The Neighbors
I’d always been a city woman with a country heart so when we moved to the foothills of a mountain fifteen years ago I was eager to get up close and personal with the creatures. What poet and naturalist Gary Snyder calls “getting to know the neighbors.” I envisioned our yard an enchanted place where astonishing birds and butterflies would be jostling each other for a chance to hang out. We planted pyracantha, Mexican sage, and grevillea to augment the profusion of nesting sites and food sources already on the hill. We built a pond with a birdbath, hung up a birdhouse, did everything but serve them cabernet and truffles.
And they came, they came. Red-tailed hawks, mockingbirds, the elusive canyon wren with its singular call like a descending scale. Kestrels perch on the railing of our deck. Swallowtails, ladybugs, dragonflies flutter by. We’re crooned to sleep by frogs, crickets, great-horned owls.
But to make certain life didn’t become unbearably idyllic, others came too. The ants gave us our first taste of how uncivil the locals could be. I remember in particular one sweltering weekend when a coursing river of ants had surrounded the entire perimeter of the house. Then they stormed the parapets and partied inside, dancing on the ceilings, gorging themselves in the cupboards, streaming up and down walls.
Two of our rowdiest visitors were a pair of red-shafted flickers who kept insisting on using the redwood siding of our house to build their nest. We finally placed a birdhouse next to the gashes they’d pecked. They moved in, then on, after breeding season. I think I heard one of them mutter as it wheeled off into the sky, “And they call us birdbrains.”
Not long after the flickers, a thundering, seething swarm of bees took up residence in the birdhouse. Joe, a local apiarist came and, with devastating calm, removed the birdhouse replete with queen, a battalion of bees, and a mantle of impeccable honeycombs on its interior walls.
But rats were our grossest neighbors. Meeting one in the hall at two in the morning when you’re barefoot and bleary-eyed can jump-start your heart. It took months to get the greasy little beasts out. Then, as if to stick it to us for evicting them, one built a nest in the air filter box under the hood of my car. “It got in through your grille,” my mechanic told me, so thrilled by his find that he took a photograph of it. “Brought leaves, shredded paper, acorns, the works. A regular living room.” I was not thrilled.
The coyotes, another incredibly adaptable species, weren’t a surprise. We live adjacent to a canyon near the aptly named Coyote Drive. I enjoy them, especially their haunting howls. Even after one killed our cat. I respect their role as predators, many of them displaced by people like us. And their dauntlessness. Once I spotted a coyote at midday in the yard standing about ten feet away from our dog. They almost looked like a couple of pals chatting about the weather, but I became unglued, ran toward the coyote, waving my arms and yelling to chase it away. Shamelessly cool, the coyote ambled off ever so slowly down the driveway.
Then there was the scorpion that stung me. And the cone nose beetle that bit my husband. Its bite can trigger anaphylactic shock. And the black widow in our bedroom that killed the kitten we had adopted just weeks earlier. And the leg of a deer our next door neighbors found in their yard the morning after we’d sighted a mountain lion. And the rattlesnake in our next door neighbor’s studio.
Still, I wouldn’t dream of exchanging our cherished corner of the cosmos, neighbors and all, for the most chi-chi high rise in Manhattan overlooking Central Park. I don’t love all the neighbors. I do admire them. Apart from the biodiversity essential to our planet’s health and survival, they’re integral to what makes this place breathtaking. The loss of any species—the less-than-genteel as well as the cuddly and endearing—would, I know, diminish us and this mountain that’s a joy, and adventure, to call home.
©Lucy Aron, October 1997, The Santa Barbara Independent
