Urban Animals (Part 1) -or- The Rat and I
Winter breezes ruffled the printouts in my hands as I shifted position on the wooden bench. It was a late afternoon in New York City and I was in Union Square Park waiting for friends, planning to go on to a Village bar for happy hour, but waiting so long the sun had set over the metronome clock and I found myself reading by streetlamp. Tightening my jacket and straining eyes to read in dim light, I suddenly was hyper-aware of increasing activity around the bench. Glancing down at my feet, I saw the dark ground moving and couldn’t figure why. Then I felt something brushing over my Italian business shoes. I raised my feet and peered closer and suddenly understood: beneath the bench was alive with dusk’s rush hour of mice, commuting to their night jobs of hunting and gathering.
A year ago I would have been standing on my park bench in a shouting panic, drawing attention and scorn from longer-time New Yorkers enjoying the park after nightfall. Now, though, I was more concerned with how the article would end, so I just lifted my feet off the ground and continued reading:
In New York City, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last twenty-five years, but there are still millions here; some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being.
– Joseph Mitchell, “The Rats on the Waterfront” (1944)
I moved to New York City in the summer of 2006, shortly after graduation from Washington College in rural Chestertown, Md; before that, I had grown up in the suburbs around Philadelphia, Pa. — both places I considered far more nature-oriented than the concrete environs of Manhattan. Sure, I knew of evil subway rats (from children’s cartoons) but I had never seen one scamper along a sidewalk. I’d lived here only a few days before I had that experience to write home about. Soon enough I was a fan of a “New York Moment:” letting tourists entertain me as they would notice a large rat running down subway tracks, gasp in shock, next mutter something in confidence after calculating the safe distance between themselves on the platform and the rat on the tracks, then remark aloud how this was something they certainly never had to deal with back home, and thank goodness for that.
Shortly after subletting a windowless basement room in an East Village apartment that cost more per month than my parents’ mortgage ever did, I was in the bathroom one night when I heard a skittering in the tub next to me, an annoying sound that I ignored as long as I could before pulling back the shower curtain to expose a rodent, desperate to escape the slippery porcelain. I called in the roommates and excused myself from their disposition of an unfortunate creature that could not swim well enough in scalding water to save itself. I wore sandals in the shower the next day.
In my next apartment when I caught a mouse using our bathroom, I responded with aplomb, calmly climbing onto the toilet and grabbing the nearby plunger. However, as I was on my way to the gym, I could do little more than leave a note, “LIVE MOUSE under plunger - Do Not Remove!” The roomies took care of that one, too. Some weeks later, discovering nibbled bags of bread and mouse droppings throughout our place, we took action to reclaim our beautiful second floor apartment for ourselves. I got glue traps and placed them all around, forgetting almost instantly just where I put them until a month later when an incessant scrabbling noise under the stove signaled at least one gluey success.
All that progress and nothing has changed. I woke up today to loud complaint from my roommate, who saw another rodent running through the kitchen. His observation seemed quite ordinary to me, as I saw one saunter across the living room floor two nights ago while I was watching television and give me a look as if disdaining my program choice. Here, rats have advantages over, say, intruding Philadelphians. They were here before we were and they will certainly be here long after we move in search of another place that promises to be free of them. Tenants don’t stand a chance of kicking out the native-born New York mouse or Manhattanite rat from an apartment it’s called home for years. I’ve accepted a level of coexistence, understanding that every so often some infestation, coupled with a media spotlight, will shut down the neighborhood Taco Bell.
And nothing makes living with rodents more tolerable than learning of the new bedbug epidemic spreading through Manhattan. So grows my urban wildlife list, and I can scratch off another predator. The nature-lover must accept his place in the Hudson River food chain. After all, it is the Year of the Rat, ever since a parade went down Canal Street in Chinatown last month — and I was born 24 years ago in this same auspicious year of the calendar as reckoned by Chinese — so I embrace all this, wholly, inevitably, and hardly bothering about the pigeon shit on my doorstep, as destiny.
Peter W. Knox graduated from Washington College in ‘06, with a BA in English and Creative Writing, where he was the editor-in-chief of the monthly features magazine and a weekly columnist for the college newspaper. Knox now lives in New York City where he works in book publishing and occasionally crafts essays for nagging college contacts on the side. Knox has been published in various magazines since 2004 and you can always find him at his website: www.peter-knox.com
