Josh & Kristin —vs— Templeton & his Rat Army

Only one could emerge victorious.

Portland is known for many things: her Rose Test Gardens, her White Stag sign, and her glittering Willamette, cutting right through . . . but it is because of that same river that Portland is also notorious for another, far less distinctive honor: rats. Any place graced with a river loves a rat, and thus, coupled with the mighty Columbia, we are positively surrounded. Portland and rats go together like ka dinga da dinga dong.

This is the way that it’s always been, but somehow, before this <painfully protracted> period of my life, I had never actually seen a rat in the wild. Battling rats had never before been a feature in my life, and if someone had told me that my future struggle would be an epic, years-long war which would utterly consume our lives, I wouldn’t have really believed it, because how smart can a rat be? I’ve got a devious mind to make fell plans. They’re rats. They’re not going to outsmart me.

Well . . . scratch that. Maybe they will. Maybe they’re going to absolutely control my life. Because we got the Bobby-Fischer-On-The-Type-Of-Steroids-That-Make-You-Kill-Your-Family rats. I’m not saying that facetiously. I only wish! No, some rat expert came out (and when I say “rat expert”, I mean, this dude actually went to university and got a masters in species rattus) and he literally said: “Your rats are far, far bolder and brasher than are ordinary rats, because your previous neighbors have been living with them like you live with your dogs. This bold knowledge is imprinted onto the brain of any baby rats, like a memory, and so it becomes habitual and the behaviors escalate.”

And as far as the steroid analogy — the rats did kill their family. When they got hungry enough, they started cannibalizing each other, and it was Rat Fight Night every night. Screamin’ and murderin’ for hours.

So . . . excuse me while I barf out my eyes . . . .

This is not how the story starts, however. The story begins — I’m not exaggerating — over twenty years ago, with our two-doors down neighbor, Joy. This is how serious the rat legacy is on Senate St — it’s been going on for decades, and the rats here are as powerful and relentless as the Borgias.

So, Joy. What do I know about Joy? Almost nothing — I really only found out about her after she died. She was a very tiny, ancient Chinese lady who had an enormous photograph on the wall of her dead, high-ranking military husband, staid in his Chinese dress blues. (I only went to her house once. The smell was too oppressive and punishing to stay.) She didn’t speak English too well, and she was zany, and she would come over and take our cans. Oftentimes, as a thank you, she would leave paper plates of positively disgusting looking food on our porch. Josh once ate a potsticker thing and almost vomited; he swears to this day that the filling was cat food.

Joy died. After she died, her children wanted to sell the house; but first, it had to be decontaminated by men in hazmat suits, because she was a clinical hoarder. Among other things, Joy had apparently been attracting rats — lots of them.

Now, Joy, who lived two-doors down, had been a Level 5 Hoarder. Our next-door neighbor, Jody, was only a Level 3, but she was further hindered by being a Level 5 Shut-In. So when the rats, now evicted from Joy’s, moved into Jody’s house, it was like . . . I don’t know. Patty Hearst, maybe? Like, maybe the rats showed up and thew her in a closet for 57 days and told her her name was Tanya and she was one of them now? Otherwise, I don’t understand how you just resign yourself to living amongst rats. I have never even heard of such a phenomenon, not even among the grossest, most indifferent of people — it’s beyond filthy, it’s unhygienic. But that’s what Jody and her husband, David, were doing, and the rats were out and about in the same way that <my dogs> Desmond and Mowgli are out and about.  

Although they had lived there for twenty-five years or more, they lost the house for fiscal reasons during COVID. In my estimation, the house should have been condemned, but it was sold for a song to Daniel and Katie, our current next-door neighbors. The cost they paid best illustrates the condition of the home — they paid for it two years ago what we had paid for our home seventeen years before.

Daniel used to be a contractor; his plan was to rip everything down to the studs and start over and “make it super cute because we’re going to live here forever.”

We were like, “You’re going to run out of money.”

“No, no. I’m gonna Homeowner Special ev-ree-thing. It’s gonna be amazing.”

