Suggested headline: Woodward’s tips for dealing with skunks

(Though my regular column is suspended during the pandemic, we’re running some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally were published in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many are humor columns from the 1980s. In times like these, we need humor.)

  Spring must be here. Buds are swelling, crocuses are thrusting their heads through the soil and evenings are fragrant with the springlike aroma of …

  Skunks.

  Yes, friends, the scourge of spring is upon us. In some places this isn’t a problem. Where I live, it is the problem. Skunks consider my neighborhood their personal sanctuary.

  As a public service to those who may have to confront them but have little knowledge of how to avoid the horrors of being sprayed, the following is offered as advice on how not to deal with a skunk. Rest assured that the author has researched each of the techniques and can vouch for their reliability:

  1.  Do not leave doors open to the house at any time during skunk season, roughly spring through October. While some experts suggest deliberately leaving doors open to lull skunks into a sense of false security, I cannot recommend the procedure for anyone lacking a backup house.

  I thoughtlessly broke this rule in the wee hours one morning while taking a letter to the mailbox. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  The letter was important enough that upon waking in the middle of the night and remembering it hadn’t been mailed I got up and ventured outside to the mailbox with it. It was a warm evening so I wasn’t wearing a whole lot, but it was 3 a.m. Who would see me at that hour?

  Walking back from the mailbox to the house after putting the letter in the mailbox, I was surprised to see a dark figure lurking on the sidewalk. A dark, sinister, hissing figure. The hours when most of us are sleeping are, of course, the time when nocturnal skunks are at their menacing best.

  I remained calm, except for one small scream. This frightened the skunk, which immediately reversed course and boldly headed for the front door I had carelessly left open. Barring a quick counterattack, the skunk would be inside the house within seconds. 

  What to do? Luckily, a visit from any skunk, let alone one about to waddle into your house, gives a person an adrenalin rush. Blessed with insufficient time to think about it, I sprinted down the sidewalk, leaped over the skunk and bolted into the house just in time to slam the door in its face.

  It had to have been a strange sight, a man wearing nothing but his Fruit of the Looms, hurdling over a skunk in the dead of night.

  At least there wasn’t anyone around with a camera.

  2.  If you think a skunk is in your house, do not attempt to rout it with a baseball bat. I realized this while attempting to rout a skunk that proved to be a Batmobile under my son’s bed.

  Yes, as a matter of fact, I did feel a little silly. The experience taught me a valuable lesson however. When routing a skunk, the weapon of choice is not a baseball bat. A better option is an attack dog, preferably one you never want to see again.

  3.  If you have a dog as a pet, do not under any circumstance allow it to establish visual contact with a skunk. This will trigger a chase impulse the dog is powerless to resist.

  Our dog Molly, after being sprayed by a skunk and scrubbed almost to the point of hemorrhaging, saw another skunk the very next day and almost broke the door down trying to go outside and get sprayed again. So much for the myth of canine intelligence.

  4. Do not waste time bathing a pet sprayed by a skunk. It doesn’t work, at least not very well. The only thing that does work well is time. Lots of it. 

  Another option is to immerse the pet in tomato juice, followed by treatment with a product specifically designed the remove skunk odors. Then give the pet to someone you don’t like very much.

  5. If the worst happens and a skunk actually does get into your house, get rid of it immediately. The house, not the skunk. A house sprayed by a skunk is the ultimate in lost causes. If you’ve been up close and personal with a skunk, you know this. If not, trust me.

  This is what you do:

  Do not disrupt or frighten the skunk in any way. Get the family out of the house, go to a neighbor’s house to borrow a phone and call a Realtor. Have the Realtor put the house on the market immediately, priced for a quick sale. Do not mention the word “skunk.”

  With luck, the loan will close before the new owners discover your secret.

  This concludes Woodward’s tips for dealing with skunks.

  Have a nice spring.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

(Though my regular column is suspended during the pandemic, we’re running some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally were published in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many are humor columns from the 1980s. In times like these, we need humor.)

Suggested headline:  A textbook Woodward vacation

  Readers ask if my vacations are really as bad as they sound in my columns. The question is administered with varying doses of skepticism, as if no one’s luck could be that bad. To put an end to this misconception, I kept a diary of the two-week vacation just ended.

  Day One – Cool and cloudy. We drive as far east as Idaho Falls. A convention is in town. By the look of the town, it’s either clerks or undertakers.

