STINK, STANK, STUNK:
A VERY 2020 THANKSGIVING STORY
So, last night, Rod and I go to bed early after a 10-hour drive from Dallas to our family cabin in Ruidoso. But being a 13-year-old lady, Kendall has to pee frequently during the night, so she woke me up to go outside at a rather usual 12:30 a.m. Edina, ever the good younger sister, always accompanies her. Groggy from only about 90 minutes of sleep (and a couple or seven Tito's and sodas before bed), I turn on the light in the back yard and open the sliding door.
Both dogs rush out as they have uneventfully for years, except this time Edina comes face to face with what appears to me to be a Guinness World Record-size SKUNK. Kendall's preoccupied with something else on another side of the deck, possibly another skunk, but Edina lunges at the one LePew visible to me and my mind begins racing, playing out the possibilities of a bloody attack that would certainly end with the black-and-white striped beast the biggest loser. Within a split second, Eddie goes from being face-to-face to being face-to-ass. Her nose is now square in the skunk's bunghole, shadowed by an upright and flared-out tail, and the unmistakable odor of a rancid booty spray fills the chilly mountain air, wafting toward me as I scream for the dogs to come my direction. A few seconds later, Rod rushes out of the bedroom speaking in tongues of the incoherent post-slumber variety, simultaneously bolting into the backyard like a ninja without even asking why I'm not out there myself. So now I'm screaming at all three of them to get inside.
Now, let me pause a moment in the action to paint the picture for you more fully at this point. Rod and I have both showered the road trip off of us before bed and retired to Dreamland FULLY NAKED. So yes, I'm standing in the doorway au natural (my gorgeous locks blowing in the wind, but that's not the point of this story) while Rod flails toward at least one skunk and two dogs, mooning any neighbor within eyeshot—in the light of the actual moon—for full dramatic effect. Normally, there might be cheers from spectators, but to say that we've embraced the Covid-19-pound weight gain whole-heartedly (and whole-beer-bellily) would be an understatement.
In an amount of time that feels like minutes but is more likely 20 seconds, the living beings most important to me in the world finally run back inside as I slam shut the door. We're all in a bit of shock and minor (OK, MAJOR) panic. Edina begins frantically running in circles around the cabin as we try to catch her to see where the skunk sprayed her, hoping he/she/they missed her face. We haven't a clue what to do, but Rod decides a bath is definitely in order so we begin herding Edina into the downstairs bathroom. Before we achieve success, she manages to get back into our bedroom, jump on the bed and roll around on the duvet. More screaming and a few PG-13 words escape my mouth as I gag from the smell, which seems to be getting increasingly more powerful.
Before I can even Google what to do, I find Rod in the bathtub with Edina (one of them nearly completely hairless and one covered in hair—again, just painting the picture for you). With no dog shampoo on hand and all stores closed due to a new pandemic curfew in New Mexico, we turn to what's already available in the bathroom. He starts washing our frightened 50-pound bitch with some sensitive skin Aveeno body wash as I scroll through online skunk message boards, fan pages and Tik-Tok videos while sitting atop the toilet next to the tub. (I'm now in sweat pants and a shirt, so things are slowly becoming a little less scandalous.)
To my relief, the skunkverse at least agrees unanimously that the soaking-in-tomato-juice approach is an old wive's tale (but still a key plot point in one of my favorite-ever episodes ever of "The Partidge Family”). Instead, the legit magic formula consists of the holy trinity of Dawn liquid detergent, hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. I rush to the supply cabinet and find Dawn. (Yippee!) Rod rinses off the Aveeno and now douses Edina in dish soap.
While he's doing that, I decide it's probably smart to get the duvet into the washing machine ASAP. I notice a huge, saffron-yellow stain on the white-and-grey duvet, which turns out to be the sulfur-spiked skunk oil those little bastards spray when they're scared. Once everything's in the washer, I return to the bathroom to check the status of things. He's still scrubbing away, so I go on the hunt for baking soda. Voila! There's a box in the fridge, so Edina is soon coated in a white paste similar to something that would cause a contestant to be eliminated unceremoniously on "The Great British Baking Show".
I return to Googling.
"How do you get the skunk smell out of a house?" I dictate into the phone.
"Boil vinegar," says Mr. Google.
Revisiting the supply closet, I find a wide variety of vinegars: balsamic, white, apple cider, another larger bottle of apple cider, and a tiny bottle of fancy, schmancy balsamic. White seems like the most appropriate all-purpose vinegar in my 1:45 a.m. mind, so I dump the entire thing in a periwinkle blue T-Fal pot and crank the heat.
