Squirrels: Watching Me, Watching You

The bible speaks of the Ten Plagues to befall Egypt. Each horrible, and as-a-whole a clear indicator of the stubbornness of man that it took ten plagues for God to get his point across. Squirrels were not among them, though they feel like a plague to me. And this one plague has lasted longer than Egypt’s ten – by millions of years. What does that say about our stubbornness or God’s for that matter?

Perhaps I am being a little harsh on these furry creatures, but not without reason. Squirrels and I have crossed paths (both directly and obliquely) many times over the years. At one time, I did consider them friendly. As a young boy I recall innocently feeding them McDonalds’ fries while sitting on a park bench outside South Carolina’s capitol building. But that represented a rare instance, and it was not long before squirrels showed their true colors (other than gray).

I may sound paranoid. But squirrels have a way of getting under my skin, invading my thoughts. On Jethro Tull’s Beast and the Broadsword there is a song called Watching Me, Watching You, and though the first line of the refrain goes, “Watching me, watching you, girl!” I honestly thought from the first moment I heard the song that it said, “Watching me, watching you, squirrel!”

Why should I feel that way? Let us take an example from my college years at Clemson University. One day I was out behind Riggs Hall to see what progress had been made on the Mechanical Engineering Department’s rehabilitation project of an old steam shovel. As I walked around and looked at the rusted hulk, it seemed that not much had been done to this point. Thinking on this I was startled by a shriek. Looking around I found its source. A squirrel was clinging to the brick wall and shrieking at me. Not chittering, shrieking.

Recently we moved into an older neighborhood, and there are a lot of squirrels here. In our last neighborhood lynx, coyotes, and the odd mountain lion kept them in check. Not so closer to town. As one of the many projects turning this house into our home, we had a sprinkler system put in. When the crew had finished the work, I was going over the new system with the foreman. Laughing he told me about one of his young crew members who had brought a sandwich with him for lunch the previous day. The young man had the sandwich in his coat pocket, had his coat set to the side as he worked in shirt sleeves. At lunch time, he went over to his jacket only to find that a squirrel had chewed a hole through the pocket and taken the sandwich.

Occasionally I turn my thoughts to the problem of squirrels, and I have come around to the thought that maybe their behavior is not all their fault. Most of my life I had taken a very biased approach to squirrels, but when viewed objectively I have developed a theory. Admittedly it is one that is more religious than scientific. I speculate that the diminutive stature and natural mischievousness of squirrels mark them as easy targets of possession by demons.

Before you start casting the first stones, hear me out. It is not unheard of throughout history that human beings themselves have been known to put their life in imminent peril to rid themselves of demons. It goes like this, the possessed individual in a moment of lucidity will put themselves in actual harm’s way hoping this will scare the demon out just as they make their way to safety at the last possible instance. This does not always turn out well for the person, like so much in life timing is everything.

To me it seems that squirrels exhibit this behavior. We all have witnessed it. A squirrel dashes in front of a car for no reason, often to escape at the last second (sometimes to end up as a tenderized tidbit for magpies and crows). I witnessed one particularly harrowing example of this when I was a student at Clemson. It was a Saturday, and more importantly a home football game day. Back then, I would guess that the residents of the town of Clemson numbered about fifteen thousand. So when the student body was in full force, the population doubled in size. On a home game day, that number more than doubled. The only way to accommodate this flood of orange and purple humanity is to turn all roads (except one lane) into inbound routes prior to the game.

In college, I was younger, thinner, faster than I am now (note no mention or claim of agility is made – you will understand why). I was a runner. On this particular Saturday, the Clemson Tigers were hosting the Southeast Reginal Cross Country Championships with a good chance to win. I was joining my running mates at a golf course some five miles outside of town to watch the race. I was pumped!

No way was I driving, so I got into my running gear and headed out. Early on as I was running on the sidewalk along the edge of campus, I looked to my left at a sluggishly moving sea of cars jamming all four lanes of the road. Looking up ahead I saw a squirrel make a mad dash into that slow flow of iron. I was panicked. I didn’t want to see the squirrel die. I kept watching, hoping beyond hope that it would be alright. It made it across two lanes then made an abrupt left to run with traffic! By this time, I was running down the sidewalk while looking back over my left shoulder in horror as the squirrel was running underneath cars. Without any show of reason, the squirrel turned left again and made for the sidewalk. I gasped, I was afraid, I was compelled to keep watching as the squirrel miraculously made it back to the sidewalk safe-and-sound. At that moment, I literally ran into a speed limit sign, stumbled backwards and landed on my pride. I got up as quickly as I could and resumed my run at a stagger, this time with my head down to avoid the likely laughing stares of a host of drivers and passengers.

On second thought screw demons, maybe squirrels are just naturally evil.