Not knowing what I was getting into, I said, “You bet. I’m an old fashioned rat catcher who’s good with my traps. Using bait poison is usually more trouble than it’s worth.” 

A week later, I was on set doing my usual initial rodent service (inspect and find and mark the entry holes, set traps to determine level of activity, and write a custom action plan). I  started with the one truth about rats I hold dear: THEY HAVE TO LEAVE THE HOUSE SOMETIME. And I was going to find where that somewhere place was, and trap it. After poking around the exterior (up and down on my ladder a half a dozen times) I found a large gap along the gutter line, leading directly into the attic. 

“This has to be it!” I thought as I marked the entry hole with plastic bags and set a bunch of traps in the gutter. I was so excited. All I could think about was the moment when I sent Pioneer Pest Management a copy of the story of how I’d found the entry hole they couldn’t find in two years. 

I was so excited I called Richard and told him I’d found “the rat highway.” I also told Tyree, the kind tenant who lived upstairs. She asked me to set some traps inside, so I did. 

STORYSOLD: All the failure aside, the real whammy discovery today was this:

That’s not a mole hole, and it’s not a burrow hole either. That’s an exit hole. Which means, either they use the runways I blocked and decided to dig there way out for food, or this simply is the main entry point. I dug down where I put the mole trap (which mysteriously wasn’t there) for a while without luck. My guess is, if I get serious and dig down to where the sewer line enters the home, we might find our entry point. Tyree’s brother’s story from the beginning was, “There’s a hole that keeps appearing there.” I have no idea how far down that pipe is, and I don’t feel comfortable digging too deep without your permission, but I’ll give it a shot if you like. It might be worth it. Something has to explain why you’ve been struggling with rats for years. It might yield another clue. The other thing is the food and water question. I think there’s a good chance that they’ve become uninvited household pets, sneaking a bite or two of dog food and water when the house is quiet. That’s why I added another slightly trickier live trap behind the dog dish (I put the dog food bag in the trap to cover the trigger). I explained my plot to Tyree, and let her know that I would come out to clear the trap if we caught one. She seemed happy to know that. The live catch cage is a new idea, so it may take some time to work. The last time I used one it didn’t kick in for three weeks. I know it means more waiting, but waiting is what wise old rats do best. And they’re not going to explore something new until they’ve checked it from every angle before they go in. All in all, I’m feeling optimistic. I have succeeded in making contact. 

When I pulled my fishing box from the chimney and saw that the rats had once again made off with my lure, rage no longer felt like appropriate expression. What I felt at that moment was beyond rage. It was the cool, calm, calculated, psychopathic feeling that precedes the revenge plots we humans love to feature in so many of our action movies. I don’t love dogs like John Wick (he’s a psychopath), but I feel strongly that the stealing of dog food should be grounds for the launching of a revenge plot (yes, I’m also a psychopath). No matter. I shined my light down the old chimney and did The Math: they had cleared two traps and three glue boards in the confines of a little box! It could have happened “by instinct,” but it sure as hell looked like they tore the edges of the cardboard box, tossed the torn pieces on the glue, and used it to walk on. If they muscled their way out of the glue, there’d be a lot more hair…

 

What I found was an uncapped pipe that lead down somewhere. I stuck a metal rod down it, and it was open for at least a foot past its opening. The pipe was right below the reoccurring exit hole I’d found the week before, but it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. I mean, if they’re using it to travel in: where does it exit? They still have to get into the house somehow! I’ve never done a subterranean exclusion before, but the first thing I’d do if I wanted to test a possible entry point would be to mark it. So I searched my truck and found an old piece of dried foam, and did just that.

 

Then I pushed the dirt back into the hole. The plan was, if the pipe has a function (and needs to be unblocked) the foam can be removed easily. If it leads to some mysterious underground lair, then we will know it was the entry point if (a) the hole doesn’t return (b) the behavior of the rats inside suddenly change dramatically. Or it’s possible that it’s just an old pipe, and the burrows are still six feet below it like we talked about on the phone.

I would have checked my fishing hole during this service too, but I didn’t have my ladder. Instead I drove home, unloaded the gravel, and wondered what the competition was doing with my new box full of bait. To win, they have to trip my two traps, eat all the dog food, and leave both kinds of bait uneaten in the box.  We’ll find out when I return on Thursday.

