Stinky Situations
Hello! This is the 10th post of Loved Like Lazarus! Creating this publication has been a wonderful experience and I have only heard kind words, praises and encouragements. Thank you all for your support and I am glad that you find value in some of the things I say.
I wanted to go for a different feel to mark this special occasion, so I decided to just share two funny stories from my past. Enjoy.
It was the Fall of 2009. If you read my Mental Health Part I post, you may remember it was a rough year for me. I had withdrawn from college because of anxiety, panic attacks and depression, which led me to go back home to live with my parents. I felt my world was over, I was a failure and that I was missing out on life while my friends went about the most fun years of theirs. At this point of my life, I was in pretty good shape physically though. Running was one of my forms of exercise, but was difficult to be motivated to do after the whole traumatic ordeal of leaving school. Within the first week of being back at home, I was very depressed and my mom encouraged me to go running to hopefully get some endorphins going. They didn’t really provide much relief, but it was something to do and I always pictured myself running away from my depression/anxiety while doing it. I don’t remember if this was suggested to me by a counselor or if I came up with it by myself, but I sometimes personify my negative feelings of anxiety and depression. This creates separation between myself and them and motivates me to rebel against their tyranny. A few swear words flung at their persons I also find justifiable.
One day, I was panicking over something (probably going back to school) and it was driving me crazy the whole day. When my mom got home later that night, she suggested that I go on one of my runs and stop worrying about it. It was late evening and hard to see, but decided to go anyway. It was a nice cool evening and at the end of the block I felt like I had made a good decision. I have always liked running at night. There is something very primal and peaceful about it. I was almost to the river trail and was running along some bushes when I saw, what I thought was a cat, run out right in front of me. It gave me a quite the fright and I also felt a lite sprinkling of liquid on my shins. My first impression was that a yard’s sprinklers had come on and scared the cat, and my legs got wet from that. But then the smell hit me. It was a skunk. I had been sprayed by a skunk….
Most of you have probably smelled the stench of a skunk before. It is a very distinct smell and not pleasant. I hope none of you ever have the experience of being the victim of a skunk-and-run. Skunk smell up close is of a different variety than the skunk smell at distance. Maybe I am weird but, skunk smell far away can even be mistaken for Mary Jane smoke or roasting green chilies in a revolving steel drum in front of the Durango Colorado Walmart. But up close, it smells like an industrial chemical fire. It is crazy to imagine how that smell comes from a living thing. It is like a chemical fire of burnt hair and burning tires. The vapors cause your eyes to water, your nostrils to burn and you can almost taste the smell.
So, there I was, in my hopes of going for a jog to alleviate my feelings of depression and anxiety, I was sprayed by a skunk and now had a more complicated set of emotions. Mostly the thought was, “this is just great… Why God! I am trying to do everything to feel better mentally and emotionally but now I am worse off!” I thought about running back to my house but that would only delay the inevitable. It was the most pitiful walk of despair. Usually when you see these sad walking home scenes in movies it starts raining, but I wasn’t even afforded that luxury….
In the past my dog was very curious of skunks. There was one week in high school where he got sprayed three times! He would be sprayed in the back yard, scratch at the door, we would let him in and then immediately regret it. It was a mad dash to get him out of the house before he started rubbing up against all the walls and furniture. Sometimes he would even run downstairs and we would have to drag him back upstairs. Some of you might have had to drag your dog by the collar back to someplace they do not want to go, like the bathtub or back to the scene of their poop/pee crime. Their collar slips off and it is super annoying. You then have to chase them, catch them, pin them down, reattach the collar a couple holes tighter; or even worse, slide the stupid buckle and tightener plastic to make it tighter (I mean who can figure that out the first try? I hate those things). So, imagine doing those things while your dog is also thrashing around with skunk spray on him. My dad and I couldn’t be that rational so we would panic and just carry him back outside, shut the door, and he would proceed to stare inside from the sliding glass door. In hindsight, he had the same look on his face as when I got sprayed by a skunk. RIP my dog named Denton, he loved the chase.
After we got him out of the house then there was the cleaning process… We would mix up hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and dish soap in a large bowl. Then, wash him with a sponge with the garden the hose. It was a messy ordeal with you ending up having to take a shower later too, to get the smell off your hands and legs. The whole house would smell like skunk for several days and the furniture would take longer to air out.
