June 8, 2025
Day 1,346 of the Adventure
I lost two battles in the past 24 hours. One to the sun and the other to a skunk! I'm not sure which is worse. The sun simply beat me down with heat. I intended to get the last of the blocks laid up for the storm shelter and started early enough..... I thought. About half-way through, the sun reached a point in the sky where I had no shade left. It was 90 degrees and full sun. So...... Sun won! I'll have to get the rest of it tomorrow morning. The skunk was a different story. It all happened last night. In an attempt to rid the back yar bird feeder area of pesky raccoons, I set a trap for them uniquely designed for raccoons. I baited it and set it near the birdfeeders. I guess the local skunks didn't get the memo. It was no more than 30 minutes after dusk and I caught sight of movement on the monitor. It was a skunk sniffing around the trap. Shelley said "Quick, use the camera's speaker function to scare it off. Great idea. It took a mere five seconds to access the camera microphone and by that time, the skunk was trapped. Now a lot of critters can be dealt with fairly easily. Not skunks. They carry bioweapons with them. Now, the skunk was an unexpected victim of my war with the raccoons. But the dispatch of the skunk was just the beginning of the night. A skunk might hold his fire, but then again, he might not. In this case, it began slowly and began to grow. Knowing that neither of us, Shelley nor I, wanted to be exposed to a long night of skunk odor, I decided I had to deal with it. Approaching the trap was tenuous. While he obviously could not technically fight back. He had covered the area with a carpet bombing of sorts making the operation something of a biohazard zone. I finally got him released and carried him by the tail with a pair of pliers. It remains to be seen whether the pliers will ever find their way back into my toolbox or not. I removed him 150 feet or so from the cabin and returned to hose the area down. Upon returning, Shelley had already Googled "removing skunk smell from the ground". Dish soap, Peroxide and baking soda was the remedy we chose. It contained ingredients we currently had in the cabin. I squirted and sprinkles generous amounts around our version of ground zero and hosed it all down for close to fifteen minutes. It helped, but didn't really work. By now, the skunk himself was reaching out to touch our senses. I decided to just start the tractor and dump a bucket of dirt on top of him to bury the problem. New problem. Earlier in the day, I had removed the bucket in favor of the pallet fork for moving stacks of blocks and pallets of cement bags around. The quick attachment switching between the two is easy going from bucket to pallet fork. It can be difficult going back to the bucket. The connection is the same but when switching to the bucket, some of the loader arm gear obscures the connection point. Leaving the process a little to feel and guess. It's difficult enough in broad daylight and I'd never even wanted to attempt it in the dark. BUT......... skunk! So, I began the tedious process of lining everything up. Almost immediately, the batter in my flashlight ran out of charge. Now I'm in the dark with the tractor headlights, which are being blocked by the front loader frame from shining on the bucket. After twenty or so minutes. I resorted to getting everything as close as I could and just man-handling the bucket onto the connector and clamping the hold-downs on. From there. everything went pretty easily. A couple loads of dirt and the skunk was no longer an issue. At least until later when I dig him up and move him much further away from us. The only lingering issue now was that even though the skunk was buried and the feeder area somewhat cleansed of it's skunky smell. My imagination was not letting go of the idea that in the whole process, I must have gotten some of it on me. Maybe it was just the residual shock of my sinus passages being exposed to an hour and a half of skunk disposal. After cleaning up I returned to bed, dreaming of skunk!
Adventure Quote: “.....it was like having a pet nuclear device.” ― Gary Paulsen
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