T A B L E_.T A L K

Media coverage of "Bimbogate": Are we sick of this yet? Discuss media saturation in Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Bestseller Hell
By Jon Carroll
James Van Praagh's friendly ghosts
(04/17/98)

The curse of the Pulitzer?
By Dwight Garner
Will the New York Times put book critic Michiko Kakutani out to pasture now that she's won the big prize?
(04/16/98)

Greener pastures
By Jenn Shreve
Out of the growing glut of finance mags, one zine is poised to capture the expanding market of young investors
(04/15/98)

Under the Covers
By James Poniewozik
What kind of man
reads ...
(04/14/98)

Extra! Extra! Homeless papers duel for street supremacy
By Carol Lloyd
A slick new British newspaper causes a ruckus in the homeless newsrooms of America
(04/13/98)

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

the squirrel and the computer

When a small life and a computer screen both went blank at the same moment, something else lit up: an old file called "conscience."

BY ROBERT WINKLER
My screenful of words vanished, and the digital clock on my answering machine clicked off. The electric hum always in the background of human existence -- motors of refrigerator, furnace and computer fan -- sighed away. The room fell silent at 9:50 a.m., but my internal power plant kicked in with a flash of exasperation.

I had not saved what I was working on, though it was less than half a page. What could possibly go wrong on this warm, sunny and windless day?

The electric company had received no other reports from my street but said they would send someone out. I made other calls and an hour later, with an excuse not to work, left for the bookstore. Just outside the driveway, a yellow electric company truck with flashing lights idled beside a utility pole. I asked the driver the cause of the power failure.

"Squirrel on the transformer," he said, as he filled out a form on his clipboard.

"Was it killed?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Electrocuted?"

He nodded and motioned to the base of the pole. "It's over there."

I left the car running and got out to look. Eyes half closed, the unlucky arboreal acrobat lay on its side next to the pole -- a female gray squirrel that chose the wrong tree.

Under her chin, possibly at the point of contact, the fur was burned completely away, exposing a patch of bare white skin about 1.5 inches in diameter. Black-singed fur bordered this area and extended down the right side. The white underside fur, scorched brown or sheared almost to the skin, seemed the work of a mad electrified barber.

The partly consumed gray fur on the sides and legs resembled steel wool. A burn line followed the left hind leg almost to the toes. The head, back and tail seemed relatively unaffected. The electric company man got out of the truck and came over.

"Burned through," he said. "It must have come along, touched the hot wire that leads from the transformer to the overhead wire, then touched the grounded transformer. That's 13,000 volts."

He said it happens often, and that sometimes an animal will get into a substation and knock out a whole town.

"I'll turn the power on in a few minutes," he said. "Just have to flick a switch at the end of the street."

Our brief conversation next to running vehicles on the otherwise deserted street was the only service for this fallen denizen of the trees. I wondered about her history. We could have been neighbors for years. I might have watched her spiraling around a tree trunk at play with another squirrel or heard her barking at the neighborhood cats. The sound of her teeth grinding the hickory nut might have caught my attention on the way to the mailbox.

That morning outside my window, I had watched three squirrels as they feverishly dug up nuts and scampered back into the woods. I wondered whether she was among them, whether her home was that clump of leaves and sticks in a bare tree near the utility pole. She might have been returning to her nest to feed her young, who if they survived without her would probably never learn her fate.

She could have taken this route in safety a hundred times before, then chanced one day to place herself in the deadly position. Or maybe it was her first time on the pole, which she had climbed to avoid a threat on the ground, only to be gripped by a buzzing, burning flash that drew the life from her and flung her away.

The one connection with the squirrel I was certain about was the moment of her death, marked by the shutdown of my computer. Her final pulse of life brought human doings on this quiet street to a temporary halt -- her immolation a wild creature's ultimate statement on technology.

Standing over her, I realized how rarely any of us pause, in our self-absorbed, technology-driven lives, to acknowledge the rightful place of so ordinary a creature as a squirrel.

Furry lives end every day in the suburban jungle, but I did not want this one to be forgotten at the flick of a switch. I picked her up by her bushy tail and moved her to a grassy resting place farther away from the road.
SALON | April 20, 1998

Robert Winkler is a contributing outdoors columnist for the sports section of the New York Times.