The Stink of True Friendship

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I never expected to be one a first name basis with a skunk, but then there have been a lot of creatures my husband has introduced me to which I had carefully avoided previous to marrying him. All too often, his fascination with nature’s denizens has disrupted my carefully constructed environmental safety zone. As far as I can tell, it has never once occurred to him that most species would prefer to complete their entire life-cycle without human interruption.

After my husband graduated from BYU with a degree in Economics (which he will tell you allows him to understand complex international finance strategies but has never earned him a single penny), my uncle offered him a job in Bozeman, Montana, managing a brand new Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Prior to his opening the store, he spent a few weeks in Salt Lake City training at various KFC locations.  Daughter #1–less than a year old–and I stayed in Albuquerque with my parents, while he bunked in Salt Lake with our closest friends from college who had just bought a house in Murray.

My husband gets bored easily, so when he wasn’t working, he looked around for something to fill his spare time. He picked driving a tractor. He’d always had a secret yearning to climb up in the cab, rev up that powerful engine, and race across an unplowed field. (I’m pretty sure the idea of actually spending a day in the hot sun working for a living was not part of that dream.) Fortunately for him, my former roommate had married a fellow who was working on a PhD in agriculture. He managed an actual farm in Cedar Fort with an actual tractor which he used to plow 50 or 100 acres or so, if memory serves

When my husband realized this, he got a gleam in his eye similar to Dorothy’s when she saw the Emerald City. He begged and pleaded and finally convinced our friend Paul to let him try his hand driving the tractor. I’m not sure how much help he was, but he spent several afternoons working in the fields fulfilling his heart’s desire. On one pass through the field, he unintentionally ran over a skunk’s nest. Only a single tiny baby survived. Naturally, he stopped abruptly, climbed down and rescued the kit, tucking it under his arm until he could get it to safety. He reasoned it would make a lovely pet for Daughter #1 when she was older.

There was one small impediment to his plan. Skunks have a serious offensive weapon when disturbed. My husband borrowed an abandoned bird cage from our friends to house the small creature in their back yard temporarily; then he was off to the local library for an evening of research on how to de-scent a skunk. Armed with that information, he convinced a local Murray dentist to give him a very small prescription for ether and also lend him a couple of surgical tools.

He designated our friends’ basement as his work area by spreading a thick layer newspaper out over an old table. A sniff of ether and the baby skunk went immediately to sleep. My husband did exactly as the borrowed vet textbook instructed and turned the skunk’s rectum inside out to reveal the two scent glands. Using surgical scissors, he successfully clipped one side loose, but when he twisted the scissors to cut the other attached sack, he pierced it with the scissor’s sharp point, sending its sulfur-containing chemicals (called mercaptans) spraying in every direction: a miasmic fog which settled over the basement floor.

Nothing if not thorough, my husband over-builds every project he tackles, but though he tried every cleaning product he’d ever heard of, starting with tomato juice—which does not eliminate the odor, only helps mask it—moving to beer and even oatmeal, also ineffective. He scoured my friend’s considerable collection of hygienic products including bleach, Lysol, Spic ’n span, etc. But it was weeks before the smell finally wore away.

Unfortunately, upstairs my friend had to deal with unintended consequences. She had had a baby only three days younger than Daughter #1. In fact, we had gone to the same doctor, and she had delivered her daughter in the same bed to which I had been assigned the three days before. She had had severe morning sickness every day from the moment she became pregnant. She had even thrown up on the delivery table. And now she was pregnant again.

Her basement oozed skunk. For days, she scrubbed and sprayed, attempting to dilute nature’s finest protective covering. She used vinegar, bleach, and sunlight where she could open windows. All of it helped. None of it eliminated the smell. She lost a dozen pounds emptying the contents of her stomach every time she went past the basement door or had to go downstairs to do laundry. My husband was mostly oblivious to her misery as he was gone long hours training, but far way away in Albuquerque, I agonized with her.

Eventually, the skunk—who survived the amateur surgery—came home to our house, but it was never happy. A wily little critter, it slipped out of its cage several times, snapped at my husband whenever he fed it, and one day, it simply disappeared. My husband speculated it was stolen rather than lost because pet skunks were popular at the time. I hoped that was true because it was too small to protect itself, and it had lost its only defense against predators.

But the real heroes of this story are our friends who not only still spoke to us, but once again but opened their home to us and our four children when we moved to Salt Lake years later. Their tale of the skunk invasion had by then become legend, and they laughed over and over again as they told it to new acquaintances. Skunks have their place in nature’s hierarchy, but friends like those surely earned a gold star in Heaven. And if, as some say, the Lord provides each of us a mansion in the sky, I guarantee mine will have beds ready for them.