  Day Two – Cold and windy. We leave Idaho Falls and drive to Yellowstone Park, where the weather provides a change of pace. Snow is blowing sideways without ever touching the ground. The man at our motel informs us that Yellowstone’s famous bears are gone, shipped out for causing traffic jams and otherwise being hazardous to humans. Our daughters are crushed.

  Yellowstone’s mountain passes are closed by the unseasonable storm, prohibiting travel through much of the park. We take in some geysers and mud pots and enjoy a Yellowstone dinner, tubes of red dye masquerading as hot dogs.

  Day Three – An endurance-driving marathon takes us to a place called Wolf Creek, Mont., in time for the evening fishing. Younger daughter is all but consumed by mosquitoes. Except for carnivorous insects, nothing is biting,

  Day Four – Rising early, we try the morning fishing. Older daughter loses favorite doll in waist-high grass, I ruin new shoes in mud, wife falls in river. Fish aren’t biting. We give up on fishing and drive to Glacier National Park, where the weather and scenery are reminiscent of the Himalayas. Wife loses makeup kit.

  Day Five – Older daughter wakes up with chicken pox, courtesy of younger daughter, who just got over them. We decide to stop having so much fun and drive to relatives’ house in Everett, Wash., where the patient can recuperate in comfort.

  Do you know how long it takes to drive from Glacier National Park to Everett, Wash., with a sick kid in the car? Forever. We arrive at 3 a.m. via the North Cascades Highway. There are higher, foggier, more treacherous roads than the North Cascades Highway, but none come to mind. The fog was so thick my wife had to get out of the car and walk the center line because it was all but invisible to me behind the wheel,

  Day Six – Everett greets us with a typical western Washington morning,  rain between the showers. Mark Twain said this part of the country was the only place he knew where a year comprised nine months of winter and three of late fall. Worse, I’m getting sick. A cold, or maybe the flu coming on.

  Day Seven – Daughter’s condition is improving; mine is in decline. In  addition to the above-mentioned symptoms, I’ve developed a nasty case of conjunctivitis and am rubbing my left eye raw. In a driving rain we head south to visit some other relatives, who invited us to spend the weekend with them at their cabin on Puget Sound. By the time we arrive, I’m so sick  it’s all I can do to climb the stairs and fall into bed at 8 p.m.

  Day Eight – Steady rain. Fishing, crabbing and oyster gathering are canceled by wind and whitecaps, This is largely irrelevant, however as it now seems certain that I have a nasty case of the flu. My head and muscles ache; my temperature is 102.

  The day’s one moment of excitement is provided by Missy, the relatives’  poodle. Missy is afraid of children. Rather than submit to our daughters’ affectionate advances, she dives off of a balcony, landing on rocks ten feet below. In contrast with my flu, which has largely been ignored, this is seen as a first-rate medical emergency. Consideration is given to dropping everything and driving an hour to the nearest vet.

  Day Nine – Father’s Day. I awake on the front porch of the neighbor’s cabin, having been displaced by the grievously injured Missy, who has taken over my bed. (Missy eventually was diagnosed with nothing worse than a minor bruise.)

  Stepping into the shower, I notice red spots on my neck and chest. My flu isn’t the flu at all. My daughters have given me the chicken pox for Father’s Day.

  Days Ten through Thirteen – There is a numbing sameness to these bedridden days. Those who know about such things have gone out of their way to inform me that chicken pox is much harder on adults than  children, a claim I’m in no position to dispute. I have 177 pock marks on my chest and stomach, 122 on my face. There are pock marks in my ears, my nose, my mouth. I can’t shave or brush my teeth without a blood transfusion, cannot be seen in public without evoking horror. I am the world’s ugliest human,

  Day Fourteen – Bright sunshine. I am well enough by this time to pack my suitcase and bid farewells to the relatives, who extend sympathies on the vacation. They do not invite us to return any time soon. It’s already Saturday. Half of a two-week vacation flashed by while I regained a semblance of health.

  Day Fifteen – Hot. By far the nicest weather of the trip. Nothing like a twelve-hour drive in a heat wave to put the spring back in your step. I’m still pock-marked and stay out of sight as much as possible but am spotted at a service station by two teenage girls.

  “Did you see that guy?” one of them asked the other.