Meanwhile, back in the tub, Rod has finished another round of scrubbing and has rinsed Edina off completely. We wrangle some towels and get her dried to the best of our ability. I return to the laundry room to re-wash the duvet after stripping everything off the bed for good measure. Rod showers himself and we meet in the living room (now both fully clothed), pour ourselves another Tito's and turn on the TV.
Edina is in a full-on panic still and won't stop pacing the floor, so I give her a Trazadone from the prescription we keep on hand to reduce Kendall's anxiety on road trips. Doesn't seem to be working, but we get her settled a tiny bit. And the silver lining appears to be that she’s actually completely skunk-odor-free, but smells fresh and clean. It seems that her roll on the duvet actually transferred the skunk oil to the fabric, preventing it from completely infiltrating her skin. (Yippee 2.0!) Soon after this revelation, Rod starts complaining about his back, which makes sense given his recent underwater adventures, but also emphasizes that his eyes are burning, too. I estimate that it's merely from our long day driving cross-state and near-total lack of sleep, but then I notice, hmmm, my eyes are burning, too. The cabin has now turned into a noxious vinegar chamber, but opening the windows means letting in more skunk funk. So we decide we have no choice but at least open the front windows as our best option. After all, the stank is mostly isolated to the backyard and the dark void of the Lincoln National Forest beyond.
As we sip our Tito's and watch "American Dad" (it's now a little after 3:00 a.m.), I continue my correspondence school course in Skunkology 101 and discover that other websites (not the one I visited, of course) clearly state that the odor neutralizer should be half water, half vinegar. (Side note: we tried this morning and amazing, no burning eyes!)
At this point, we're exhausted and Edina has finally settled down enough that we can go to bed. Luckily, we're quarantining at the cabin alone and have two other bedrooms to retreat to, so we head to one upstairs. The smell that is now pretty palatable on the lower level has somehow followed us up the staircase like a putrid poltergeist and locked itself in our room, determined to haunt our nightmares further and tickle our nostrils with its fermented fingers.
Needless to say, it was a rather sleepless night, but we learned a few really important lessons:
1. Skunks are jerks.
2. Whatever animal design team thought it was a good idea to arm a creature with toxic ass juice is also comprised of jerks.
3. Tomato juice should only be used to make Bloody Marys.
4. We're really not cut out for this Grizzly Adams bullshit whatsoever.
5. But we haven’t reached a point in this terrible year that we can’t still laugh at life and be thankful that this episode wasn’t any worse.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING WEEK, STINKERS!
So, last night, Rod and I go to bed early after a 10-hour drive from Dallas to our family cabin in Ruidoso. But being a 13-year-old lady, Kendall has to pee frequently during the night, so she woke me up to go outside at a rather usual 12:30 a.m. Edina, ever the good younger sister, always accompanies her. Groggy from only about 90 minutes of sleep (and a couple or seven Tito's and sodas before bed), I turn on the light in the back yard and open the sliding door.
Both dogs rush out as they have uneventfully for years, except this time Edina comes face to face with what appears to me to be a Guinness World Record-size SKUNK. Kendall's preoccupied with something else on another side of the deck, possibly another skunk, but Edina lunges at the one LePew visible to me and my mind begins racing, playing out the possibilities of a bloody attack that would certainly end with the black-and-white striped beast the biggest loser. Within a split second, Eddie goes from being face-to-face to being face-to-ass. Her nose is now square in the skunk's bunghole, shadowed by an upright and flared-out tail, and the unmistakable odor of a rancid booty spray fills the chilly mountain air, wafting toward me as I scream for the dogs to come my direction. A few seconds later, Rod rushes out of the bedroom speaking in tongues of the incoherent post-slumber variety, simultaneously bolting into the backyard like a ninja without even asking why I'm not out there myself. So now I'm screaming at all three of them to get inside.
Now, let me pause a moment in the action to paint the picture for you more fully at this point. Rod and I have both showered the road trip off of us before bed and retired to Dreamland FULLY NAKED. So yes, I'm standing in the doorway au natural (my gorgeous locks blowing in the wind, but that's not the point of this story) while Rod flails toward at least one skunk and two dogs, mooning any neighbor within eyeshot—in the light of the actual moon—for full dramatic effect. Normally, there might be cheers from spectators, but to say that we've embraced the Covid-19-pound weight gain whole-heartedly (and whole-beer-bellily) would be an understatement.
In an amount of time that feels like minutes but is more likely 20 seconds, the living beings most important to me in the world finally run back inside as I slam shut the door. We're all in a bit of shock and minor (OK, MAJOR) panic. Edina begins frantically running in circles around the cabin as we try to catch her to see where the skunk sprayed her, hoping he/she/they missed her face. We haven't a clue what to do, but Rod decides a bath is definitely in order so we begin herding Edina into the downstairs bathroom. Before we achieve success, she manages to get back into our bedroom, jump on the bed and roll around on the duvet. More screaming and a few PG-13 words escape my mouth as I gag from the smell, which seems to be getting increasingly more powerful.
