When I was about 15 or 16, I wrote a letter to the editor and submitted it to the Argus Leader, a South Dakota newspaper with its headquarters in my hometown of Sioux Falls. The letter was in response to some news that a squirrel had found his way into a power plant and electrocuted himself, cutting power to more than 7,000 homes in the process. I wrote to warn readers that this was only the beginning of a major uprising. That squirrels had been waiting and scheming to seize power, and that this symbolic act of self-immolation was no accident.
The letter was one of my earliest attempts at humor writing, and it was a mild success. The paper called to confirm some details, and the woman on the other end of the line couldn’t stop from giggling about the letter’s absurdity, while simultaneously avoiding asking whether or not I actually believed anything I’d written, because if I had, she was talking to an insane person. I remember that day and that phone call, because it felt so good to make even one person laugh through my writing.
When the letter was printed, somewhere in the editing process it had been cut and butchered to the point that it was completely unrecognizable to me as something I’d written, and it was no longer amusing. Any metaphor and necessary subtleties had been jettisoned, so that in the end, the squirrel died for nothing. Although more than 10 years later, a local morning talk radio show host found it and got in touch with me to have me on his show. Here is what happened: I bombed. It was a live show, I froze up, said nothing funny, felt really bad about it then and somehow still do, and confirmed to myself that I’m a better writer than a talky-person.
And so that experience was both my first delicious taste of the thrill of being published, and my first bitter retching on the demoralizing process of having people edit your work who don’t know or care about the work they’re doing (to be clear, having an editor who isn’t that is an amazing experience and will improve your writing). But this isn’t about writing. This is about squirrels.
When you’re living in the city, your opportunities to connect with the animal world and the wildness of nature are limited. Birds. Rabbits. The occasional raccoon. Perhaps gophers. But no city creature is as ubiquitous as the squirrel. They are our main conduit with wildness in the city. A creature that is master of both the earth and at least part of the sky, building nests like birds, albeit highly acrobatic birds without wings. They are basically superheroes.
Still, people have varying opinions on whether squirrels are cute or disgusting, but most of us can agree that they are stupid assholes. Every year they take one bite of every tomato in my garden, realize they don’t like tomatoes, leave it laying around to rot, and do it all over again the next day. And it’s not just tomatoes. It’s bell peppers, carrots, potatoes. Basically anything I plant. And this is despite the fact that I have 9 bur oak trees in my yard which this year shed thousands of acorns. The squirrels have therefore dug thousands of small holes, where they’ve buried (or fake buried) enough food to last them 10 lifetimes. They are greedy, stupid assholes.
Which leads me to this: I wasn’t wrong all those years ago to suggest they might have the capacity to scheme—it was just that their ambitions were much smaller, their revolution more localized, more grassroots. There are millions of squirrels in the United States, each one a small, devious agent of chaos, doing its part to unravel the fabric of human society. On the other hand, we’re not so great anyway, and who needs that many tomatoes?
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