Midnight on a hot July night. My husband and I, sound asleep, woke up in a flash as 50 pounds of panicked Labrador jumped on my chest. Our dog, Sparky, had straddled me, of course! Mom! The one who feeds him, walks him and saves him from scary things.
“Sparky! What . . ? “I didn’t finish the sentence. The odor overtook me, assaulting my eyes, my nose, my throat. My stomach lurched.
Our home at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain, must have been included in the point-blank target of NORAD. The Russians have attacked with poison gas.
Ollie, still half-asleep, mumbled, “What’s going on?”
I didn’t share my dream-like NORAD explanation, because by then a vaguely familiar overtone wafted in with the nauseating smell. It emanated from Sparky. I recognized it. Skunk!
I leaped up screaming, hurled the startled Sparky from the bed, chased him downstairs, out the back and slammed the door.
The air in the family room hung heavy with the smell that was beyond Skunk. More like Essence of Skunk, Skunk Concentrate, Russian Poison Gas Skunk. My awakening brain now began to piece the scenario together. We’d left the back door open so that Sparky could go out without waking us. His dog food dish stood just inside the open door. In my reconstructed image, the skunk had stepped in to eat the dog food and woke Sparky up. A mad chase around the room ensued with the skunk spraying as often and vehemently as biologically possible. Eventually the skunk fled outside, and Sparky dashed up to the bedroom to tell us about it.
By this time the rest of the family had joined me downstairs.
“My Gosh! What happened?” “Open the windows!” “Turn on the fan!”
We couldn’t do anything else at this late hour. We went back to bed where we could hear the banished Sparky crying from outside the back door. I couldn’t sleep. Every breath made me nauseous.
Finally, I got up once again, found a damp bar of Zest in the shower and placed it on the pillow by my nose. Concentrating on its scent, I fell asleep.
Ollie, happy to have a 7:20 AM tee time, sprayed air freshener before he left.
Ten-year-old Mark, eight-year-old Gaby and I woke to the aroma of Glade Evergreen, Lysol Breath of Spring, and Skunk.
We soon found that we had nothing to eat for breakfast. The bread smelled and tasted like skunk. So did the cereal. So did the dishes, pans and silverware. The enormity of the damage began to hit home.
The children by then wore their mournful “I’m hungry” looks.
“It’s okay,” I told them. “Shower, shampoo and put on clean clothes. We’ll stop at Dunkin’ Donuts on our way to church.”
We got to church and sat down, close to the back. As we listened to the organ prelude, I noticed an unpleasant smell and knew immediately that we were the source. The fact that all of our clothes had come from different closets in different rooms, all with closed doors, made me feel slightly weak.
A sound from behind us interrupted my discomforting thoughts. The people behind us were sniffling and blowing their noses. They were behind us to the right, so with every hymn or prayer when we stood up, we sat down a little to our left. Finally, we were all scrunched against the far-left side of the pew, and the time had come for the children to leave for Sunday School.
Gabrielle, traumatized by the events of the last few hours, whispered, “I don’t want to go, Mom. I want to stay here with you.”
Mark, jammed against the side of the pew and acutely aware of the smell surrounding our little group, stood up, glanced at us, and said grimly, “I’m going.”
Mark’s class in the adjoining building required a walk outside. The fourth-graders, with keen senses to begin with, and alert to any excuse to be late to class, slowed down.
“I smell a skunk!” someone declared.
“Yeah, me too. It’s around here someplace. Let’s find it!”
Immediately the search began in the surrounding bushes and rocks. Mark, too embarrassed to admit he was the cause, and without guile enough to join in the search for the non-existent skunk, stood with his hands in his pockets and wished mightily that he was somewhere—anywhere—else.
When the church service ended, Mark rushed in to get us, saying, “Let’s get out of here!”
Back home, we saw that Ollie had returned from the golf course and had begun giving Sparky his second tomato-juice bath. Half-gallon empty cans of tomato juice lay around the yard. Sparky dashed about, trying to avoid the cold-water rinse from the hose.
We began throwing away food, washing dishes, and washing clothes. To my dismay, I discovered after the first wash, that the inside of the washing machine now smelled like skunk. I would have to air everything first.
Fresh air seemed to dissipate the odor. We opened all the doors and windows, only to realize that the furniture, drapes and carpets still held the smell. We needed the help of professionals.
I consulted the yellow pages, and the next morning the cleaning crew of four uniformed men arrived.
“Whew!” one of them exclaimed, as they came inside. They knew they had the right house. The small, wiry foreman had the authority of a brain surgeon entering the operating room and he realized I needed reassurance.
“I’ve done skunk before,” he told me, nodding gravely.
They set to work immediately, moving the furniture down the stairs and out to the garage.
The burly red-haired member of the crew oiled all the tables and wood furniture with industrial-strength Lemon Oil, never missing a crevice.
They returned and worked the following two days. They had a setback. After the shampooed furniture dried, it was like Sparky after the first tomato-juice bath. Still skunk. Not as strong, but still there. All of the furniture had to be done a second time.
“What do you think?” they asked when they finished. We could still smell it.
There is a last resort,” the foreman told me. “We can do a cherry-bomb.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s a powerful aerosol. You’d have to close up your house completely and leave for 24 hours. We use a timer to set it off. A scent of cherry wood will come down over everything. It won’t damage anything in your house.”
Mentally I began adding up the cost. We’d need to add the hotel room in addition to four days of the work crew. I’d called the insurance company who after consulting some unknown source, told me Skunk was not covered.
“We’ll think about it and call you tomorrow,” I told the foreman.
We discussed it but had some reservations. Additional cost, yes, but a bigger concern—how safe was the cherry bomb for our piano, computers and other appliances?
The next morning, after another night of open windows and ceiling fans, the smell was decidedly less. We canceled the cherry bomb, paid the bill and brought the miserable chapter of our lives to its conclusion.
Almost. Bizarre reminders continued to appear. When I removed a steak knife from the wooden slatted holder, a whiff of skunk came with it. When I took my sunglasses out of the case, the odor again. When I packed to go out of town a few weeks later, and unzipped the suitcase, a cloud of the unmistakable scent arose.
But eventually that too passed. The home and possessions we loved returned to their unpolluted state.
Did any unexpected good come out of this experience? It did! Ollie won first place in the Pikes Peak Open Golf Tournament. The winner of each of the four days went on to play the next day. Ollie won every day, and played straight through to the championship. His opponents didn’t stand a chance. Ollie’s motivation to stay away from his odiferous home outweighed their thoughts of relaxing in a recliner with a cold beer. Ollie’s drives went straight down the fairway. His approach shots landed on the green. His putts dropped into the holes. Ahh, yes! The sweet smell of success.
***
Lucy Bell, former writing consultant and published author, is inspired by James Baldwin who said: One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Lucy mines her own experiences with a preference for the humorous. She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Most of It Was Fun.”
