I was hurriedly preparing my morning: getting my work keys to let my students into the clinic for some Saturday appointments, cleaning a couple of things, fiddling with the solar still (water still tastes awful; it’s been a week), and then I went to get my kayak. After letting the students in, I figured I’d get a little paddling time at the reservoir. I haven’t been since I got back from Canada for the summer.
And therein lay the problem. In a moment, you will understand that the last sentence I wrote is a horrible, sick pun. I pulled back the tarp that covers my kayaks where they hang from hooks and straps on my back fence, in my liliputian “backyard”, and as I did so I smelled something. It reminded me of a nasty townhouse I spent a month or two cleaning up, after decades of filth and neglect. The kayak had been hanging on its side all summer, and the source of the stench was right about where my right thigh would go, if I were paddling. It looked, at first, like a bird’s nest, but messier. Rat’s nest? Pile of leaves somehow blown under the tarp and accumulated in the boat? Mud and twigs? Few seconds I did not realize how unlikely all of these ideas were. As I tilted the kayak to pull it out of its straps, a rounded, triangular object like a large, thick, wooden gingko leaf clattered down from where it had been stuck to the deck of the boat.
As it turns out, this was a scapula (I think, maybe; you can see it in the photos). The nest was fur and bones. It was a cat, or had been, quite some time ago. It must have been dead a good portion of the summer, because there was no rotting smell, just a strong musky reek, like a dried, carmelized pool of urine (which was, I think, the reason for a similar reek in the upstairs bedroom and closet of the townhouse, back in Ohio). The ex-cat was pretty much fur and bones; nothing squishy, nothing remotely moist. It was dry, but partially stuck together, as if with crackling glue. And there were dead, black, crunchy tubular insect bodies everywhere.
Now you know why the last two hours have been spent peeling, scooping, scrubbing, soaking, scrubbing, soaking, and scrubbing the kayak. Instead of paddling it. I have used half a gallon of concentrated Simple Green and a quart of Lysol. The gloves I was wearing will be thrown away. The clothing may be burned. If so, I expect a face-melting manifestation much like that opening-the-ark scene in the first Indiana Jones movie.
I assume the cat died from something other than being trapped in my boat. (1) There were no signs of struggle, and there was lots of foam he/she might have scratched and probably destroyed. For that matter, any cat worth its salt could have clawed through the tarp covering the opening. (2) It would have taken about zero calories’ worth of effort to escape. The tarp was not tight; it was like a semi-taut sheet draped over a window. I guess the cat was just dying for other reasons, and chose my cockpit as its blue plastic mausoleum.
DEAR SMALL ANIMALS: I KNOW YOU NEED A NICE, QUIET PLACE TO DIE, BUT I OBJECT TO YOUR USE OF MY KAYAK FOR THIS PURPOSE. MAY I RECOMMEND INSTEAD THE CULVERT BEHIND MY APARTMENT COMPLEX. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING. SINCERELY, THE MANAGEMENT.
If you want to see the photos (of course I took photos), they’re kind of freakishly fascinating (to me). They’re under the cut.
First look: What is that thing?!?
Second look: I’m very sorry Mr./Ms. Cat.
The flea collar indicates this was someone’s pet. I hope they were very sad to lose the kitty, because otherwise it means they were jerks. I posthumously named this cat Kayak, obviously due to the gender neutrality of the name. I will not get it confused with the kayak, because the kayak’s name is Pig.
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