Patio Raccoons and Toilet Reptiles
Isn’t this raccoon just the cutest thing? He was strolling around on my patio in broad daylight early this afternoon. I wanted to love him and squeeze him and name him George, but if I had tried, he would have ripped my face off and given me fleas. So, I ran to get my camera instead. The trashcan bandit was still there, snacking on leftover cat food when I returned, and obligingly stood still and looked directly at me just long enough for me to snap this slightly blurry but adorable photo before scurrying away (conveniently providing a desperately needed charming lead-in for the story I promised in my last post).
Sometimes I think people don’t believe me when I tell them that I frequently have wild animals in my yard, because it happens to be small and very near the geographical middle of a fairly large city; however, this photo is proof. (I admit I cropped the picture to exclude a chair with a muddy towel draped over the back, and the patio table, which is covered with beer bottles, but it’s still proof, dammit!)
In addition to raccoons, I have also had possums, bobcats, turtles, lizards, rabbits, feral chickens, giant bullfrogs, owls, hawks, and turkey vultures back there, and on one memorable occasion, a beautiful egret, but at least none of those can get into the plumbing and come up at me out of the toilet. And yes, I am, in fact, slightly anxious about that possibility.
As if war, recession, global warming, the health care crisis, and the exploding cost of living weren’t enough, now I have to worry about the possibility of ravenous, 20-foot, 250-pound Burmese pythons coming out of my toilet and swallowing me whole. That sounds crazier than usual, so let me explain: According to this article in USA Today,
As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast…
Wonderful. I live in Florida, which contains the Everglades, a favorite dumping ground for no-longer-wanted exotic pets. God only knows what I’m going to run into from one day to the next. Boa constrictors. Ostriches. Ocelots. Walking catfish. Tourists. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell them apart.
But it gets worse. There’s this article, about a woman in New York City, of all places, finding a python in her toilet. Sound like an urban legend? I think not. Here’s another one, only this time in Australia.
Besides, I know it can happen, because I have already had to personally remove several unpleasant reptiles from my own toilet. The toilet in the house where I live right now, thus the anxiety. In the words of Dave Barry (who once wrote a column about a woman in Florida who had a squirrel come out of her toilet), I am NOT making this up.
Years ago, I came over to visit my elderly mother, and had only made it halfway to the door when she burst out of the house, wild-eyed, wild-haired and in a panic.
Mother: “HELP! There’s an alligator in the toilet!”
Me: (I couldn’t have heard that right.)“What?!?”
Mother: “You heard me right, I said there’s an alligator in the toilet!”
Me: (naturally, I started laughing) “A gator? In the toilet? What the HELL have you been eating?”
Mother: “Oh, so you think you’re funny! And don’t you dare curse at me!” (slapped at me and missed) “This is not a joke, Miss Smartass, now go get it OUT!”
Knowing she wouldn’t miss if she swung at me a second time, I sighed and trudged to the bathroom, silently wondering if my poor mother had lost her mind. Then from behind the closed bathroom door there came an ominous splashing noise. Oh, no. I opened the door, to find water all over the floor, and the toilet lid weighted down with a potted plant. The splashing became frantic, as did my mother.
Mother: “See? SEE? I TOLD YOU there was an alligator in the toilet! That is NOT senile dementia sloshing around in there, you ungrateful little shit!”
Me: (uh-oh, maybe I didn’t wonder about her sanity as silently as I thought…)“Did I actually SAY anything about senile dementia?”
Mother: “No, but..”
Me: (smugly interrupting) “Well, then…”
Mother: (smugly interrupting) “…BUT we both know you were thinking it!”
I didn’t have any answer to that, and we both just stood there for a moment, contemplating the tempest in the pee-pot. Strategy was needed.
Me: “So how big is it?”
Mother: “Big enough to try to bite me on my ass when I sat down.”
Me: “Don’t you LOOK before you sit?”
Mother: “Why the hell would I check the fucking toilet for goddamn alligators before I take a piss?”
She had just cussed more in the last five minutes than she usually did in a whole month, and I wasn’t going to let that much profanity go by without a snotty comment. Also, she had a good point, so I wanted to change the subject.
Me: “Don’t YOU swear, if you expect ME not to.”
