My parents went down to Rochester for Father's surgery Sunday afternoon. Smooth sailing for me, I thought -- 2 1/2 days of the house all to myself, I can sleep in my sister's better bed and bedroom, I can throw all my dirty clothes wherever the fuck I want, and I can bring over my ATF, ***e*, for some fun handjobbin'.
But first, exercising at night, when I want! And since Sunday was Daylight Saving Time, when I left around 7, there was still a little daylight when I went to my car.
And so I was able to spot the dead squirrel on the driveway.
I had just opened the door and looked at the left side of the driveway, the side where my parents usually park their minivan. Through all the dirty ice melting in the spring-though-it-feels-more-like-winter sun, I looked down and saw this fuzzy lump. "No," I thought to myself, "that can't be a squirrel." And so I creep up on it, afraid that it'll scurry away or toward me.
But no, it was dead. It looked alive, however. It was fully formed, just a lump, though a big lump, like a rat you'd see in New York City. In fact, it was weird to see that the only part of the squirrel that was flattened, which one would expect to see when encountering roadkill, was the head. The rest of it was ... body-like, you know? Let me put it to you this way: Do you know those pastry bags, the ones that chefs cradle with both hands, one at the nose and the other at the butt end, and he or she squeezes with one hand the pastry through the nozzle? Say that that chef pushed that, uh, dough so that one quarter of it is all smushed. Now, put it in a squirrel shape and it'd look like this dead squirrel.
OK, maybe that's a horrible way to describe it. All's I'm saying is that the body looked normal but the head was completely run over, and that's weird. What's even weirder is that you would expect a run-over head to have blood splattered all over the place, but there wasn't. It's as if when my parents ran the squirrel over its brains didn't burst through its eyes or ears but was just pushed down into its body. It was a clean kill.
Assuming it was a kill. First of all, how did my parents not notice a dead squirrel? And second of all, how does a squirrel not hear my parents' footsteps going towards their car, let alone the sound of the engine? Maybe it just died there well before the minivan ran it over (assuming it did run it over). Or the squirrel was either deaf or stupid and just was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Regardless of the manner, it still gobsmacks me to see roadkill not on the road, but in our driveway. Drivewaykill, so to speak.
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That basically ruined my day. First thing I did was use the shovel to see if I could get rid of it right then and there, but the squirrel apparently was fused with the ice below it. Maybe the cold body helped to shield that piece of ice from melting from the sun. And I couldn't get beneath the squirrel body to pick up the entire plate of ice it was under.
I didn't want to think about it at the gym, but that's all I could think about while working out. I had to get rid of it, but how? And who the hell ever had to remove a dead squirrel from their driveway? The logistics overwhelmed and thus discouraged me.
All I could do upon getting home is use the ice scraper from the back deck and try to get put it in a trash bag to throw the squirrel away under the cover of darkness at one of the local gas stations' trash cans. But that too proved impossible; the scraper would only manage to slide over the ice, and it was too dark for me to really dig under that because I didn't want the scraper to touch any part of the squirrel. Shit, I was afraid that if I accidentally touched it it would wake up and bite me, and then I would get rabies. After a couple minutes I decided to give up and try again after work the next day. Maybe the sun would melt the ice and make picking it up easier.
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And what do you know, it worked! The sun Monday managed to melt a lot if ice surrounding the dead squirrel, and getting the ice scraper under the ice underneath the squirrel was a lot easier. I was also lucky that the body was intact; if it were splattered all over the place like I thought roadkill usually looked like, I would have to be shoveling pieces of it into the bag. So I was thus able to think of it like a Neapolitan pizza, and the ice scraper was one of those huge paddles that you use to slip that pizza into a wood-fired oven, except that I didn't expect the squirrel to be so heavy. Well, I didn't really expect it to be light. Actually, I didn't know what to expect when I picked it up.
Looking at it up close it was kind of eerie, and kind of beautiful. I was picking up a dead soul, and even though I wanted this thing to be gone from our property, I still fretted about just throwing it away, which is what Animal Control said to do. (Oh yeah, I should backtrack ... during my lunch break I looked up my city website and it said that I should call 911 if I had a question about roadkill removal. When I did, I got the feeling that the woman from Animal Control thought I was stupid to ask a question with an obvious answer. Babe, I ask again: Who the hell has experience disposing of roadkill?) I was fortunate that the squirrel was in one piece, and that the ice beneath it didn't break it when I picked it up. Going closer to get more control over the squirrel, I noticed the fur, the beautiful, tough fur on it. And this thing was huge. Maybe they normally are that big, but they're usually running finding food or raping female squirrels, and so I didn't notice. I wanted to touch it, but again, I was scared that the squirrel was, well, playing possum, and when I touched it it would raise its squished head, zombie eyes bulging, and bite my head, thus giving me rabies.
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How to dispose of it? I was going to use the plastic grocery bag from the laundry room, but then I remembered I have used plastic bags I used to carry fallen leaves all the way to the county landfill in the trunk of my car. Better to keep the bag in the laundry room; besides, turns out that the squirrel was so big it wouldn't have fit into the bag.
I didn't want to lay down the trash bag(s) on the wet driveway, so what I thought I would do is to hold the bag in one hand and just toss the squirrel off of the ice scraper with the other hand into the bag. (So much for a dignified disposal.) But the squirrel was bigger, as well as heavier than I thought. Still didn't want to touch it, so I used three used trash bags that were in my trunk. I would lay down one and put the squirrel on, not in, it, lay the bag and dead squirrel on top of another bag, then throw the entire thing in a third bag. I had to lay down that third bag, so the inside of my trunk is wet and dirty as hell, even though it probably was both already. But I managed to ensure, I think, that that dead squirrel body didn't touch either me or the inside of my car.
My intention then was to go to the gas station (in the middle of afternoon rush, where people would be milling about, but dem's the breaks) and take off the lid off one of the receptacles to open up the mouth of the thing so I can gently lay the squirrel in its final resting place. But when I tried doing that it wouldn't slowly slide down into the plastic trash bin. I then saw that the body was "blocked" on one side by the towel holder. My dreams of placing it the squirrel in with dignity wound up with me shoving it in, either head or tail first.
Then I went home, saw there was a piece of brain or detritus or something on the driveway, scraped that up with the scraper and wiped it off by shoving the scraper into the snowpack. And then I was done, having grown from the experience of disposing a dead squirrel from our driveway.
But seriously, though: How the fuck does a squirrel just die on our driveway?
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