Carnage, Mayhem, Dark Thoughts and a Love Story
I have, at times, introduced myself as a recovering motorhead. I’m still working on it. About ten years ago I gifted my British racing green Triumph Spitfire to my daughter and sold our lumbering Jaguar V-12 convertible. Then, I bought a real car, a 2003 Mercedes SL500. A lovely car, the best I’ve ever owned. For those uninitiated in the dense nomenclature of Mercedes Benz, SL stands for Sportlich-Leicht. It was a grand-touring roadster.
The SL was unalloyed white, Germany’s international racing color. It featured a sumptuous gray-ash leather interior, burl wood accents, and a burl steering wheel. It was rolling art by any other name. At the touch of a button, its glass hardtop tucked into the trunk like a scene from a Transformers movie. With the top in the boot, the car was nearly windless thanks to Teutonic aerodynamic wizardry. With its sophisticated ultra-high pressure magnetic fluid suspension and its massive Michelins mated to a five-liter V-8, it handled like it was on rails.
I bought the SL used with thirty thousand miles. I pampered it for eight years and drove it from Key West to Calais, Maine. It never faltered and never failed to put a smile on my face and never failed to go fast when I wanted to. Last summer I drove it to Maine and decided it was more useful in the Pine Tree State than in Alexandria. I never liked driving in the DC area where people are rude, open car doors with abandon, smash into parked vehicles, and generally have little or no regard for nice things. And, if DC drivers don’t get you, the potholes will. In Maine, it would lead a lazy life of top-down, blue highway cruising where I would soak in the natural beauty, and coastal vibe and the only depreciating challenge would be sand in the floor mats.
And, that’s what happened – until I put it away for the winter.
In mid-November, I washed the SL, treated the leather interior, connected a battery tender, and left Maine with the knowledge that our modern two-car garage would provide shelter and a bit of warmth during the coming cold and dark. But, when we returned to Maine the week following Christmas, things got weird.
Mus musculus Linnaeus, 1758.
It was cold in Maine the week we returned. For eleven days high temperatures never rose into double-digits, and the lows were below zero. So, yes, I understand why any living creature would appreciate the relative warmth and shelter of our garage. I can appreciate this, but I never agreed to it. Not that anyone asked.
My first clue that there was a problem came when I started the SL to make sure it was okay. It wasn’t. That’s when I got the stomach-punching “Visit Workshop” message displayed in the instrument cluster. Then, the SL would not turn off. The engine kept running with the key out of the ignition. When I popped the hood to block the air intakes to kill the engine, I saw a dead mouse in the engine bay.
Along with the “Visit Workshop” message the SL told me to “Raise Roll-Over Bar.” This message, I had never seen before nor could I find anything related to it on the Mercedes owner’s group sites.
So, in early January, I tucked away this problem for a warmer time and set some old-fashioned spring traps in the garage. I was in Maine roughly four weeks between January and April and caught twenty-four invaders. In April, I mustered the courage to start troubleshooting the SL, and my first line of investigation was the fuse box-relay area behind the passenger’s seat. I popped the plastic cover under the leather interior panel, and there it was an abandoned utopian mouse commune. Abandoned because I had presumably trapped all the whisker-twitching cultists. They had used the sound insulation that Mercedes had thoughtfully padded the noisy bits with to build a bunker precisely over the fuse box, critical relays, sensors, and circuits. Then, they peed on everything and chewed the hair-width wiring that communicates the driver’s wishes and demands and conducts the neural network of SL’s deep state automotive consciousness.
I sucked everything as clean as I could with my Shop-Vac, got a magnifying glass and inspected the havoc. And, yes, it was chewed on, and peed on, and generally as smelly as you might imagine but please try not to. This filthy blight in mind-numbing proximity to pristine gray-ash leather and burl drove me to the brink. I was in motorhead shock. My cherished object of attachment the bonds to which I had forged with meticulous stewardship and my pride in its very existence within the orbit of My Things had transmuted to anxiety, maybe even panic. The onset of a separation complex hit me like a homesick freshman. It was a week before I regained nominal emotional equilibrium and the problem solver kicked in. I called Dan’s Auto.
Dan’s a square shooter and Joe, the tech who tried to mend the SL, is a stand-up guy and a patient caregiver. But, they had no luck. That’s when I called Prime Motors in Scarborough, Maine, the nearest Mercedes dealer. There would be access to the latest proprietary Mercedes diagnostic equipment and trained techs familiar with the SL’s cognitive elements, relay modules, and nervous system.
I took it to Prime, and the next day the service writer called and suggested I contact my insurance provider. I did and, yep, it was a total loss. The investigating tech estimated that over 100 of the tiny little wires would have to be repaired, and modules galore would need replacing. The service writer said the retractable hardtop module alone would cost $3,100. Thus came to an end an eight-year relationship with the best car I had ever owned. I kid not when I say I would have kept it for another twenty years or willed it to my daughter.
So, what’s the revenge? How does one go about killing every mouse and their relatives in the State of Maine?
My first line of inquiry was cats. Your every day, unrepentant American shorthair tabby is a prodigious mouse killing machine batting one-in-three, that’s a .333 OMP (On Mouse Percentage). They are nature’s Hall of Famers all. A quick online search found a feral cat support group in Portland that sells fixed and neutered “barn cats,” preferably in packs of three or more. But, I don’t have a barn. So, I tried to enlist our next-door neighbors because they have an unattached garage that might qualify as a barn, and they too, had suffered terribly this past winter when their lovely home was attacked by a vile coalition of mice, woodpeckers, and chipmunks. And, by the way, everyone says that this past winter saw an epic reign of mouse predation. Some blame it on the bumper seed crop from last year’s good growing season. Anyway, after thoughtful discussion and applied game-theory analysis over bottomless cocktails, it was decided that introducing feral cats onto Barters Island might be socially disruptive. It seems that not everybody likes feral cats. And, since our neighborhood cat, Tilly, is too well fed to bother with scruffy mice, cats as a revenge strategy were out. No, my revenge will come in a more personal and engineered form. Vengeance made of my own hands.
Before enlisting Google, I heard from three Mainers about, what I’ve deemed, the Maine Mouse Bucket. Now, before I go further, this device can be used to live-trap the vermin for kindly redistribution to someone else’s yard but I’m Greek, and it’s payback time.
If you Google “Maine Mouse Bucket” as I did, you’ll see a cheap and reportedly efficient method of trapping and dispatching mice in an abyss of deadly hubris. As I dove deeper into my research, I found that the whole world has arrived at similar inexpensive anti-mouse-rat innovations. All involve a bucket and a seemingly obvious but secretly perilous route to bait nirvana. So, assuming that Russian bots have no interest in manipulating this corner of the internet, I’m convinced that the Maine Mouse Bucket will do the trick and free my soul of its honor-bound debt. I’m on my way to Grover’s Hardware now, and I’m building at least three. Overkill? Impossible. – SJH
