My dad is an easy-going fellow, a lover of peace, the first one to wave an olive branch when everyone else is still swinging bloody battle axes.
He’s easy-going except when it comes to his garden—a tiny plot of land planted with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, pole beans, parsley and basil. The garden patch always kept fresh vegetables on the table until one summer when a ground hog moved into our yard on Lantern Hill. Each morning, my father awoke to find the remains of the previous night’s ground hog feast.
“Ground hogs can’t swim. Flush him out,” advised Louie, my dad’s plumber friend.
So, Dad hooked up an industrial-sized hose. He slipped it into the mouth of the hole. Then he turned on the water full blast. The water gushed for many minutes before my father noticed peculiar happenings at the other end of the yard.
Apparently, the ground hog had created two entries to his abode, the second being near a shed. By the time my dad noticed this fact, water was flowing into the storage unit, heading toward old end tables, lawn furniture, and stacks of picnic paper goods.
Not one to give up easily, my dad asked his pinochle buddies for advice. Nick, a retired air conditioning repairman said, “You gotta do it clean and easy. Gas the little fur ball.”
Intuitively, my dad knew that my mother would not approve of this method. So, he waited until a Sunday afternoon when she was safely off at the opera. The only witness to his activities was my ninety-four year old grandmother who sat inside the glassed-in sunroom. He didn’t worry about her, because he figured she couldn’t see all that well.
My dad drove his tractor to the hole, connected crinkly black tubing to the exhaust pipe, and then snaked the tube as far as he could down into the opening. Dad turned on the engine and waited hopefully.
Apparently, gas did not spoil the groundhog’s appetite. The nascent pole beans were gone the next morning.
Stymied and desperate, my father talked with my lunatic uncle about his problem. Uncle Bruno did something with explosives during one of the wars and had two fingers missing on his right hand to prove it.
Bruno told my father, “Hey Jimmy, you gotta blow him up. Fried ground hog. It’ll be fun.”
So on Tuesday morning, when my mother always took Grandma and great aunt Angie shopping, Dad and Bruno poured gasoline down into the ground hog hole. Then, they soaked a thin cotton rope with gas and dropped one half the length into the opening. The other (unsoaked) half they stretched across a few feet of lawn. They placed a metal garbage can lid over the hole. I never heard the rationale behind the lid.
Bruno tried to light one end of the fuse, but it kept going out. So, they poured a little gas on the whole length that lay above ground. Bruno dropped a match on one end and they both ran for cover. Within a few seconds, flames ripped down the fuse and straight into the hole. A great explosion sent the flaming lid several feet up into the branches of a cedar tree which immediately caught on fire.
Fortunately, my father hadn’t put away the hose since the water fiasco. So, after a while (and most importantly for him, before my mother got home), my dad was able to douse the flames.
And the ground hog? All that stress made him head for comfort food. That evening, he ate his way through the plum tomatoes, taking a large bite out of each one.
By the end of the summer, the score stood at Ground hog–Four, Dad–Zero.
Well, my dad has returned to his peace-loving ways. All-out war was never in his nature anyway.
My father has decided that sometimes you need to shift your perspective in order to cope with intractable problems in life. He tells people, “You know, it’s all a matter of how you look at things.”
Now, when asked about that fat furry brown creature rooting around his garden, my father replies, “Oh that? He’s my pet ground hog.”
*The names in this story have been changed to protect the guilty.