Back to my original story, I realized I would have to ring the doorbell to announce to my mom the fate that had befallen me. She opened the door and immediately closed it again. I asked her to please let me in and I would run to the shower as fast as I could. Because I am not a dog, it didn’t occur to me that I would need to use the same mixture of hydrogen peroxide, backing soda and dish soap. She disagreed. She LOCKED THE DOOR and told me to wait in the driveway. She prepared the mixture IN THE SAME LARGE BLUE BOWL we used on every other occasion of dog related sprayings. She left the bowl outside the door and I, in my shame, had to retrieve it and walk to the garden hose and bathe myself. When I was washing up, I did crack a smile thinking of the irony of the same dog bowl and the ridiculousness of the situation in general. My expensive running shoes never did smell the same. I had just got them!
This story has it all: a compounding ‘Job-like’ quality of woes; how the compassion of a mother for her son fails in comparison to the lack of skunk stench in her house; and the humor of a bad situation to snap you out of the humdrumery of life. Sadly, this was not my last skunk encounter.
In 2020 I took an overnight backpacking trip in the Superstition Mountains. The trail was called Haunted Canyon, and at the end of it was an abandoned cabin called Toney’s Ranch.
As you can see from the pictures it was very beautiful. We even saw a Sonoran Desert centipede! They are a thing of nightmares! (Please forgive my profanity swear words in this video. I was very excited to see this centipede after years of hearing about them. I find centipedes to be the creepiest insect hands down. It is a funny video though and I love showing it to people).
I went with my dog Scout and she had a great time, it being only the second time she had ever gone backpacking. She was running all over the place living her best dog life.
We got to the cabin and set up camp. It was a cool fall evening and I was feeling good. The cottonwoods were changing color and there was no one else around. We only passed two other people hiking out earlier that day. I was tucking in for the night and let Scout out to run around one more time. I heard a tussle and then the smell hit me. She had been sprayed by a skunk…. I wasn’t going to let her sleep in my tent anyway due to her vomiting on my sleeping bag the last time I took her camping. She was going to sleep under my gear flap (a little tarp attached to the tent to store your gear outside so it doesn’t get rained on). I thought fast and zipped that closed as fast as I could.
I was at an impasse. The choices were to get out of my tent, put her leash on, drag her away from me, and tie her to a tree, in the hopes of the smell being not as intense near me; or I could do nothing and have her lay just outside the tent and continue to breathe in noxious skunk chemicals all night. If I tied her to a tree, I knew she would just whine all night and I would have to put up with that too. Plus, I would for sure get skunk smell on my hands and legs and then it would get on all my camping stuff and I would have to deal with that for days after. So, I decided on the later and just roughed it out, smothering my face into my fleece jacket as a makeshift pillow/gas mask to protect my nose and eyes from burning. Luckily, I did not throw up myself. Staying that long so close to the smell was very nauseating. Needless to say… I got pretty much zero sleep.
In the morning the smell was less. Perhaps she had rubbed enough of it off on the trees and vegetation, and rolled in enough dirt to make it manageable. She knew she was in trouble, so I was able to tie her to a tree without much of a struggle. I packed up everything and we started the 5.5 mile hike back to the car. I had to keep her on-leash because I was afraid she would roll in mud or rub up against another hiker. We got to the car and she proceeded to stank it up real good on the 1.5 hour drive back to north Phoenix. It was a 24 hour ‘Skunkfest’. She hasn’t been backpacking since….
If you have made it to the end of all my posts, you may have noticed, I tie the story of Lazarus to the theme for that post. I will continue to do so, even if some of them are a stretch, like this one.
Martha thought she was looking out for Jesus reminding Him that there would be a stench after 4 days of Lazarus being dead in the tomb. As if He didn’t know that! Him being God and all. The resurrection power of the Holy Spirit is like the skunk spray removal mixture. It removes the stink that is sprayed on us because we live in this fallen world. Also, let us learn from our canine friends. Do not blindly chase after exciting critters (sin) not knowing what they are or the full extent of their abilities/effects. You will end up in a very bad stinky situation.
Comments:
Have you had a close encounter of the skunk kind?
What do you think is the creepiest bug/insect?
Do you have a camping story on par with Skunkfest 2020?
This whole piece stinks, jk