A Stinky Situation — Part II

As I had said yesterday, our smelly little friend had returned sometime during the early morning hours and had given us the goods.

My wife and I were sharply awakened at 3:53 by a scent so overpowering, so gut-wrenchingly strong that we were forced out of our bedroom, towels over our noses. It was like being beaten about the face and neck with angry skunks.

We continued downstairs, stalked by the cloud of noxious perfume. The smell seemed less intense in the entryway, but by the time we got to the kitchen and family room we were sucker-punched again. The stench was literally nauseating. We stood stricken, holding our noses, staring wide-eyed at each other, desperately searching for some respite, some deliverance from this horrific olfactory assault.

We had contemplated hunkering in one of the girl’s rooms, thinking the smell of used socks, moldering bath towels and last week’s pizza was preferable.

Instead we headed through the laundry room and finally sought refuge in the garage, taking with us the bottle of vinegar.

Ah, sweet relief! The garage was unscathed by the evil grip of the putrescence. We took turns at taking great gasping huffs of the vinegar in a futile attempt to soothe our offended nasal passages.

“What are we going to do? I can’t live like this!” My wife cried.

“I’ll call the trapper today. We’ll get this resolved immediately.”

“We need to spray. We need to spray right now,” she said. I nodded and took this to be my own grim task.

I headed back in through the laundry room, grabbed the bleach, and steeled myself to go outside into the back yard and face the menace head on. Meanwhile my wife had holed up on the couch after pouring a dab of vinegar on her sweatshirt and pulling it up over her nose and mouth as a makeshift gas mask.

I drew a last breath, opened the door, stepped out and shut it behind me. I was in the skunk’s dojo now, and entirely committed to the knowledge that I would be subject to the full onslaught of the stink.

I exhaled… breathed in gently… and detected no smell! In fact, the air was sweet and clean. I turned back inside and reported this news to my wife, and then went straight away to the front door and stepped outside there. A deep breath there revealed no odor whatsoever. Not even a faint one.

This confounded me. How could it be that the scent was so strong in the lower level of the house and utterly overwhelming in our bedroom, yet directly outside the window in the front yard the odor was nonexistent?

My mind could determine no other explanation for what Pepe did early that morning, under cover of darkness: he must have slinked over to the front of the house, positioned himself right beneath our open bedroom window, leaned forward to balance on his front feet, and let loose with his noxious stream, bulls-eyeing our window screen.

Crafty little bugger.

As I came back in, my wife cried out again: “The house still stinks! Don’t we have a fan we can use to suck in the clean air?”

“Yes. But it’s put away…” I started, thinking about where that fan was usually kept and the amount of effort I’d have to expend to get it.

“Okay… that’s all right…” she said, resignedly. Every husband knows this tone. The translation would read something like this: “I hope you’re comfortable while you’re sleeping outside tonight.”

Okey dokey then.

To get to that fan, I’d need to get into the attic. To get to the attic means fetching a ladder. To get to the ladder means moving my car.

So I retrieved my keys, opened the garage door, backed the car out, lifted down the ladder, lugged it up stairs, set it up under the attic access, scaled the rungs, lifted the access panel off, and peered around in the darkness with my flashlight. Amidst the boxes, rugs and Halloween decorations I saw the oscillating stand fan. Where was the box fan? Puzzled, I ducked back out of the attic and started back down the ladder, only to see the box fan nestled snugly in this very closet, right there at the foot of the ladder. The ladder I had just set up. Right next to the box fan. Which I must have bumped as I was setting it up.

Hey, I was tired.

So I schlepped the fan and the ladder downstairs, set the fan up in the patio door to suck in the sweeter outside air, turned on all three interior exhaust fans, returned the ladder and moved my car back inside.

And soon the air in the house began to clear, and we began to smell a ray of hope.

Then, after a few minutes, it started to rain. “Ah, cleansing rain!” I thought. “This will make things better!”

Not so much.

Did you know that water actually re-activates dormant skunk smell? It’s true; it hydrolyzes the acetates in skunk spray into the volatile mercaptan equivalents, re-invigorating the scent. So now, with the rain, we were sucking in a fresh batch of newly strengthened skunk smell.

That evil little creature had us on the ropes.

Upping the ante in our combat, I made that phone call to a local wild animal control service. They’re coming out today to trap Pepe and take him to the wild, where he can roam free and stink up the forest or something.

Stay tuned.