was made when they bumped into each other at our subway stop and found that they were going to the same destination, fourteen years and thousands of miles away from the last time they had met.   

As summer transitioned into winter, the house started to show its age. We discovered cracks between the window edges and the wall that allowed the New England cold to seep into the living room, and even gave rise to the occasional palpable gust of wind if you were standing close enough. It quickly became apparent that the walls were inadequately insulated- if they were insulated at all. We came to rely on space heaters so much that one of the upstairs neighbors left for two weeks at Christmas and accidentally left his space heater on- a mistake only discovered at the arrival of that month’s electricity bill. In retrospect, the greatest Christmas miracle that year was that the apartment didn’t burn down around us.

Our uninvited guest arrived around that time. I imagine that, like us, he was cold and tired of the snow, and probably dreading the months ahead of endless grey skies and slogging through slush. I really can’t blame him for taking advantage of an opportunity to stay in a nice warm house with plenty of food. 

The first clue to his arrival was the sound of something moving in the ceiling. In true horror movie fashion, it started at night, after we had all retired to our rooms. I was reading in bed when I heard something scurrying above me. It paused for a few minutes, then started up again, moving towards the kitchen.  

I opened my bedroom door. “Hey guys, did you hear anything just now?” I called down the hallway.

“Yeah,” my roommate Ming called back. “What was that?”  

The sound of our voices seemed to spook the critter, because it went quiet immediately and I didn’t hear it for the rest of the night.

A few days later I went into the kitchen in the morning to find that a hole had been chewed in one of the ceiling tiles above the refrigerator. Our guest had also gnawed away the corner of a cereal box and helped himself to the bounty within, before leaving other, squishier, signs of his presence.  

Totally grossed out, we disposed of the droppings and covered the kitchen in disinfectant, then called an emergency building meeting. 

Our upstairs neighbors had also heard the sound of running in their walls, but had yet to experience any home invasion. Their biggest complaint was the rising boldness of the animal. Though we’d been able to scare him into silence that first night with only the sound of our conversation, he was no longer wary of human voices. Now, he seemed to spend the evenings running laps around the walls of the apartment.  

We called our landlord. Often absent and aways inattentive, he accepted the idea of a rodent invader with malignant nonchalance. After a few days, he stopped by the apartment to to set up a humane, large, cage-like trap in the middle of our living room. Then he told us to call him when we caught the thing, and once again disappeared from our lives. We were on our own.

How do you pick appropriate bait for an unknown invader? We had no idea what our mystery runner could be. Skunk, squirrel, Rodent Of Unusual Size? Its nightly forays into our pantry suggested it had a sweet tooth, so for our first experiment we set out some Honey Nut Cheerios in the designated area of the trap. 

It turns out that we were up against a rodent mastermind. That night, we were subject to the usual running and squeaking and scrabbling sounds in the walls as soon as we all turned in to bed, and in the morning rodent droppings littered our living room and kitchen. The Honey Nut Cheerios remained untouched in the cage. There was a small pile of scat right in front of the cage, as if the critter had stopped there for a while, weight the risks and benefits, and decided that Cheerios just weren’t worth it. 

Over the course of the next five nights, we baited our trap with an orange, banana slices, a handful of walnuts, then pecans, and finally Raisin Bran, but to no avail. Nothing we set out could entice our unwanted guest into the cage. 

Growing desperate, we smeared two spoonfuls of peanut butter in a bowl and set it in the middle of the trap.  

A loud clanging sound woke me in the dark hours of the morning. At first I was confused- had something fallen to the ground? Did we have an intruder in the house? No. The sound of frantic clawing and more metallic banging emanated from the living room. About damn time, I thought, silently exalting our victory.  

The next morning, we gathered to observe our foe: a small but tenacious squirrel who gave us stare for stare from behind the bars of the cage. His fluffy tail, almost twice the size of his scrawny body, whipped back and forth angrily.  

That afternoon, our landlord arrived to take him away. “I’ll set him loose in the arboretum,” he reassured us.  

That was the last we saw of the squirrel, but certainly not the last of our adventures in the dilapidated house on Ibbetson St.