I've always considered myself a city girl.  The neighborhoods in which I lived as a child didn't have much wildlife.  I didn't even notice the birds when I was little--not a hummer, not a hawk, not a finch.  (Okay, I noticed  sea gulls and pigeons.  Sea gulls are at every school after lunch in L.A.  You can be sixty miles inland and still have flocks of seagulls on campus picking over left-over lunches.  And I used to go with my Grandfather to feed the ducks in McArthur Park--yes, that one, the park with the melty cake in that old song.  So I'd seen ducks and swans, even got goosed by a goose who wanted my popcorn.)

On my first real camping trip with a bunch of National Park Service rangers (yeah, I actually went camping with the folk who take you on those interpretive talks)  I was teased mercilessly about how I'd be eaten or mauled by a bear.  I was about 20 and was working for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which was to be a string of parks in the hills between West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.  Some of it came to be--most of it didn't.  I loved the job though.  I was a secretary.  It wasn't typing and filing that did it for me--I loved the rangers.  They were my peeps.

 We'd gone to Yosemite and camped in the valley.  One couple brought a television--which horrified everyone else.  There was partying and carrying on all around us.   There were wall-to-wall people at those drive-up-and-park campsites.  It wasn't much of a nature trip.  I bought a little plastic black bear to show, when I got back to L.A., that I'd seen a bear--any bear.

But this isn't a camping story.  It's about wildlife encountered at my old home many years after that trip, after I gave up being an environmentalist, after I became a mom.

I had a funny dog we named Woofy.  He was supposed to be Wolf-fang because he had a loud bark--and yelling "Fang!" was supposed to scare away prowlers, but he was really one of those fluffy foo-foo dogs, just a tad bigger than those purse dogs so popular now.  (He was too big to be a lap dog, not that he did try once or twice.)  Of course Woofy resembled a little wolf--like a stuffed toy wolf.  But he was much more animal-like than my other dog, who was also like a stuffed animal--that dog, my dog, was a very large living breathing version of Winnie-the-Pooh (all yellow-brown, and dumb--an enormous lump of love in doggy form.) 

Woofy was pretty--he had doe eyes and a nice wolfy-fluffy tail, fluffy haunches and butt fluff.  But he was also the kind of dog that would jump a fence to catch a squirrel and then jump back over the fence to bring it through the dog door and leave on the couch as a present.  He'd run off and go check out whatever moved when you took him hiking.  But he'd never come up to you and push his snout into your hand demanding a pet as my other dog did.  I never felt he actually cared much for us.

One summer when the kids were really small (the youngest wasn't yet walking) and their dad was out of town on a business trip, Woofy went in the backyard and found a skunk.  Or the skunk found him.  It doesn't matter.  It didn't matter.  You could smell the damn skunk miles away after that encounter.  Mothers I bumped into at the park later that week confirmed this.  

Woofy ran into the house and rolled on the floor a few times before I grabbed him and tossed him back into the yard.

A good portion of the night he sat on the back porch staring in at my sons and me, his eyes gleaming--reflecting the light from the den.

I started calling friends--one friend, an avid bird watcher who owned two dogs told me to wash Woofy in vinegar or tomato juice, but I didn't have either and there was no one to watch the kids if I went to get any.  I didn't know what to do.  It seemed like a situation that required immediate attention.  But there was nothing to do but keep Woofy locked outside. My dogs had never had to sleep outside except for one camping trip--and even then they still slept in the tent with us.  They were our babies before we had babies.  (You ever leave your baby outside while you slept warm under the covers in a nice warm house?)

La Canada in the summer is quite pleasant--it's not like it was cold.  It's just that the pack was inside--and poor Woofy was outside.  I felt awful--and I'm sure Woofy did too.

[I was describing to a co-worker a different scent masking problem today (pinesol from cleaning up dog shit in my car.)  Some smells are hard to get rid of.  She told me to tell this story of skunk.]

I had Woofy washed at a dog groomer's the next day.  (I couldn't see how I was going to wash him many, many times and watch the baby too--and for some reason it didn't dawn on me to just leave the poor dog in the yard until I could figure it out.)

 After I picked him up you could still smell the skunk even though they used special shampoo.  He was too clean, too fluffy for his own taste, Woofy was.  And though my other (affectionate) dog loved getting wet (he was part lab) Woofy hated it.  I'm sure he was mad at me--mad for locking him out, mad for having him washed. 

I'm sure we made up at some point.  He probably found a good dead squirrel to roll in and was back to his regular doggy self (but isn't that standoffishness really cat-like?  Hmmmm...)

 As for the current car smell problem: 

Pinesol  1 point,  Baking Soda 0 points!

Pinesol vs. Cinnamon poured straight from the spice jar:   tied.

I've added a clove spiked orange--I think I'm going to win this battle.

In Los Angeles we have skunks and opossums, pumas, mountain lines, coyote and raccoons too.  I'm more observant now.