Jeff Kaley
Waurika News-Democrat
WAURIKA —
It was a morning like most mornings. The alarm blared. I thought about hitting the snooze button to sneak in another seven minutes of sleep, but I decided not to play that game and just got up.
Once out of bed, I began a personal regiment I call the “Morning Routine.”
(While I consider the “Morning Routine” an impeccably coordinated series of activities that get me ready to go out into the world, my lovely wife calls it “dallying around.” Seems Karen’s never grasped the symmetric rhythm of the “Morning Routine,” but that’s another column.)
Anyway, halfway through the “Morning Routine,” I happened to look out the sliding door in the dining room, and that’s when I saw a sight that disrupted an otherwise tranquil morning. Out by the bird feeders, a mound of red Oklahoma soil had suddenly appeared in my back yard!
“Grrrr,” I said to myself, “there’s a stinkin’ gopher invading the premises!”
Although still in my bathrobe, seeing that hill of dirt sent me immediately into anti-gopher mode.
Hey, I’ve got a privacy fence. If my neighbors are snoopy enough to catch sight of me scrambling around in the yard in my bathrobe and a pair of socks, they just have to deal with it.
Besides, alleviating this gopher invasion turned out to be pretty simple. First, I stuck the garden hose into the burrow and pumped about 10,000 cubic feet of water into the little sucker’s house. Then, I set up a dozen pinwheels around the entry.
As it has turned out, nearly a month has passed and I’ve not seen hide nor gopher hair of that booger again.
However, that experience caused me to think back to the summer of 2007, and what has been chronicled by Animal Planet channel as “The Islamocommie Gopher War.”
See, during the summer of ’07, I risked limb, life and sanity to protect This Great Nation — heck, humanity as we know it — from the most diabolical foe our species has encountered since woolly mastodons used humans as toothpicks.
Most of us in these parts have experience with gophers. In fact, if you’re a property owner in the Great Plains or Southwest, your deed probably includes a “gopher clause” that raises the ad valorem tax rate on your property by 0.5 percent per gopher.
OK, maybe I made that up. But gophers are just part of living ’round here; we’re used to the burdensome nuisances, and we know how to deal with them.
At least, we thought we knew. That was before the summer of ’07, when renegade pocket gophers in the Oklahoma Panhandle wasteland got access to the Internet and began studying the works of Ayatollah Khomeini and Karl Marx.
Intent on reaping vengeance on humans, these angry rodents formed a cell of Islamocommie gophers. And since gophers have no reproductive restraint, their numbers multiplied rapidly.
I became aware of the conniving critters and their plot against humanity, when I noticed something was burrowing in our back yard, and the, uh, expertly manicured lawn I’d toiled to develop was being undermined by tunnels.
My initial thought was: “Dang it! There’s a pack of *#&@ gophers in the yard!”
However, that’s when the insidious mind games employed by Islamocommie gophers began.
Examining the burrow system more closely, I noticed it had rounded tunnels that rose a couple inches above the surface and branched out in several directions. There was also a lack of the entry/exit mounds one would expect to find with gophers.
Taking all that into account, I speculated the problem wasn’t gophers, it was moles. To test that theory, I spent 20 minutes stomping the tunnels down to ground level to see what would happen overnight.
Sure enough, when I checked outside the next morning, the tunnel system had reappeared. In fact, it had become more extensive.
Because there were still no visible entry/exit mounds, I concluded the yard was under assault by moles, not gophers.
Since moving to Oklahoma, I’d never had a mole problem and I didn’t have a WMD (weapon of mole destruction). Therefore, I did what I do when facing a home care situation I’m not equipped to tackle alone — I called my brother-in-law.
(Editor’s Note: Next edition, the “Islamocommie Gopher War of 2007” begins to heat up.)