  “Yes! Ooh, yuck!”

  I’d been trying to think of just the right words to describe our vacation.  Those were the ones, exactly.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog,com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

Suggested headline:  State of the art confusion

(Though my regular column is suspended during the pandemic, we’re running some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally were published in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many are humor columns from the 1980s. In times like these, we need humor more than ever.)

   Try buying a stereo these days.

   I did. My first stop was a department store. The clerk had just transferred from draperies.

  “What do you have in tape decks for around $200,” I asked him.

  “Huh?”

  “What do you have in cassette decks for about $200?”

  “You mean a deck that plays cassettes?”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “Okay. Well, we have some right here, and some under there and some over there.”

  “How much do they cost?”

  “Oh, all different prices, I guess. How much do you want to spend?”

  “About $200,” I said for the third time.

  “Oh.”

  Silence.

  “Can I look at some?”

  “Well, I guess. I mean it’s all right with me if you really want to.”

  I selected several models in the right price range. They had shiny panels and pretty colored lights.

  “Is this a good one?” I asked the clerk.

  “Yeah, it’s a real good one.”

  “How about this one over here?”

  “It’s real good, too.”

  “And that one over there?”

  “Real good.”

  “Which one is best?”

  “I don’t know. There’s one thing I can tell you, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They’re all real good.”

  The next store sold nothing but stereo equipment. The display room was so dimly lit it seemed almost solely illuminated by lights from the electronic equipment. Red, green, blue and amber lights winked from control panels that competed for space on ceiling-high shelves. Two young men stood in the center of the room, nodding solemnly as they discussed the relative merits of various components.

  One of them was the salesman. These days you need a technical dictionary and a second mortgage just to communicate with a stereo salesman.

  “I’m interested in a tape deck,” I told him. “Is there anything you particularly recommend?”

  “I have no idea,” he replied. “It all depends on what you want and what you want to do with it. Are you into tubes or transistors?’

  “Well, all I really want to do is play a few tapes. What’s the difference?”

  “Well, if you’re into high sustained power levels and peak energy transients, tubes are for you, especially if you have a variety of impedances. If you’re into true state-of-the art, though, you want transistors.”

  Not wanting to give the impression of a man who didn’t know what he was into, I narrowed my eyes, nodded sagaciously and asked to hear some music. This would get me off the hook and buy time to find someone who spoke English.

  The salesman put on a tape that sounded like a combination of Igor Stravinsky, Frank Zappa and the latest Chinese nuclear blast. When it was over, I discretely removed my hands from my years, asked for some brochures and went home.

  My ears were still ringing that night while I studied the brochures.

  They didn’t speak English, either.

  A couple of days later, I went back and sought out a different sales person for an opinion on one of the models described in the brochures.

  “I don’t really know much about that one,” he said. “But for only a few hundred dollars more you could have the Stereo 8000.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Stereo 8000 is the most discerning state-of-the-art system made,” he said in a condescending tone. “It has phenomenal bandwidth, infinitesimal harmonic distortion and delivers a million watts per channel. With the right adaptor you can use it to run your motorcycle.”

  “I don’t have a motorcycle.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We had a guy in here the other day who’d been using his to play sounds beyond the range of human hearing at volume levels you wouldn’t believe. He said he’d been driving the neighborhood dogs out of their skulls.”

  “What would anyone want to do that?”

  “I have no idea. we get all kinds in here.”

  I told him I was a dog lover and asked to hear the system described in the brochure. He flipped a bank of switches and put on a tape.

  “That sounds great. How much does it cost?”

  “The power amplifier is $400, the preamplifier is $300, the deck is $350 and the speakers are $400 each.”

  I quickly added up the cost of the components. They were worth more than my car.

  “Of course we’re running the system through an extra set of bass speakers, a quadrophonic sound unit, a mid-range driver and a high frequency blaster. They cost extra, but just listen to that sound! So pure! So airy! So .. ethereal! You don’t get that with just the basic system.”

  I thanked him and went home to talk it over with my wife. We like to make life-altering decisions together.

  “You should hear the stereo I listened to today,” I said. “It sounds ethereal.”

  “How much does it cost?”

  “Well, if we sold the car and used our savings we could handle it.”

  “Sell the car! How would we go anywhere? How would we get to work?”

  “On our new motorcycle.”

Tim Woodward’s column runs every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwarblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.