Before I can even Google what to do, I find Rod in the bathtub with Edina (one of them nearly completely hairless and one covered in hair—again, just painting the picture for you). With no dog shampoo on hand and all stores closed due to a new pandemic curfew in New Mexico, we turn to what's already available in the bathroom. He starts washing our frightened 50-pound bitch with some sensitive skin Aveeno body wash as I scroll through online skunk message boards, fan pages and Tik-Tok videos while sitting atop the toilet next to the tub. (I'm now in sweat pants and a shirt, so things are slowly becoming a little less scandalous.)
To my relief, the skunkverse at least agrees unanimously that the soaking-in-tomato-juice approach is an old wive's tale (but still a key plot point in one of my favorite-ever episodes ever of "The Partidge Family”). Instead, the legit magic formula consists of the holy trinity of Dawn liquid detergent, hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. I rush to the supply cabinet and find Dawn. (Yippee!) Rod rinses off the Aveeno and now douses Edina in dish soap.
While he's doing that, I decide it's probably smart to get the duvet into the washing machine ASAP. I notice a huge, saffron-yellow stain on the white-and-grey duvet, which turns out to be the sulfur-spiked skunk oil those little bastards spray when they're scared. Once everything's in the washer, I return to the bathroom to check the status of things. He's still scrubbing away, so I go on the hunt for baking soda. Voila! There's a box in the fridge, so Edina is soon coated in a white paste similar to something that would cause a contestant to be eliminated unceremoniously on "The Great British Baking Show".
I return to Googling.
"How do you get the skunk smell out of a house?" I dictate into the phone.
"Boil vinegar," says Mr. Google.
Revisiting the supply closet, I find a wide variety of vinegars: balsamic, white, apple cider, another larger bottle of apple cider, and a tiny bottle of fancy, schmancy balsamic. White seems like the most appropriate all-purpose vinegar in my 1:45 a.m. mind, so I dump the entire thing in a periwinkle blue T-Fal pot and crank the heat.
Meanwhile, back in the tub, Rod has finished another round of scrubbing and has rinsed Edina off completely. We wrangle some towels and get her dried to the best of our ability. I return to the laundry room to re-wash the duvet after stripping everything off the bed for good measure. Rod showers himself and we meet in the living room (now both fully clothed), pour ourselves another Tito's and turn on the TV.
Edina is in a full-on panic still and won't stop pacing the floor, so I give her a Trazadone from the prescription we keep on hand to reduce Kendall's anxiety on road trips. Doesn't seem to be working, but we get her settled a tiny bit. And the silver lining appears to be that she’s actually completely skunk-odor-free, but smells fresh and clean. It seems that her roll on the duvet actually transferred the skunk oil to the fabric, preventing it from completely infiltrating her skin. (Yippee 2.0!) Soon after this revelation, Rod starts complaining about his back, which makes sense given his recent underwater adventures, but also emphasizes that his eyes are burning, too. I estimate that it's merely from our long day driving cross-state and near-total lack of sleep, but then I notice, hmmm, my eyes are burning, too. The cabin has now turned into a noxious vinegar chamber, but opening the windows means letting in more skunk funk. So we decide we have no choice but at least open the front windows as our best option. After all, the stank is mostly isolated to the backyard and the dark void of the Lincoln National Forest beyond.
As we sip our Tito's and watch "American Dad" (it's now a little after 3:00 a.m.), I continue my correspondence school course in Skunkology 101 and discover that other websites (not the one I visited, of course) clearly state that the odor neutralizer should be half water, half vinegar. (Side note: we tried this morning and amazing, no burning eyes!)
At this point, we're exhausted and Edina has finally settled down enough that we can go to bed. Luckily, we're quarantining at the cabin alone and have two other bedrooms to retreat to, so we head to one upstairs. The smell that is now pretty palatable on the lower level has somehow followed us up the staircase like a putrid poltergeist and locked itself in our room, determined to haunt our nightmares further and tickle our nostrils with its fermented fingers.
Needless to say, it was a rather sleepless night, but we learned a few really important lessons:
1. Skunks are jerks.
2. Whatever animal design team thought it was a good idea to arm a creature with toxic ass juice is also comprised of jerks.
3. Tomato juice should only be used to make Bloody Marys.
4. We're really not cut out for this Grizzly Adams bullshit whatsoever.
5. But we haven’t reached a point in this terrible year that we can’t still laugh at life and be thankful that this episode wasn’t any worse.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING WEEK, STINKERS!