The Ways of Mice
Do you sense at times that there are celestial powers watching over you? Have you felt at other times that loved ones who’ve crossed over still move invisibly around you? I’ve felt those things and wondered about them in my writing. I no doubt will again. But not today. After the recent scary hurricane season, the interminably long and divisive election, I’m in need of an infusion of lightheartedness. I expect you are, too. So today, at the start of this holiday season, and in the spirit of the poet Robert Burns and his ode “To a Mouse” (which he opened with the epigraph, “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785”), I am going to tell a story of the ways of mice. It’s a reminder that we humans ought not to act as if we are the be-all and end-all—a reminder to take other creatures into account as we make decisions that impact the earth.
Many years ago, I drove a gray Honda—a vintage and unremarkable four-door Accord. I believed the car to be alive. It had a way of letting me know it hated being asked to pass, that it didn’t care for cruising over 60 m.p.h. It was the kind of car that doesn’t call attention to its driver—one that gets dinged a lot, because other drivers fail to see it—one that can’t be found in the lot at the mall without looking for the plates. It got to where I considered attaching a large, showy bow to the antenna, or maybe—given the car’s history—a big wedge of rubber cheese.
The car was a magnet for mice. So many moved in, in fact, that a friend and I dubbed the car the Mouse Mobile. Whether it looked like a large mouse, or had some irresistible engine squeak that spoke to them, I don’t know. It seemed odd simply to periodically share my wheels with rodents—but then, a really strange incident took place, one that suggested something about the mouse community in my town that I would bet few people are aware of.
But I’ll start at the beginning . . .
The first encounter occurred in winter. For two days it had been so cold, I’d gone nowhere. On the third day, a sunny, lung-pinching afternoon, desperation drove me out. The clutch I pushed in was rock-hard, but the car started. All the way to town, the tires thumped and rolled like blocks, and the speedometer spiked with a high-pitched whine between 0 and 120. It turned out it was only frozen, but I was so unnerved, I pulled off the highway and sat with one hand on the door latch, watching for smoke.
The car neither blew up nor broke down, so I went on, completed my errands, and started for home. That’s when it became apparent I wasn’t alone in the movable icebox. A small, dark shape darted out from under the passenger seat and up into the dash behind the glove compartment.
“Mouse!” flashed on the large screen inside my brain.
Sure enough. I pulled up outside the garage, inched the glove box open, and discovered a solid wall of shredded paper, pods from plants, grayish-purple dryer lint. I thought with wonder of the many trips up-and-down that the mouse had made while the car stood undriven. Nevertheless, I extracted the nest and tossed it onto the snowbank to show my husband. One brief glimpse was all I had—I never saw that mouse again.
The following summer, we sold our house and moved temporarily to an apartment in town. Because we had garage space for only one car, we parked the Honda in the lot, where its front bumper jutted out over an unmowed field. When I stopped one day for a red light at a downtown intersection, a skinny mouse that was all eyes and ears reared up from the slot between the hood and the wiper blade. He was adorable—his soulful eyes locked onto mine. Right through the windshield, I could hear what he was saying: “Where are we?”
He looked around at the traffic—then back at me. His was clearly a perplexing situation. The light changed—I touched the gas—back he went beneath the hood. Though this new traveling companion was charming, I pulled over, opened the hood, and shooed him down through the engine. I assume he took to the street and adopted a more urban life, because that mouse, too, I never saw again.
At this point, I’ll make a confession. I am drawn to and nourished by things odd or inexplicable. By this time, I was thinking that all these mice in my car must be significant—and then, about a year later, another incident occurred, one that pushed my assessment of the ways of mice even further into the realm of the curious.
It happened when I pulled up at mid-day to another red light at an intersection along the main thoroughfare through town. I was rolling to a stop, half-lost in reflection, when on the sloped embankment to the right of the street I caught sight of something small and alive careening down toward the curb. It was a mouse. The autumn grass was so flat, you could easily see it. My huge gray vehicle rolling in the street, all the huge vehicles, didn’t scare the thing at all—I swear, it looked like a late arrival running for a bus, a child running to its mother.
