Once a week, every week, my entire extended family gets together for an evening to have dinner and catch up on each other’s lives. It’s been going on for years and there is no sign of the practice slowing down in the foreseeable future. This is not the topic of today’s blog; it is merely the setting.
Recently, we were all gathered for the “Family Night Dinner,” at one of my wife’s cousin’s homes. My daughters, EM1 and EM2, had driven there separately so they had their own car. At the end of the meal, we all said our goodbyes and left to drive home. EM1 and EM2 arrived at the house a few minutes before my wife and I did.
EM1 was standing outside her car, looking underneath the vehicle and making several utterances of distress. EM2 saw us pull into the driveway and gleefully announced:
“EM1 ran over a skunk!”
It was about this time that the smell reached me. Yup. She had indeed run over a skunk, and its farewell calling card was all around us.
“It wasn’t my fault!” my oldest told me. “It ran out in front of me and I didn’t have time to stop. I think it did it on purpose.”
My first thought was that skunks don’t actually “run.” It’s more like an awkward waddle. My second thought was that most wild animals aren’t generally suicidal. I mean, I don’t know what this skunk’s family life was like, or if it had suffered a recent tragedy, but I still don’t think it intended a quick jaunt into the roadway to be the last thing it ever did on this planet.
I didn’t say those things to EM1, however. What I told her was to leave her car outside the garage and go through a car wash in the morning.
I thought that would be the end of the skunk adventures for the evening, but I was wrong.
We went into the house and my wife let the dog into the backyard to pee before we went to bed. Less than five minutes later, she tells me, “I think the dog got sprayed by a skunk.” I looked outside and, sure enough, our dog was rubbing her face in the grass and whimpering like a mugger that just got pepper sprayed.
I opened the door to check on her and that smell hit me again. Worse this time since it wasn’t just a little bit on the undercarriage of a car. This time it was a full load, released all over the dog.
My wife asked what we should do. I told her, “Whatever you do, don’t let her into the house.”
We had made that mistake once before. It took months for the smell to leave the living room. No amount of air freshener or carpet cleaner could cover it up, either. Instead of hiding the odor, it just made it more nauseating. Our house smelled like a candle shop that catered to potheads.
As I watched the dog run around the yard, pushing its face through the dirt and weeds of our back lawn, I couldn’t help wondering if this was more than just a coincidence. It’s possible it was sheer dumb luck that the dog got sprayed by a skunk the same night that my daughter killed one with her car. But it doesn’t seem likely.
I’m not normally a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but the timing just seemed a little too convenient. I think what actually happened was there was a skunk wandering around our neighborhood when my daughter pulled into the driveway. I think it sniffed the air as she drove by and thought, “It smells like Rupert got killed. I have to go to this house immediately and avenge my fallen brother.”
I believe there may be a vast network of skunk hit squads, roaming the country and wreaking havoc on anyone who has ever harmed one of their own. I think that’s why the roadway stinks for so long after a skunk gets hit by a car. It’s a homing beacon calling out to the hit squads; telling them that they have another job to do.
I know I sound crazy, but so did Galileo when he said that he believed the Earth circled the sun, not the other way around. So, don’t discount the idea just yet. Keep an open mind and talk to your friends about it. Maybe they saw something that they were too uncomfortable to talk about before. Maybe we just need to circulate the idea for a while before the real truth can come out.
Only time will tell which theory is correct: complete coincidence, or bands of roving skunk hit squads?
Could go either way.
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