Monday, July 6

Rats!

I saw my first rat today. I had heard them. I had heard about them. I have seen their pee and seen their poo. I have not seen the rats until tonight. What a horrid, gross, and disgusting creature...I feel a little guilty since I have seen “The Tale of Desperaux” and I should know not all rats are bad. The ones here on the island are all bad. They came over on pirate ships. Not really. However they got here, they are quite scary to hear scraping around in the attic and even more disgusting when you've got to sterilize your counter-tops ten times more than you might back home. We have had it with the Rat Zapper. It never caught a single thing- it's a free feeding station. We got two live traps today. Beth was the awesome roommate to set up the traps and bait them with gobs of peanut butter on cardboard strips. I hope we get something. Our traps at the house are live traps. I left our house just after Beth finished setting the traps to do laundry at the neighbors, since our machine seems to be the roost for a few rats. I stepped into the screened-in laundry area and as I loaded a few items into the machine and clicked on the water, guess what I saw scurrying across the rafters. A rat. A big honking furry and skinny tailed rat. It was brownish grey and about five to six inches long, no exaggerating. It was most surprising to see it since I've heard rats don't like light and they don't like noise. It made two laps between the hole in the ceiling and an area across the laundry room, going along the perimeter on the rafters. On the second trip, my breath caught up to me and I gave a shout and the rat stopped, stared at me, and then scurried off again. I screamed. Not the blood curdling horror film scream, but more of a shriek and then a gasp. Dwight, my neighbor, rushed to see, I told him I had just seen a rat and then, again, it popped its furry head out and scurried back from where it came. Good grief what a horrible sight to see AFTER I've loaded up the laundry machine. I know that I have to go back into that area again to fetch my clothes. Gross. I went back home, a short walk, and ate some dinner while I waited for the wash cycle to complete. Sure enough, Dwight did not skip a beat and he had loaded two rat traps with peanut butter and was setting them just as I came through the door. Fortunately, he could set them right where I'd seen the rat going along its favored path. I will be surprised if he doesn't catch one tonight. I grimace at the thought of seeing another live rat. The traps we have in our house are the live traps. I volunteered to help deal with the traps, but I'm secretly (and now not so secretly since I'm posting on the Internet) hoping that someone else handles the live catch. It makes you want to check every ceiling and every spot ten times before you sit down. There's an eerie feeling with knowing you're not alone. Maybe that's a little melodramatic. I definitely hope I do not see another rat or smell another rat.

In other and more happy news, I had a great day (up until seeing the rat, which made my day turn into a mostly-great day). And by popular request, here's a bit more about what I'm doing here during the work day: The day at the office today was a bit slower than usual and for the bulk of the day I caught up on some badly needed reading. There are several stacks and megabytes full of information that I've collected in the past two weeks. The information is mostly about park safety, the work that was done by my predecessor, safety information from other parks, OSHA standards, and risk assessments, among a litany of other topics I'm forgetting now that I'm away from my desk. There is plenty to read and review to get a better general picture of the safety program in the park. It's great to talk to folks to get a feel for things, but reading documents is also hugely useful. I definitely only made a dent in the copious amounts of materials while at work today so I'll take another stab at it tomorrow and hopefully make more progress. One of my main goals here with the internship, which I'm taking straight from my job description, is to assess and evaluate the overall safety program of the park. I'd like to think of the National Park as a complex organ, like the heart, with many factors working together to keep the beat going, like blood and oxygen, there's visitors and there's employees. Both are required to help the park fulfill its mission; to be a place for people to enjoy natural resources, now and in the future. I'd copy and paste the official mission from the Organic Act or the most recent version, but I think paraphrasing will do for now. The park needs visitors for it to be enjoyed. The park also needs staff to support the visitors and the natural resource itself. Somewhere in there, safety is directly related. Injuries mean you're probably not going to visit again (especially if the injury is fatal). Visiting now and in the future is part of the mission. Not coming back, that's an epic fail for fulfilling the mission. Ergo, safety is important. It's hard to know how “safe” or “risky” a location is until someone gets injured or meets an untimely form of peril.

The rain just started and I'm hoping the living room doesn't flood. I've heard the room floods at Dwight's when there's bad rain. Cross your fingers I don't get stuck at his place all night in a flooding living room.

Back to the description of work and safety and those types of things... We're a reactionary society. Safety is no exception. Someone once said maybe we should lock the cockpit on the airplane. Nobody listened until you know when. There's a 6 foot drop into an uncovered cistern. Well, it's plain to see that it's not a great place to hang out and find out the hard way that you could fall in and then have a crazy difficult time trying to climb back out. Unfortunately, some people need things like rails or signs to keep them out of trouble. That's understandable. Something to be aware of: it's hard to draw the line on what's an obvious risk (don't touch the fire) and a not-so-obvious risk (fast moving water that looks calm on the surface). And then once you've realized the risk is there, who's fault is it if someone gets hurt? When you're in a park, who is at fault when there's an accident? Legally, there is a precedent for answering that question, so I need not go into detail further. I find it a little disheartening when I hear about cases where someone put up a ten foot fence around a pool to keep people out and then someone drowns in the pool, then you heard that they got sued for something like negligence because there should have been a better illuminated exit ladder that was handicapped accessible.

I digress. There's only so many signs you can install and only so many warnings you can shout. It's easier to be agoraphobic (what Paula Dean had some years ago) than avoid every single possible risk that's out there. I'm a big fan of avoiding a sign for every step in the staircase saying “watch your step.” We all should know it's a good idea to watch your feet as they travel through the journey that is life – how else would we come to care so much about our footwear and what it looks like- we're looking at our feet and we're watching where we step, most of the time. I guess I'm trying to find out those few places where people forget to look down and see where they're going. What's more, how is the park assessing those types of things on their own and how can I help that process. I'm here to help in whatever capacity I'm needed. Keep people watching where they're going and away from injuries and risks. I've put in over 170 hours since I started with my training in Mt. Rainier three weeks ago. I have to volunteer a minimum of 450 hours while I'm here in the Virgin Islands.