Dogs will be dogs, no matter the mess
The time was 3:30 a.m., and our dog, Jack, was whining to go outside.
People, I beg of you: Never, EVER, let your dog out in the middle of the night. Or even better, don’t even HAVE a dog. Have a canary, or maybe a newt.
Yet I got up and let him out. I stood there sleepily at the back door, waiting for Jack to go out and water a tree. He came racing back even faster than usual. I opened the door and he darted inside, followed a millisecond later by an acrid cloud of pure stench gas.
“Wow,” I thought, as I stuck my head out the door. “It sure smells like skunk outside.”
Then I turned back into the house and thought, “That’s funny. It sure smells like skunk inside, too.”
The enormity of the calamity struck me with a wave of horror, or should I say, nausea. I raced after Jack and found him in the living room, rolling on the rug, trying to wipe the stench from his fur. Now, if you know anything about skunk odor, you know that a dog can’t just wipe off the stench. A dog can, however, share it.
He can share it with the Oriental rug and the new recliner and with his innocent owner, who is wrestling him, picking him up bodily and carrying him to the door and dumping him into the back yard.
So this is how I found myself on the Internet at 3:35 a.m., looking up the formula for skunk remedy. I found it on the first try, which automatically qualifies the Internet as the greatest invention of all time.
No, it has nothing to do with tomato juice. That’s a weak substitute compared to this stuff. I reprint the recipe here, as a public service:
Skunk Remedy
1 quart of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide (fresh is best)
1/4 cup baking soda (not baking powder)
1 to 2 teaspoons of liquid soap (dishwashing soap or hand soap, not shampoo)
Mix together and wash your pet thoroughly with this solution, working it into the fur. Try to keep it out of the eyes (it’ll sting). Leave it on for about five minutes and then rinse your pet with tepid tap water.
Which is how I found myself driving around Spokane at 4 a.m. on Memorial Day, seeking a 24-hour supermarket where I could buy some peroxide. I couldn’t find one, which further explains how I found myself in the parking lot of Super One Foods at 4:30 a.m., waiting for the store to open at 5 a.m. I sat there in my car, marinating in skunk gas and listening to the BBC World Service on KPBX-FM.
Ask me about last weekend’s cricket scores. I sat through 15 solid minutes of them.
At 5 a.m. sharp I jumped out of the car and marched to the door, at which point the guy stacking carts informed me that the store wasn’t actually open yet because the checker hadn’t shown up.
High on skunk fumes, I was no longer a civilized human being. I held up my finger in warning, wagged it at him and said, “Listen, pal, I don’t care whether you ‘think’ you’re open or not. I’m not interested in your checker’s tardy work habits. You’ve got hydrogen peroxide in there, and I am going to obtain it. Try to stop me. You’ll be sorry.”
At least, I started to say this. I made it only through, “Listen, pal,” when my Pepé Le Pew aroma hit the guy square in the nostrils, knocking him back a few paces. He pointed me into the store, tears starting from his eyes.
The above formula was discovered by a chemist, to whom all of mankind and dogkind should be indebted. This mixture chemically separates the components of the deadly thiol molecules (known to the layman as the stink molecules) and renders them harmless. In the space of 10 minutes, Jack went from being a dog that could not be approached without a HazMat suit, to a dog that actually smelled better than he did before he got skunked.
In other words, the dog was now the only object in my house that did not reek of skunk.
The sad truth is, the above formula works fine on dogs, but cannot be used on most household items. It is essentially a form of bleach. You can’t use it on an Oriental rug, for instance, unless you want that rug to turn blonde.
Today, the rug is still hanging on the clothesline outside. The house still retains a certain essence of striped kitty. If our house were portrayed in a cartoon, wavy lines would be coming out the roof. A mushroom cloud might be perched above.
The stench, at one point, seemed to be following me. The pungent eau-de-polecat was detectable even at my workplace, a fact confirmed by several co-workers wearing handkerchiefs over their noses. I eventually discovered that an acrid green cloud was emanating from my briefcase. It had been on the floor in the living room that night.
The briefcase has now joined the rug on the clothesline.
Today, still hallucinating from skunk-inhalation, I have been trying to see the situation from the skunk’s point of view:
“So I’m out on my nighttime stroll, and I find me some old apples just crawling with worms,” the skunk is probably telling his stinky skunk buddies. “Earthy, yet somehow piquant. Then I hear the back door open. I’m thinkin’, don’t do it, pal. You’ll be sorry. But this black dog comes bouncing up to me, tongue all hanging out. What am I going to do? It’s not like I enjoy spraying dogs. But I had no choice. I nailed him, right in the kisser. Then I raked him amidships, too, just for good measure. Yeah, OK, you’re right. I do enjoy it.”
Yet I can’t really blame the skunk. And I can’t blame the dog, for doing what dogs have to do. Which leaves no one but myself to blame, for (1) letting the dog out, (2) letting the dog in, and (3) suffering through all of those cricket scores in the Super One parking lot, when what I should have done was break into the joint. Any jury would have acquitted me.