Mother: “Don’t you DARE chastise me when I have an alligator in my toilet.”
Me: “Can I chastise you when there’s NOT an alligator in your toilet?”
Mother: (gave me The Look Of Imminent Painful Death By Her Hand)
Me: “Never mind. Really, HOW BIG? Is it big enough to take a finger off?”
Mother: (leaving the room) “Let me see if I can find you those leather work gloves.”
Well, THAT answered my question. This was one of those terrible moments when I almost wished she WAS senile, so I could put her in a home and pay somebody else to wrestle her alligators. The scrabbling and splashing in the toilet continued, punctuated with plaintive squeaks. Poor little thing, I thought. I foolishly decided to take a look. I removed the plant that was weighing down the toilet lid, and immediately regretted it. The little gator knocked the lid up, hissing furiously, and tried to scramble out of the toilet. I managed to whack the critter back into the toilet with a towel, then slammed the lid down and sat on it, with my heart racing because I had narrowly escaped spending God knows how long chasing a wet, dirty little wild animal through the house. That would be like babysitting, except with no pay and only slightly less chance of being bitten.
In case anyone wonders: No, it never once (at the time) occurred to me or my mother to try simply flushing the gator back down. That would be unkind to an innocent creature, and probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway.
My mother finally returned with the leather gloves. I put them on, and told her to shut the door behind her when she left. The instant I stood up the alligator shot out of the toilet like there was some tiny lunatic in there, armed with a reptile bazooka.
After much shrieking and scrambling around (on both sides of the bathroom door; my mother was was having hysterics from the combination of suspense and a full bladder) I managed to catch the alligator without injuring either one of us. It was a little over a foot long, yellow striped, and highly indignant about having been unlawfully detained in a toilet bowl for over an hour.
I took it outside (it was squirming, squeaking, and biting all the way; thank goodness for those gloves) and turned it loose in the creek next to the house. As it eventually turned out, there was a crack in the septic tank, which was leaking into the creek. Over the next few weeks that it took to get somebody to repair the septic tank, I ended up getting several frantic phone calls from my mother, and fishing four more angry reptiles out of that toilet. Two skinks, another baby alligator, and a small water moccasin.
Don’t get me wrong; I actually LIKE snakes. Snakes are cool. The vast majority of snakes are not only harmless but beneficial to people. Nevertheless, I don’t want them in my toilet.
Which brings us back to the Giant Burmese Pythons In The Toilet Crisis. This is alarming. Right now, I have a non-leaky septic tank; now that it’s been repaired, it’s a closed system, which means no critters in the plumbing. However, the city is putting in sewer lines in my neighborhood, and expects everybody to jump on the sewer bandwagon. (Isn’t THAT a lovely mental image?) This will effectively mean that my toilet will be connected to every other toilet in a large city… so if somebody else flushes a snake, it could eventually wind up in MY toilet. Plus, a lot of cities have sewer systems that connect to other cities’ sewer systems, making a nationwide plague of Giant Toilet Pythons a distinct possibility.
How will we protect ourselves? How do you keep a giant snake from getting out of the toilet and eating you in the middle of the night? A reinforced steel toilet lid that latches down would be no help, because men would leave it up, putting the entire household at risk, because it takes too much time and effort to even put the SEAT down, much less the LID, TOO.
Maybe we should just have toilet bowl cleaner tabs with snake sedative in it, and make the snakes lethargic before they get out of the john.If you have a python in your toilet, who do you call? A plumber? Animal control? The Department of Game and Wildlife? All of the above?
Perhaps we should have Giant Burmese Python Police, tirelessly patrolling the sewers of America with snake-catching equipment, who only emerge, pasty-faced and odorous, to save the day when a life-threatening serpent erupts from a taxpayer’s toilet, spreading mayhem and sewer slime.
All I know is right now, I have NO intention of hooking up to the city sewer system. I refuse to expose my precious rear end to the predatory impulses of enormous snakes unless I am somehow legally forced to do so. Perhaps not even then, because I don’t think I should pay TWICE for water (once coming in, for water I actually use, and a second time, for waste water that won’t eventually get filtered back into the Florida aquifer.) And in the meanwhile, I might to try to tame George the Raccoon.