Adventures in the Crawl Space (Part I)

Around lunchtime yesterday I started smelling a foul odor in the kitchen. The kitchen being a place where foul odors are not always entirely foreign (rotting food in the refrigerator, rotting food in the cupboard, that disgusting tofu marinade I made the other day using maple syrup that I suspect has been open in the pantry since Clinton was in office), it took me until this morning to identify the smell: rodent. Maggoty, rotting rodent. Unfortunately, I know it well.

I sat around for a couple more hours hoping that I was odor-hallucinating. After I was sure of what it was, I sat around for another hour convinced that the smell must be coming from the wall--a location I could not reach--rather than the crawl space underneath the house--a location very much accessible but also very much disgusting and terrifying.

Now, as I've already established on this blog, I am a strong, self-sufficient feminist. I don't believe in being "rescued" by a man when I am perfectly capable of handling the situation on my own.

My dad picked up on the fourth ring. "Hi, Daddy," I said. "There's a dead rodent under the house. Do I have to go get it?" Even I knew the rat wasn't going to walk out on its own. "We've got lots of plastic gloves in the shed," my dad answered. "And don't forget a flashlight."

I pulled on my ratty paint pants and an old sweatshirt and tied the hood so that only my eyes and nose were exposed. I slipped on a pair of latex gloves, slipped on a second pair for good measure, and grabbed a flashlight from the cabinet outside the bathroom.

There are two entrances to the crawl space: one is through the room at the bottom of the basement stairs and the other is through a trapdoor in the floor of the pantry. Because I smelled the odor most strongly when I stood at the top of the basement stairs, I figured I'd start there. There is no door separating the crawl space from the basement room--all you have to do is climb up onto a landing that's about four feet off the ground. Unfortunately, the path to this landing is blocked by a junk pile that is utterly Himalayan in size. With one hand on the thick pipe protruding from the wall, I lifted one foot onto a set of flimsy plastic shelves that sagged and nearly buckled under my weight while my other foot managed to find one square inch of floorboard between several empty canning jars and a saute pan with a glass lid. I fell catapulted myself into the emptiness in front of me and miraculously entered the crawl space without causing any sort of damage.

"Okay, dead rat," I said aloud, "show yourself." I took one step and slammed my forehead into a beam. (As it turns out, it's called a "crawl space" for a reason.) Harnessing my mild irritation into a determination to get the hell out of there as fast as possible, I crouched down and hobbled forward with renewed vigor. "Here, dead rat," I called. "Here, you filthy deceased rodent." I took a few steps and shuffled in a circle with the flashlight. A few more steps and another circle. Ten minutes and no dead rat later, I reached the conclusion that the smell was not coming from the crawl space. Never have I been happier to know that the rodent decaying in my house was inside a wall. God knows how I descended Mt. Basement Crap without breaking an ankle, but seven minutes later I was upstairs in clean clothes drinking tea and watching Arrested Development.

The horrid smell had reached the living room but there was nothing, short of starting up the chainsaw and hacking a hole in the wall, that I could do about it. A half-hour later the stench was almost unbearable. With a heavy sigh I pulled on my dusty, cobwebby crawl space ensemble and headed to the pantry. The instant I lifted the trapdoor the odor was overwhelming. I stepped aside to let the pantry light enter what I called the "seedy underbelly" of the house and there, three feet below me, pinned in the steely maw of an unbaited mouse trap, was a rotting mouse. "I'm so glad I thought to look here before I tried the basement," I said to an empty pantry. A tiny maggot, caught in the beam of my flashlight, crawled across the mouse's exposed eye.

TO BE CONTINUED...