Thursday, May 15, 2008
Swarms of rats are wreaking havoc on my neighborhood -- inhaling garbage, popping up in toilets, killing trees, even skirting up my leg. Still, they enthrall me.
Aug 25, 2003 | The rain came three weeks ago and flooded Gowanus, in the industrial flats of Brooklyn, N.Y., and the people in the neighborhood thought it would flush out the rats at last. The grain warehouses, the gun factory, the sweatshops, the garbage depots, the crumbling walk-ups, the dying hookers, the wild dogs roaming in packs, even the stinking Gowanus Canal, sat up and stopped and huddled a little in the blasting storm. The rats, who build bunkers in the empty lot across from my home, did not.
Fattened on the current budget crisis, where garbage pickup goes laggard and city exterminators turn deadbeat, New York rats are famous again, as they were in the crumbling 1970s: there are eight of them to every human, which places their number at around 60 million. Problem's out of control, reports the New York Times. To bring home the point of this slow-summer hysteria, the dailies frontpaged the infamous tale of the rat firehouse in Queens, where the creatures quite simply took over the walls and beams, the very structure, and earlier this month evicted the firefighters. "We thought we were winning the war initially," the fire chief told the Daily News, "but later it became clear that the rats are winning the war."
Rats, it goes without saying, have caused mankind more economic and physical misery than any other pest in history. They are the slyest and smartest of humanity's camp followers; wherever man has laid mortar and started towns, wherever he has civilized himself, the rat was there in tandem, a shadow order, thriving as we. Why the rat, and not the raccoon or the squirrel or the chipmunk? The rat was by far the most efficient in its parasitism, and showing much good sense he attached himself to homo sapiens, the planet's top parasite. Like man, the rat was adaptable, creative, exploitative; he thrives in all conditions, living in barns, on rooftops, in sewers, ocean liners, trees, basements, and on the tops of 50-story buildings. Like man, the rat is theatrical in its mayhem, the Black Death being its finest production. And like man, the rat enjoys collecting useless glittery junk to its nest, stealing and hoarding coins and jewelry and key rings, anything that its beady eyes mistake for value. More impressive, rats each year destroy some 20 percent of the world's food supply, by direct pilferage and indirect contamination.
The rats in Gowanus are terrorizing my lady. She cuts a vaudeville figure in the gauntlet to our door, with her Olympic leaps along the moving sidewalks, the way she suddenly charges into the streets and runs down the middle of the road against the traffic. She comes in pale and red-eyed, she throws her bag across the room, she threatens me physically, she tells me I'm a dirty person. She falls in a heap on the bed. It's an ancestral horror, common sense after the thousand plagues of history.
I find the rats fascinating; I go out at 4 and 5 a.m., near dawn, to watch them build and fight, standing at 10, even five paces; they ignore me. I walk out of our apartment on Ninth Street late one night, past a garbage pile, and a startled rat slingshots from an overstuffed trashbag that leaks diapers and hotdogs. We dance in mutual evasion to one side and then the other, but the beast runs over my sandaled foot and up my leg to below the knee (claws hooking like toothpicks, not piercing the skin -- nipping, rather), and in my head and stomach there's the hot waxen feel of paralyzed terror: a rat cornered or startled will attack; he will pounce like a berserker, running straight up one's clothes, tearing and gashing and snarling, his teeth hard like stone, constantly worked and refined, and a rat if he's desperate can gnaw through brick, cinder block, aluminum siding, lead pipe in the space of minutes. What can he do to flesh? He spreads disease, leptospirosis, rat-bite fever, trichinosis, fleas, plague. I thought of an exterminator's pamphlet I'd read on the powers of the thing: "Adept athletes, rats can leap three feet straight up and four feet horizontally. They can scramble up the outside of a pipe three inches in diameter, and climb inside pipes one-and-a-half to four inches in diameter. They can walk between buildings on telephone or power lines, and scramble on board a ship on its mooring lines. They can fall more than 50 feet and survive."
My rat did a back flip off my calf and hurried into the darkness, and I drank heavily at bars for the rest of the evening, keeping calm. This was a Norway rat, the largest, meanest, dirtiest and commonest of the species in North America; also known as the brown, the wharf, the sewer, or the house rat, and to biologists as rattus norvegicus. He was 9 inches long -- 16 counting his scaly tail -- fat through his middle like an otter, heavy like a wet shoe, and colored like a brown paper bag soaked in vegetable oil.
The Norway rat bears young with awful vigor, between four and seven times a year, in litters of sometimes 20 or more, and its offspring prepare to breed as early as 4 months of age. Many thriving families were established in the lot on Ninth Street and Second Avenue in Gowanus. The bunker there was bustling, multi-tiered, with a dozen back doors and side entrances and escape hatches and well-worn paths in highway intersects, as nonstop in its hurry as the sweatshops or the gun factory across the street, which produces pistols for cops. The rats pass each other on the paths, they bump heads, shivering, exchange what might be anthropomorphized as a nod of recognition, even a salutation, and like New Yorkers everywhere make way scurrying to their respective holes. I once saw a black rat and a German shepherd mutt battling over a chicken bone, on a warm sunny morning. They splashed in puddles and the dog howled, the rat shot forward like a party favor and raked the dog's nose. I can hear the rats, four floors down from my windows, squealing and making little hooting sounds in the garbage piles. They root and roll and slink and slide, biting each other, competing for scraps. Feeding time is the occasion for much social friction, the weeding of the weak, the establishment of hierarchies, where the top rats partake at leisure and the subordinates pick at the remains. In extreme cases, in periods of starvation, for example, the weakest are sometimes themselves eaten.
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