Yeah, no. There was so much wrong with that house, I can’t even tell you. What a money pit. As he was demolishing it, he found and evicted, by his own estimation, “eighteen to twenty active rats’ nests”. Denied a food source or a hiding place, these rats were quite suddenly and very rudely made homeless. But these intrepid pioneers did not wallow long in their lot. They called upon the memories bestowed unto them from their ancestors; they again looked to the West, whereupon they saw our house; they made the short march; and thus began The Bad Time.

The Bad Time

We had never before had a rat, because they had been perfectly content living in Ratopolis over at Jody’s house. But almost immediately after New-Sheriff-in-Town Daniel gave them the heave-ho, I began hearing them running in our walls; they were confined, however, to the unfinished part of the basement. We laid traps. The next thing that happened was, a rat died, and the expression “I smell a rat” took on a whole new meaning, as they certainly do create a very distinct, pungent, and malodorous scent postmortem. We called an exterminator, but these rats were wily and they did not give a fuck. Weren’t scared a bit and generally laughed at a trap. Moreover, there were a lot of them — at the height of their dynasty, perhaps as many as fifteen, possibly more — and they were breeding. New generations of rats were joining the fold. We were being overrun. This was THEIR time. It was Operation Rat Blitzkrieg, Springtime for Templeton and his Rat Army, and Winter for Josh and Kristin. The situation was extraordinary. Something drastic had to be done. A specialist had to be called in, and as I explained, it wasn’t Dale Gribble. It was a different kind of weirdo.

The natural remedy would have been a ratter, but I couldn’t get a cat in here, because we’re allergic. I removed every scrap of food from the larder, and then how quickly followed the murders — I’m pretty sure they ate their young first. This went on for awhile, by which I mean a couple months. Meanwhile, the exterminator was coming out every now and then to cart away bodies and just generally stand around and be worthless and maybe lay some new traps that never seemed to catch a rat. They were so incredibly worthless — except this one guy who caught a rat with his bare hands and drowned it in a bucket.

The battle of attrition between the rats themselves raged on nightly. It was unbearable to listen to. One morning I went upstairs to discover the plants in my garden window rifled, the trap in the nook gone, and blood in the kitchen. My first thought was: Gross; and then: Okay. This is bad. They’ve gotten so desperate they’ve found a way into my beautiful kitchen.

I called the exterminator, who came out, and as we were standing there, with me stridently informing him the problem didn’t seem to be getting any better, only worse . . . oh . . . my . . . God. A fat fuckin’ rat came moseying out of the dishwasher (now ruined, incidentally, and needing to be completely replaced, as that’s where they were coming through and now trying to nest). He was smug as he could possibly be, probably licking his brother’s blood off his yellow rat teeth; I screamed and, in a feat never before seen in human history, I leapt straight up and backwards onto the counter and landed on my feet. This was the horror of my life. The exterminator yelled, “Come here, you bastard!” and lunged at him, but he got away.

I was made terribly upset by the whole scene, but screaming nonstop and bawling like a baby like I wanted to do wasn’t going to help anything. I shook it off and said,  “The rat is gone, so okay, forget that one. We’ll get him later. We must solve the mystery of the missing trap now!” I was thinking of my dogs. I said, “It was in the nook, and now it’s not. The blood trail goes nowhere.”

Well . . . not exactly. It went somewhere.

Even though it’s really close to the ground, the rat had gone under the stove with the trap attached to its groin. (I am saying that diplomatically.) The exterminator discovered it was still alive. He had to pull the stove out to deal with that one . . . and it goes without saying I left the room and did not watch. It was all too, too horrid for reality.

The entire experience was a complete nightmare from beginning to end, a real “you have to kill the head vampire” type of situation, but we had no idea whatsoever who that was. Finally, finally, we got him. (I always imagine it was a ‘him,’ some cruel and unforgiving patriarch like Devil Anse Hatfield.) But it still wasn’t over, because oh my God, what a mess they had made. Think . . . Berlin, except with extra piss and shit.