Then I rigged 2 more of my better traps the same way, and set them gently at the bottom of the hole.

So, now, as of July 18th 2020 the home I’ve dubbed “Old Pioneer” in honor of the 2 years Pioneer Pest Management freshened the bait in the stations like snake oil salesmen every so often, is once again sheltering humans without the aid of a rat catcher. I know many of you readers must be wondering, “How can we afford to turn our backs on this story? Obviously the rats are going to rally and try to cross The Line again! Wouldn’t it make sense to pay a rat catcher to, at least, check The Line every month or two?” If you’re one of those readers, our answer is still “No.” Don’t feed the rat catchers. They will never catch the rats if you do.

I should have seen What Happened Next coming, but I didn’t see It Coming any more than any sucker member of The Audience. 

A few days after our adventure to Death Valley, I walked on stage like Disney’s Goofy prepared to fish the rats from the walls like normal. I set my ladder up in the back, opened the door to the attic, and walked in ready to lower my trap line and catch the rats. 

“Gosh!” I exclaimed when I saw that my chimney hole had been capped with plywood. “Someone has sealed off my only access to trapping the rats in this confounded duplex!” 

I understand why homeowners exclude The Urban Wilderness from their homes (every wild creature on earth draws a line around their homes), but this was the first time I’d experienced a homeowner who had made an environmental change to exclude their rat catcher from their ability to catch the rats infesting their home. 

In that moment, I could hear it. The laughter in Portlands’ sewers could be heard for miles around. 

After I took a deep breath, I walked into the upstairs unit where a contractor was working in the kitchen. Tyree was no longer there. She’d moved on; hopefully somewhere where she didn’t have to pay the high price of Portland rent AND listen to the rats scratching through the walls every night too. 

I took one look at the contractor and it all made perfect sense. Why hadn’t I seen it sooner?

“It’s the got-damned Californians again!” 

He was more of a Classic Bro than a Californian, but clearly he was working for the Great State of California in the kitchen of a home that any loyal Portland native would describe as a “colony.” Before you rush to judgment, please allow me to tell the story… 

Since the 80s, Californians have been moving to Portland, buying up “cheap” real estate, and driving up our cost of living. Over the years, the BMWs invaded Oregon in waves. To maximize the effect of their invasion, they also established colonies in Washington, especially in Seattle. The trademark Californian move was to buy property with the intent to sell it at a profit. Californians aren’t homemakers. They sell their homes which are worth a lot more in California, then they buy many properties with their earnings in Oregon. They live in one of the properties, then rent out the rest…and make their small fortunes as landlords and or property managers. In the 90s, native Oregonians began to notice an influx of other prospectors moving in from other parts of the country: New York, Boston, Cleveland Ohio. Oregonians couldn’t afford to buy homes from Californians. The new people were the people the Californians were selling their investments at a profit to. 

Our human Jake likes to joke, “I can’t even make jokes about Californians anymore. There’s not enough Oregonians around to laugh at them. Finding a native Oregonian in Portland is like finding a unicorn in a field…they’re like wildlife, always on the run from the next bump in rent.” 

From the perspective of a native Oregonian, NE Portland today is unrecognizable as the neighborhood we knew. Instead of an endless parade of fancy coffee houses, bars, restaurants, and ergonomic office spaces (complete with yoga studios), there used to be small businesses in Portland that produced things. The Pearl and Water Ave used to be the industrial part of town. Alberta St. used to have an array of small businesses that weren’t only bars, coffee houses, and restaurants. Henry’s used to brew beer on Burnside St! in a huge beer factory that was amazing. Now it’s just a restaurant called Henry’s. Columbia sportswear used to have sewing factories in town before Girt sold out. And Columbia used to have competitors like White Stag and Foresters who also had factories in town. In fact, the now iconic Portland neon sign with the stag in it…was White Stag’s sign. 

These days it’s not okay to hate groups of people, even home invading Californians. It’s not politically correct.

I suppose that makes sense, but America goes to war with other countries for invading and occupying the homes of innocent, freedom-loving peoples all the time. I also suppose it’s way, way too late for Oregon to go to war with California. That epic battle never happened. California and their fellow Home Investors from around the country won a long time ago. For the native Oregonian, Portland will forever be known for what it has become, “Little California.” 