The mouse took a bounding leap from the curb and bolted for my front end, vanishing under it just as the car came to a stop. I was—need I say—astonished. When the light changed, I could see no sign of the mouse, alive or dead, in my rearview. I had the unshakable sense that, out of all the cars approaching the light, it had chosen mine. I drove on, wondering uneasily where it had gone.
Like me, my husband, Bruce, is a writer. He has a strong intuitive sense but also a rational streak that fights it. The result is that he’s forever shaking his head in amusement, or incredulity, over the interpretations I offer for events in my life. When I gave him my take on the curb-leaping mouse, it was too much for him. “It chose your car?” he said. “Where do you get these ideas?”
The next day, I took a trip to see my folks. Bruce wasn’t going with me, so while I packed, he went out to check my fluids. Within minutes he opened the door in the kitchen. “Come and look,” he hollered. My eyes grew wide. I started to crow, for sheltered between the air cleaner and the engine block, next to the carburetor, was a pink nest, a whirl of rolled fiberglass that the stowaway had pulled from our garage walls.
“I thought you were nuts,” Bruce said, by way of apology.
It was only the first installment. Two years later, I pulled up to the very same intersection, again as the light was turning red. This time I was behind one of the small buses that run through town. As open to the incredible as I may be, what happened next threw me. The traffic braked to a halt, and another mouse came flying down the embankment, now heaped with snow. It leapt from the snowbank—a lithe and compact déjà vu—and raced to the twin right rear tires of the bus. Standing tippy-toe on its hind feet, it placed its front paws against the inside tire. Not finding a way up, it rocketed around to the other side and reared again. It tried four times in all, examining the tires and the bottom of the bus from different angles.
Now, this was taking place a mere car-length away—and it had me pounding on my steering wheel. “Stay away from me!” I shouted out loud. “Don’t come over here!” It must have been a sight for drivers going by—a grown woman pounding and shrieking, staring at the wheels of a bus. In general, I welcome, am even grateful for such weird and unexpected experiences—but something from the primitive part of my brain had come out. I felt like the cartoon elephant on a chair. Here was another mouse, attempting to enter a vehicle—and I, mere yards away, in the big gray mechanical mother of all mice!
The flesh-and-blood mouse, however, knew what it was doing. It wanted a bus. Incredibly, the mouse read the change in the bus’s rate of idle, and just as the light turned green and I was envisioning its horrible demise, it raced back up the snowbank, made a beeline for the wall of a nearby business, and disappeared down a hole along an electrical pipe. It never even looked at me.
As wild as this developing story was, Bruce didn’t twitch a mustache hair. I suppose he had become so accustomed by then to mice hitching rides or setting up housekeeping, he could believe anything. We discussed the idea of a network of mice traveling around town. It appealed to him—and I think, too, that at dinner parties and such he relished the expressions on people’s faces when I started sharing my stories about the ways of mice.
The world is larger—and smaller—than we know. What else could I conclude that day, as I drove off behind the bus? A whiskered bundle of energy had reminded me that we’re not the only resourceful creatures on the planet—that we ought not so easily to dismiss “lower” forms of life. My experiences with the ride-hopping mice expanded my definition of family to include all God’s creatures, on the holiest of holy days, or the most ordinary one.
Driving around town since then—especially when I pass that corner—I speculate with pleasure: How many of the mouse community are out and about? Where is it they go to and come from? Do they catch the closest ride, or do they recognize our vehicles, recognize us? Do they know the patterns of our driving, or even make our commutes with us? It heartens me to think it may be so.
Bruce and I eventually retired the Honda. It was inevitable—we’d fought an ongoing battle with rust. No other car I’ve owned has felt alive, the way the Honda did. It’s going on thirty years since we let it go, and I am still grateful for the furry blessings that came with owning it.
This piece, in a form contemporaneous to the events, appeared in the Brainerd, MN, Daily Dispatch, Oct. 25, 1998.
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