I Win the War...Kind Of

Don't be obsessed with your desires Danny. The Zen philosopher, Basho, once wrote, 'A flute with no holes, is not a flute. A donut with no hole, is a Danish.' He was a funny guy. …

I'm going to give you a little advice. There's a force in the universe that makes things happen. And all you have to do is get in touch with it, stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball.

                                       ~Ty Webb from the movie Caddyshack

I am happy to report that Mr. Mole appears to have departed the garden. I don’t know if it left because of my efforts or on its own accord. It occurs to me that moles may be like those wandering eccentric comets that come close to the earth and then head out into space on weird orbits that may or may not bring them back to our vicinity some unspecified time in the future. I mean it must be hard to know where you’re going when you’re tunneling through the earth—kind of like a person walking around with his head up his ass.

At some point in the war against Mr. Mole I started wearing my boony hat whenever I went to the garden. I was inspired by the character of Carl in Caddyshack:

 License to kill gophers by the government of the United Nations. Man, free to kill gophers at will. To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong - Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that's all she wrote.

Obviously, I don’t know if the mole is dead or alive. I put the mole trap out, placed poison pellets in a couple of the mole runs and used two solar powered devices that periodically emit a chittering sound that is supposed to imitate a mole distress sound. I suspect these devices are better at snaring suckers like me than frightening off moles. Even though the mole is gone for now I’ve kept them in the garden. I find the sound of a distressed mole oddly comforting which suggests either I do not have mole in my background or that I’m a sadistic S.O.B. when it comes to small furry animals with paddle feet.

A few days after I put the trap out I discovered it had been triggered but I couldn’t find a punctured mole underneath it. To resurrect a Vietnam War era phrase I was looking for body count. Fighting a mole is a lot like fighting against a guerilla war—it’s sometimes difficult to tell how effective your efforts are. I’d like to believe that I wounded the mole, and it crawled away to die a horribly painful death but then I also like to think that I am the most interesting man in the world.

I lost track of the location of the poison pellets. If this blog should suddenly stop come harvest time and my obituary reads that I died of poisoning you will know that the mole won in the end. I’m not sure whether that would be categorized as irony, comedy or tragedy.

I’d be happy if the mole left simply because it got tired of me stepping on all its tunnels. At least then I would know that my efforts to defeat Mr. Mole were a relevant factor. The truth is that my efforts probably had nothing to do with the mole’s departure. Once again nature demonstrates how futile and insignificant man is in the scheme of things.

Being retired gives you the time to draw lessons like that from relatively minor life experiences. I was about to say that the reason for that is because relatively minor life experiences is about all you can hope for after retirement but that’s not true. What is true is that you have more time to cogitate when you’re not spending most of your time working or worrying about work. So I end with these words of wisdom from Caddyshack:

Remember Danny - Two wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left.