Whether or not you believe we’re horribly bigoted is beside the point. The reason why I told that story was, “conquest has its consequences.”

When we talk to customers we don’t call that story The Great Californian Invasion. We gave it a nice comfort-loving soft name. We call it, The Portland Makeover. And The Portland Makeover has made the rat catchers of Portland a lot of money over the last few decades. 

The general storyline of The Portland Makeover reads like this: a) a Californian buys a home in an old redline district or up-and-coming poor part of town; b) they immediately begin to remodel it (like the remodel project that closed off my chimney hole!) and the home begins to grow strange add on living spaces like nurse logs grow new trees; c) like the pioneers who deforested The West, what they don’t do is take the history of the home into account, and c) instead of taking a long look at the way the creatures (human and animal alike) used the house in The Past, they reshape it in their own image.

The rats might have respected the new environmental territories produced by The Portland Makeover if the Californians had bothered to do the one thing I do everyday: inspect the Homefront, find where the rats are/were running and nesting, discover all the entry holes, and then secure them with heavy mesh or metal flashing. But that didn’t happen. Symptoms of The Portland Makeover include: large gaps between new roof sheathing and old gutter line, new add on crawlspaces with no access hatches, spray foam insulation installed in attics where the squirrel holes were left open (see our service story The Foam Cave), old uncapped chimneys that lead into the guts of the home, uncapped sewer drains in basements, attic spaces that were turned into living spaces without first securing entry holes (thus turning a routine exclusion into a difficult wall infestation), and of course our before mentioned uncapped rainwater drains. 

It’s not that the folks who lived in NE Portland before The Portland Makeover did a better job of excluding entry holes. Our human worked with a lot of NE Portland customers before they were displaced by mural art. It was a poorer part of town, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have good pest control. Like farmers (not hobby farmers) who are also usually poor, rat catching was a normal part of their daily homemaking story.  In fact, we met a talented rat catcher in NE Portland named Marvin (when our human was selling his story to Pioneer Pest Management) who gave us a few pointers we use now everyday like the importance of hooking the rats on our food source. Farmers are the same. They all have their own unique (usually highly entertaining) methods for keeping the rats away. In both cases, it’s not that farmers and poor people don’t have the time or money to invest in exclusion work. I blame the genocidal killing based method of rodent control on American culture (and English colonialism before that), especially strange notions of manhood. It’s like in every Marvel super hero you can watch on TV. “Death is the only thing that can stop The Bad Guys (and Pests), because they’re so Bad that no one can ever change their characters.” That of course is total nonsense…and I blame The Pest Control Industry in part for perpetuating that myth. 

Anyway, I didn’t talk with the contractor in the kitchen long. Once I realized that my rat fishing hole had been capped because they were remodeling the upstairs unit, I contact Richard about the need to have somewhere to trap the rats in the walls. Throughout this adventure, Richard and I had been in communication about the elephant in the room. Where the hell are the rats getting in?

For some reason, Richard was hopeful that the capping of the chimney combined with some plumbing work he had done would put an end to the never ending wall infestation. 

It was less than a week before the youthful transplants from Ohio contacted Richard with more reports of scratching in walls. 

Richard asked me what he should do. I said, “Cut a hole in the wall, so I can trap them.” 

And that’s exactly what he did: 

That was my first set up. The good news is that it caught a rat.

CHAPTER 9 – This Story Goes from Bad to Worse 

I should have seen this coming. In my defense, I’ve never had to open a wall in a home to trap rats before. The idea behind the expanded aluminum metal mesh you see in the photo above was my usual thing: do something to change the environment and force the rats into the traps. I have no illusions. Rats aren’t dumb. They know a trap is a trap. Good rat catchers all use what I euphemistically call “environmental pressure” to encourage, push, force, and starve the rats into trying their luck with a trap. 

A week after Richard opened the wall, the Ohioans reported that they smelled something death-like. Once again, I put on my Goofy character on and walked in expecting to simply clear and reset my two wall traps. 

I noticed that the metal had moved. What I didn’t notice was the bare electrical wire for the heater it was resting on. 

