Chipmunks Revisited

For years I have hated the chipmunks who inhabited my yard. They dug under backyard perennials. They deposited dirt on my front yard rockscaping. So for years I fumed helplessly at them.

Last year, Pella inventor Gary Vermeer delightedly reminisced conquering them in childhood with a bucket of water and a dog. Like many Pella natives, he affectionately called them “grinnies.” His dog knew the grinnie procedure so well, that whenever Gary began to fill the bucket, the dog ran to him, already salivating. Gary poured a bucket of water down the grinnie hole, and when it scrambled up to avoid drowning, the dog attacked.

I didn’t have a dog, but I told Gary I could substitute a shovel, and whack the chipmunk when it surfaced.

I didn’t follow through. The thought of blood oozing around a stripe stopped me.

I bought a live-catch trap instead. The first week I caught nothing. I asked my engineer husband to check the trap. “Carol,” he scolded. “The way you’ve set this trap, it would take an elephant to trip it.”

Trap properly set, I began catching them, one after another. I showed my first catch to Gary, and told him I wouldn’t be buying a dog or whacking away with a shovel after all.

I released them on the far side of the Skunk River. Gary teased me they would find their way back across the bridge, but he didn’t convince me.

Some were mature adults, others young. One morning, when I was releasing a young one, I noticed that all the trap’s rubber knobs were gnawed and rough. I knew its mother had been frantically trying to free it in the night. The next day, I was sure I had caught its mother, and promptly brought her to her new riverside home.

I began to picture the Skunk river bank as the site of a vast celebration—a clan of chipmunks rejoicing to be together again and free. I heard them telling stories of their great journeys in the darkness and strange roaring, up hills and down them to this Canaan across the Jordan.

This spring, the Skunk River flooded not only the bank but acres and acres of adjacent farmland. I concluded the great flood of 2008 had ended the great reunion.

I was surprisingly sad.

But I have begun repopulating their promised land, and I will continue to do so as long as they continue to propagate in my yard.

Someday, ages hence, I may even start calling them “grinnies.”

The Twentieth Chipmunk

Last summer I trapped sixteen chipmunks. This summer I had trapped just two more— chipmunks nineteen and twenty, caught in the act of eating together.

I took them across two rivers to release them—as I had seventeen previous chipmunks. (One had died of dehydration and desperation in the August sun.)

These sibling chipmunks waited for their release overnight and through a mild June morning. I went through the usual ritual, placing the cage in a plastic box to protect my trunk from chipmunk pee, driving across Thunder Creek and the Skunk River, pointing the cage toward the tall grass and opening the cage.

Chipmunk nineteen rocketed toward the grass, as had its previous seventeen relatives. But chipmunk twenty wrapped its claws around the cage floor. I turned the trap upside and it clung more tightly to what was now its ceiling. I up-ended it and it remained fixed to the wall. I finally shook its cage, producing level 5 earthquakes in its mini-world. It plunged reluctantly into the grass and crouched there without moving.

In fairness to number twenty, I don’t think he was feeling well. His fur was a bit matted, and he looked a bit thin. Perhaps he had the beginning of dehydration—his sibling must been more hydrated when their foray into the cage began. Or perhaps he had chipmunk flu. Or maybe he had heard horror stories about chipmunks drowning in their bottomland homes in the Iowa floods of ’08.

But, whatever the reason, he chose the familiar cage instead of the freedom of the grass.

Foolish chipmunk.

Foolish me.