Just like that, my daily morning routine of walking in Soaring Eagle state park came to an end. Not one, but three signs were posted by the trailhead: recent cougar activity reported. The signs were white with red lettering, all caps, the word cougar underlined and italicized. There was no ignoring that.

My neighbor Tom said someone probably just saw the cougar that’s been there for years.

So I took a different walk, around our neighborhood, and figured this was pretty good too. It went through the rock meadow neighborhood past the equestrian center and large homes, then looped along the hay-covered horse trails that are normally too muddy to take come fall.

There was also the Buddhist temple up the hill I could explore: it had a pink facade like a birthday cake with people in colorful robes hurrying there before 0600 every day. I often saw them on my way driving home from the park and wondered what that was all about. It just said Vedic Center outside and they had a vegetarian food truck with happy characters painted on the side. I wondered if they sang or spoke in Sanskrit. Or if Sanskrit was even something you could speak.

I’d wanted to be out backpacking most of the week rather than face living alone, with the rest of the family out of town. But it wasn’t so bad after all. I chainsawed a large bough off a sickly tree, the perfect excuse to get my logger chaps out and assemble my new safety helmet with the built-in visor and ear muffs. I probably looked pretty silly to our ex-Marine neighbor Kyle when I asked if he could hold the ladder while I got up high and balanced myself with the saw. But I said Dawn would be glad I’d taken steps to be careful while she was gone. It came down no problem. So I sawed considerably more, feeling strong.

Then I went after the moles. We’ve had moles messing up our yard for 15 years now. On this Saturday I decided to take them on.

Watching DIY videos on how to trap moles is literally like going down a rabbit hole, or mole run, getting in the heads of all these weird men (they are always men) who fancy themselves experts in rodent capture. You get the exterminator vibe with the would-be YouTuber, a strange combination. They all like a specific kind of trap, most, the scissor traps that snap shut and seize the mole in its place until you yank them out of the ground, dead. Part of me had a soft spot for the moles’ cartoon hands and snout but then another part of me just wanted them dead.

Men who trap moles have a bizarre, persnickety quality and I fit the bill. I got a large bucket of repellent too. There was a high likelihood it wouldn’t work and would confound me but that was fine too, even better. We had another ten years in this house, maybe more.

The house was taking on that look of a bachelor, as my two single uncles’ houses looked: less a look of manhood and more just the absence of woman.

Being the persnickety type in our household you would think the house would look pristine with my family gone but instead I let it lapse with partly used paper towels by the sink left there for reuse, maps and ziploc bags splayed out in the den, my hiking gaiters balled-up by the front door, trekking poles leaned in the corner. I guess I surrounded myself with the things I loved as a kind of distraction.

I took myself out for a burger but there was no fun in that, I just did the drive thru. And thought about my two uncles, one my mom’s brother Dave and the other my dad’s brother Jim: I pictured the two of them home alone on a Saturday night like me, talking to their pets, eating alone. No rush to do the dishes. Probably knew a thing or two about moles.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Errata, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, humor, Memoir, pacific northwest