I Am Being Menaced by a Retarded Squirrel...

A disturbing incident occurred just now.

I write on the third floor of my house in a garret room (I believe this is named after Mrs. Garrett on The Facts of Life but I'm not sure).

Usually it is pleasantly quiet, and I have a lovely, wide, gracious view from my window. This view includes the Susquehanna river and some of its small islands inhabited only by indigent, predictably jobless wildlife, which in wintertime rather resembles an ashy watercolor by John Marin. And Harrisburg's admittedly unpugnacious skyline. My garbage cans, which I sometimes soliloquize. The crazy man who works in the alley making tables that stand on taxidermied deer legs to sell to the furniture-challenged at flea markets on Sundays.

The usual stuff.

Anyhoo, I heard this scutter or scuttling over my head.

It wasn't "a pair of ragged claws." My house isn't that Eliotesque.

It was the one word that probably galvanizes my autonomic nervous system as powerfully as "Shark!" sets a sailor's adrenal glands to ringing...and that word is "SQUIRREL!".

I have been warned by neighbors that the squirrels round these parts seem to have mutated into a truly aggressive territorially expansionist lot.

These are no ordinary squirrels. They are Genghis Khan squirrels. Ataturk squirrels. Mongol squirrels.

We have gas heat. They want gas heat. Nature is mostly simple equations like this.

They will find any slight chink in the armor of your house, any gap of a half inch or so, and work it with the pyschoticism with which Emily Dickinson worked a hyphen.

I once had one make an incursion into the attic right behind where I sit and I am proud to say I went into full berzerker mode.

The neighbors had done their job of setting me into crazed vigilante vigilance mode.

I could still hear their voices echoing in my head. "Oh once, they get set up in there, you're as good as done. They litter frequently and then the chewing begins and the real problems start from there. Money you can't imagine."

"They litter frequently?"

I didn't know if this was the old gentleman's way of implying that the squirrels have the icky slobbishness of say your average taxi driver, or whether this was his coy way of alluding to the squirrel's propensity to ignore Malthusian cautions on overpopulation. Nor did I want to know.

Either scenario made my flesh crawl.

So when I heard that scuttering across my roof shingles, I sprang into what I hoped would be irrational, efficacious action.

I grabbed a mailing tube with metal lids on the end and began pounding on the wall like one of those Hindu ascetics beating the street and chanted with about the same ferocity.

There seemed to be a momentary silence in which the squirrel was clearly carefully gauging his insanity against mine.

And he apparently decided I had won, as I joyfully heard him scuttering away and a blessed non-Cagean silence (with the exception of the cartoon voices in my head) reigned once more in my cuckoo aerie.

But this squirrel tonight!

This squirrel was over my head! In more ways than one. On the roof moving back and forth, using Clint Eastwoodish tactics to keep me guessing.

This squirrel had game.

I went for The Mailing Tube of Death and began banging on the ceiling and walls, hoping the squirrel would think martial and not musical.

But this squirrel kept up the minatory pitter-patter of rodent obduracy. It was psy-war with a tail. The worst kind.

It was now dark outside and what well-bred squirrel stays out after dark?!?

It was freaking me the hell out.

The more I beat against the ceiling with my mailing tube, the more he seemed to be homing in on my signal.

And then I realized. My god.

This freakin' beastie thinks I am trying to communicate interspecially with him!

Leave it to me to get the Dian Fossey of squirrels on my roof seemingly beginning what might turn out to be a lifelong scholarly love. Studying me and the effect he has on me.

Make no mistake, Mr. Overbite. We will not appear together on the cover of National Geographic magazine in a photo of extremely uncomfortable chumminess.

I thought about going outside and trying to spot him on the roof, possibly throwing something up there, but what if it lodges on the roof? It wouldn't be prudent to give him a victory this early in what may turn out to be a long war. He would surely be emboldened as Hitler was when he took Poland for his morning constitutional.

And it's winter, so the hose is packed away and that wouldn't be prudent either. To have my neighbors see me hosing my roof in the dead of winter as night falls.

The talking might be elevated from the normal Orange Alert with me to something much worse.

Oh listen.

Silence falls again like a warm blanket on Linus.

At last. But for how long?

Quo vadis, Squirrel?

I am afraid to admit I hear that movie preview voice in my head. You know the one, the guy with the James Earl Jones serious voice that says "So it begins...

I hate that guy.