We might be slightly untidy, but we are not dirty people; unfortunately, our morale on this point had been laid pretty low, regardless of our knowledge about the circumstances which had caused all of it. We felt like the filthiest creatures on Earth. You feel so alone with your vile problem, and you feel like maybe you should just move. Just slink away in your secret shame with a newspaper hiding your face. Intellectually, you know that rats must be a chronic and serious problem in Portland . . . but you also feel like you’re the only one experiencing it, because it’s not a thing people go around talking about at parties. Absolutely no one has ever said, ever: “Ermigawd, I have a million rats, Emily, let’s dish about it while I serve you the dinner I made at my house!” But as soon as the rats were gone — victory! — we rallied. We had braved the onslaught. We had not forfeited our home to disgusting vermin. We would rebuild.

In the wake of Rat Woodstock, we found that pretty much everything in the back room had been nested in, or gnawed, or pissed and/or shit upon. But who actually knows what many of the wet spots were? Rat amniotic fluid? Dead rat melt? Everything had to be thrown away, including the Christmas stuff. This happened in late October. We had to hire a junk company to come and haul everything out.

So at this point, what with the exterminator, and the new dishwasher, and the junk people, and having to replace everything lost (uh, we can’t not decorate for Christmas, I freaking love Christmas) we had to outlay thousands of dollars over this issue. It was infuriating and highly upsetting. For Christmas, we ended up buying a tinfoil tree, and even though it should be in the back, we store it in a place it should not be stored, where the rats can’t get to it, because we are too scared to put anything they can nest in back there again.

Months went by and there were no issues. Then, recently . . . goddammit. Fuckin’ rats in the wall. Called the exterminator out. He made his postulation about where the rats were getting in, which I didn’t believe at the time; otherwise, he was worthless. For six goddamn weeks they ignored me. This wasn’t even the same company as before — I got rid of the first one because they were so inept. So I was livid — yeah, it was all fine for them, but all I knew was that I was paying for rat extermination and I couldn’t get a callback and I was LIVING WITH RATS. Believe it or not, that was a problem for me! I kept calling, it escalated, but I couldn’t get anyone to return a message — I was so pissed. FINALLY I got on the books, and some honcho got scheduled to come out. In the meantime, I hired a maid to clean up the mess the new rats had made, to make it real easy for the exterminator. And while she was doing it, two rats were RUNNING AROUND. It was so fucking embarrassing I wanted to die, but I’d warned her and was completely transparent about what was going on. (However, you better believe I paid her super handsomely out of sheer disgusted guilt.) She also confirmed that the exterminator was right, and they were coming in where he had said. We walled it off, so any new rats will be trapped; but the other two, in a panic, scrambled away and hid behind the armoire. They’re also trapped — not in the way I’d wanted, I’d wanted them on the other side of what we walled off — but they’re trapped nonetheless. There’s no way out; they can run, they can hide, but thirst and hunger will catch up with them. It’s perfectly clean now, everything is gone, there’s no food, all that’s up on offer is bait. The game is up. I’m gonna get those bastards. Who do they think they’re messing with?! I conquered Bobby Fischer rats, and these guys ain’t no Bobby Fischers. I'm telling all ye rats out there, hearken to me now: Stay . . . off . . . my . . . property. I’m like the Terminator. I will not stop until you are dead, and apparently, I’m willing to come after you for years.

The most barf-inducing thing that happened this time was that one of the things the maid had to throw away was a carton of beef broth. Well, apparently this most unwelcome duo of rats I’m currently trying to evict was originally a trio; but the third member of their party chewed away the top of the broth carton, drank it, fell in, and drowned. Kristina went to throw it away and there was a bloated rat body inside the container. It’s so insanely gross and shameful I want to die of mortification. I can’t express that deeply enough. And the corker?

If I had known where they were coming in, if that had been identified correctly initially, all of this — ALL of it — could have been avoided by a small piece of hardware cloth over my vent, which Mike and Daniel have laying around and would have given me for free. 🤦‍♀️ 🤬