Septmeber 16: Award-Winning Nature Essay, Skunks, "The Smell of Sin"

Well, I do owe you an extra post to make up for my absence last night.  So, I have decided to share the nature essay for which I was acknowledged last night at the Falling Rock Cafe and Bookstore.

It's about two of my favorite things:  skunks and sin.

Enjoy!

The Smell of Sin

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

     -----Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour”

I used to collect skunks.  Ceramic pink ones.  Crystal ones.  Green plastic ones.  When my mother assembled her manger scene at Christmas, I insisted that she include a small, porcelain Mephitis mephitis, its plume raised in salute to the Christ child.  Something in the solitary skunk nature appeals to me.  Stocky and slow, a skunk can back down a grizzly bear by stomping, hissing, and letting its tail bloom.  Yet, my attraction to the Mephitidae family borders on the obsessive.

The oldest skunk fossil was unearthed in Germany and dates back 11 to 12 million years.  That means that, while our oldest ancestors—primates called Ardipithecus—were taking their first toddling steps on the savannas of Africa, skunks were probably ambling across the icy bridge between Asia and the Americas, to the soils and glacial meltwaters of Upper Michigan.

Surely the skunk family, which originated some 40 million years ago, has gone through its share of Darwinian metamorphoses.  Perhaps some ancient skunk kin sported cheetah legs, was a black-and-white bolt of speed.  Or maybe it had saber teeth, took down mammoths in a cinder-and-snow apocalypse.  I’m not sure if any of these skunk chimeras were possible, but I like to believe so.

Contrary to popular belief, skunks are not nocturnal.  They are crepuscular, a word I love.  It means “occurring or active during twilight,” that time just before or after the rupture of darkness, when peepers carol and mosquitoes feast.  In that in-between, skunks nose around for berries, larvae, desiccated mouse carcasses, mushrooms, and overturned trash pails, their bodies perfect mirrors of the universe, night giving way to day giving way to night again.

My encounters with skunks have always been crepuscular.  One pre-dawn, I opened my front door to find the contents of my garbage can disgorged on my lawn.  Apple cores and pizza boxes and chicken bones glistening with dew and moonlight.  This is not an unusual occurrence on trash collection mornings in my Ishpeming neighborhood.  I cursed the skunk gods loudly, my voice startling in the thrush and chirr of bird and insect chorus.

Then, the green barrel of the garbage can jumped, rolled, and I saw the wedge of black and fan of white emerge.  I had no time to regard the creature.  It turned, raised its tail, and was gone like a Perseid meteor.

A 1634 edition of Jesuit Relations contains the following description of a skunk’s defense:  “. . . two have been killed in our court, and several days afterward, there was such a dreadful odor throughout our house that we could not endure it.  I believe the sin smelled by Saint Catherine of Sienna must have had the same vile odor.”  An adult skunk can spray accurately up to 25 feet, and the scent can be detected a mile away.  That morning, I was less than five feet from my crepuscular vandal.  Yet, I didn’t smell it.

You see, I am lucky.  One in 1,000 people have a condition called specific anosmia.  That means they are simply immune to certain scents.  Lilac or sulfur.  Swamp water or rotten egg. Scientists have postulated that recessive genes are the culprits here.  Some strange coupling in the helix of creation.  Perhaps it’s an upgrade on the human animal, or maybe a step back to an earlier model. 

When Charles Darwin first encountered the Bethlehem orchid, with its white swan throat, he imagined an insect with an almost twelve-inch proboscis.  Long enough to inseminate the orchid with pollen.  Several years after Darwin’s death, the sphinx moth was discovered, with its 14-inch nose and attraction to the petals of tropical stars.

That’s what I like to think I am in my skunk love:  a sphinx moth in this cold and rugged peninsula.  An adaptation or throwback to a Mephitis epoch when the smell of sin ruled the earth like tyrannosaur.  Because of my DNA, I’m more than bear or wolf or mountain lion.  Out in the twilight, I flit from bush to tree to boulder, waiting for my black-and-white orchid to appear.