“Gosh!” I said as I reached for the metal. “What’re these rats up to now?” 

The moment I moved it, I saw a spark. Then I saw a flame burst and fade in a puff of black smoke before my eyes. 

Luckily, the maidens I was there to rescue from the rats were there to save me.

“Huh,” Abby said. “Do you want me to turn the power off?” 

“Yes please,” I said, still standing with the metal in my hand trying to figure out why I hadn’t been electrocuted. After I made a halfhearted attempt to save face, I peered into the hole in the wall. Sure enough, the wire had been worn bare by years of rats running over it. 

Someone in Ohio must have raised these youths right, because the first question they asked was, “Are we in danger of a fire? I mean, are there other wires like that in the walls?” 

As our hero borrowed some electrical tape from the maidens and wrapped the bare wire, I did my best not to play prophet and make any kind of dramatic statement about their safety in the future. I did write an email to Richard. 

STORYSOLD: I checked in with the tenants on 8th street a few times (via phone) over the last few months. And they didn’t notice any activity until last week (soon after all the snow and rain…which indicates sewers again). 

I felt like I was learning to trap rats all over again. After a few catches, I settled on this set up: 

It worked like a Marvel hero story works. It killed the rats, but there was still no serious talk about finding the source of this wall infestation. I didn’t blame Richard. Like writing a novel, it’s labor intensive to go back and make edits after it’s been built. And my recommendation was (as usual), “We have to open those walls up and find the entry hole.” 

CHAPTER 10 – The Dollars and Sense Value of Stories  

Fall of 2022, Storysold: Pest Control was in crisis because our human host’s family was in crisis. There is no short short for that story. All I’ll say is, for the first time since childhood (when our host still believed Jesus would be popping out of the clouds at any moment) we believed The Apocalypse was on its way. 

I had a month or two break after I’d cleared something like 10 rats from the hole in the wall. I didn’t trust the calm, so I contacted Abby to ask if I could swing by and take a look see in the wall. 

She replied that she and her fellow Ohioans had found a new (rat free) rental in Portland. 

I don’t know how that all went down. All I know is, next time I talked with Richard he said he couldn’t rent the unit again without disclosing the rat problem to the new tenants. After five years (maybe more) I wondered what he told his tenants before. In other words, for some reason he no longer felt (or could) rent the unit until he cleared out the rats. 

I’m okay with not knowing some things. Embracing the mysteries of nature is a trait storytellers and rat catchers share. 

At first, we spent an hour or so spitballing some ideas. Richard was convinced that a sewer scope would help. I didn’t disagree, but I pointed out that we would have seen a lot of reoccurring exit holes in the front lawn above the line if it was broken. And I hadn’t seen even one. I was open to any idea (mainly because I didn’t want to be blamed if it was wrong), but I generally pushed for opening the walls. 

Richard did a sewer scope and found no breaks in the sewer line. 

In the midst of one of The Family Crisis, Richard called to talk. I wasn’t able to talk. He wanted to know where I would open the wall if I was going to open the wall. This is what I texted him back: BASICALLY ALL I WOULD ADVISE IS TO START AT THE OPENING IN THE WALL AND FOLLOW THE RAT TRAIL TO THE RIGHT. 

After listening to the many tenants reports of activity in the walls, the area to the right (like within 5 feet or so) of where Richard cut the hole in the wall was the area with the most reports. 

A week later, I got a text from Richard. He’d found an uncapped old rainwater drain in the wall right where I said it would be.

In spite of all the heartache our human host was experiencing on his Homefront, that victory was sweet. We glowed about it for days. “Hell yeah I called that one!” we boasted to other customers. “I felt just like Babe Ruth calling my shot.” 

When The Action settled down and the story presented itself, what had happened there was clear: The Portland Makeover had struck again. That wall had been extended out–beyond the original foundation, over the old uncapped drain–when they turned what was a classic NE Portland home into a rental duplex. 

The traps in the wall caught one more before I arrived to set more traps in the unit. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was my last rat. The End of an epic service story had finally come for the makeover rental duplex on NE 8th St. 

Richard said when he opened this part of the wall (shown in photo below) he saw the last rat staring back at him. 

In conclusion, “Don’t feed the rat catchers.” Make them to do their jobs and find the entry holes.