When I go home to visit the folks for the weekend I never know what I'll end up doing....

Adventure Inside the Wall

They killed the third rat the evening I got home.

Rats had plagued my parents’ house for months. For months they had heard them scurrying above the kitchen ceiling and seen assorted signs of rat activity. The indoor dog, a Chihuahua/miniature Doberman mix named Chiquito, would often go into the kitchen in the evening and become agitated, as if he heard or smelled something that the humans of the household could not detect.

Mom and Dad ruled out poisoning the vermin for fear that they would die and decompose stinkily in some inaccessible spot. Initial efforts to trap them failed when the trap turned out to be too small. Eventually a large live-catch trap installed above the ceiling began to get them. Dad took the captured specimens out to the trash barrel in the yard and drowned them there.

While installing a new washer and dryer around that time Dad realized that the rats had demolished the large tube-like duct—or perhaps it was a duct-like tube—that ducted hot air from the dryer outside. He bought a new rat-proof duct made of accordion-pleated metal to install. To do this he would need my help.

When Dad had first built the house in the mid-1970s he had run the upstairs plumbing and all the washer-dryer connections along the cinder block walls that made up the core of the house in the corner formed by the back wall and outside wall of the kitchen. He had built a light wall of paneling to cover this unsightly utility area and had pushed the washer and dryer back against it.

Once before, when I was about ten or twelve, it had been necessary to get into this space to work on some of the plumbing. Dad had dropped me down inside the wall with a caulking gun to caulk around some pipes. I remembered the experience all too vividly, especially the almost overpowering vinegar-like smell of the caulking compound. Dad likened being inside the wall to sticking one’s head inside a pickle barrel. It did indeed smell like I would have imaged the inside of a pickle barrel would smell.

New, three decades later, it was time to open up that utility alcove again. Personally I felt like it was more of a job for my brother—but he wasn’t there, so I would have to do. Dad and I started by moving the dryer out of the way. Next we began clearing out a large cabinet built into the wall above the dryer’s usual location. It was a rather deep cabinet—we had to reach pretty far back to get everything out. There were old glass flower vases, plastic parfait glasses that had not seen the light of day in who knows how many years, bottles of sunscreen that may well have dated back to my childhood trips to the lake, and lots more.

Finally we had the cabinet emptied. Now we had to pull the cabinet itself out of the wall. The cabinet was very heavy and had sharp edges. Getting it safely down to the floor without mashing any fingers or toes was a delicate job.

The cabinet’s removal exposed a rectangular opening about two by three feet in size, with the bottom about chest high in the wall. Dad reached in and fished out the remains of the rat-gnawed duct. Then he gave me a broom and told me to start cleaning out the alcove while he made other preparations.

Almost every surface in the crawl space had a thick, grey coating of lint, dust, and I didn’t really want to know what. The place had been accumulating clothes dryer lint for decades. I quickly took to calling it “the lint closet.” I started using the broom to knock the lint and dust and I-didn’t-want-to-know-what off of the walls and pipes and down onto the floor. Within minutes I was sneezing my head off. Over the years I had largely grown out of my role as the family’s number one allergy sufferer. Now it came back with a vengeance.

I sneezed so badly that Dad had to take over the cleanup job so that I could rest and get myself together. Mom gave me an antihistamine tablet for my estornudos, as she called them. Then she left for a Saturday shopping expedition to the county seat that would keep her gone for hours. I suspect she was not unhappy to have a reason to get out of the house while Dad and I worked.

Once Dad had all the lint, etc. knocked down to the floor I was able to get back to work raking the mess out through a hole in the base of the wall where the dryer duct had gone and collecting it in a dust pan to put in the trash. Chiquito kept trying to crawl through the hole—he could just barely fit—and explore the “lint closet.” I could tell that he smelled the rats that had been using the space.

At one point I saw a little snout peeking into the lint closet through a hole in the end wall. That hole led up under the stairs where Chiquito couldn’t go. I had just spotted a curious rat! It must have spotted me too, because in a moment it was gone.

Up to this point Dad and I had been reaching through the crawl hole to do our cleanup work. Now came the time to venture into the space. Dad went first. It isn’t every day one sees a 68-year-old man with a build similar to that of boxer Mike Tyson crawl through a two-by-three foot hole chest-high off the floor, into a crawl space about six feet long and less than three feet wide. Dad’s work at an auto body shop has obviously kept him limber. When he looked out through the crawl hole I was reminded of seeing him standing in the church’s baptistery during a baptismal service.

When Dad came back out of the crawl space he had to go into town to get some item or other from the hardware store. I stayed behind and combed through the assorted stuff we had taken out of the cabinet, throwing away assorted things that clearly were no longer needed. By now the antihistamine had me feeling very drowsy.

When Dad came back we took the metal duct, stretched it out, and worked it into something like the length and shape we would need. Then Dad set the live catch trap down into the “lint closet.” I had to go into the wall myself to set it. Getting back out without bumping the trap and tripping it was the tricky part. We took Chiquito, turned out all the lights, and went for a little spin in Dad’s convertible to get some rest and much-needed fresh air. Dad’s hope was that the rat I had seen would come into the trap while all was dark and quiet.

When we came back the trap was still empty. We pulled it out of the way. I worked my way back into the “lint closet.” It wasn’t easy. Although there was plenty of head room, the floor section was barely large enough to make a decent coffin for me. I had to share it with assorted pipes, wall studs, and the metal dryer duct that Dad handed in to me. Dad then stepped outside and held the outer dryer vent in place while I tried to mate the end of the dryer duct to the vent. After getting that fastened I had to twist and pull and stretch the stiff metal dryer duct to get the other end of it over to the hole where it had to go. I felt like I was training to become a contortionist.

Eventually we got everything positioned as we needed it to be. I managed to climb back out of the wall. We carefully heaved the wall cabinet back into place. Then we started putting stuff back into it. Mom came home while we were still trying to clean up the kitchen. After that we had some lunch—and I went upstairs and took a much-needed nap to sleep off the effects of the antihistamine. Hopefully it will be another three decades or so before I have to venture into the “lint closet” again.