Dances with Squirrels

My introduction to performance art.

Many years ago, when station wagons roamed the land, my parents took my brother and me on vacation to Lake Tahoe. This was before DVD players or for that matter before VHS. Nope, it was just my brother and me beating the crap out of each other for ten straight hours and my Jewish mother screaming at us from the front; my father white-knuckling the steering wheel.

Except for the occasional burning car, dead coyote or the creepy purple glow from the nuke test range, the space between Vegas and Tahoe is an empty wasteland.

My dad stopped at Tonopah to get gas and we got out to search for a snake or lizard to scare my mother with. I lifted a rock and was stung by a scorpion. My middle finger swelled up like a German sausage. My mother wrapped it in ice and for five hundred miles I got to flip off every passing vehicle.

In Tahoe, my dad rented a very rustic cabin and for the first ten minutes it was a kid's paradise. The rest of the 9 days, 23 hours and 50 minutes were complete boredom. Except for the last twenty minutes. Those last twenty minutes were the greatest time of my entire life.

With nothing really productive to do, we decided to become the great white hunters. Our first quarry was deer. We discovered that deer run very fast and were bigger than us. We lowered our expectations to squirrels.

I designed an ingenious trap. It consisted of a shoe box held up by a stick and some Cheese Whiz squished on a string attached to the stick. See, the plan was a squirrel would see the cheese, go into the box, pull the string that would drop the stick and the box, which would capture the varmint.

Every day we set up the trap and every night the wind blew it over. You could imagine our delight each morning, when we found the box down. I crept up and gently lifted up the box with a long stick. My brother held a large rock to stun the poor creature.

Well after the seventh time with nothing in the box, we set the trap and forgot all about it.

Now it was the tenth day and time to leave. As my dad pulled out of the dirt driveway he noticed the box. "What is that?" he asked.

"Oh, that's our squirrel trap," I replied.

"Well pick that crap up and throw it away." I kicked my brother out of the car, he stumbled over to the box and casually lifted it up. Now there are few moments in one's life that are so beautiful and perfect that you get a feeling you are one with the universe. This was such a moment for me.

Three days before, one of the dumbest squirrels in Lake Tahoe, saw the cheese, pulled the string and was trapped by the box. And for three days this squirrel sat in the dark. When my brother lifted the box, the squirrel - half insane from thirst and hunger and blinded by the sun confused my brother for a red headed tree and jumped on his chest. The squirrel dug in his little furry claws and was never letting go.

I remember my bother jumping back in fright, noticed the squirrel locked onto his chest and did something akin to an Irish jig. His feet were flinging back and forth, his arms waving in the air and he was shouting something in Gaelic. Then he ran full speed into the forest and vanished like smoke in the wind.

My parents sat there a moment in complete stunned silence. Then my dad slowly got out of the car, slammed the door, grabbed my mother's toiletry bag from the trunk and ran into the forest. I got out as quickly as a could and ran after them.

About fifty yards in, there was a small clearing, rays of golden sunlight streamed through the trees and upon the nettled covered ground, my father was trying to remove the squirrel by beating living hell out of my brother with the battered toiletry bag.

I still get a little teary eyed thinking about that scene.

**No squirrels were harmed in the creating of this story**