The Old Country

RM WEEKLY · ISSUE NO. 9

This week, I'm writing to you from New York City.

I came on my own dime to explore something I mentioned in issue six. I wrote about how the rat came in the hold of a ship, uninvited, but determined. It came, and it stayed. Over 250 years of traps, poison, and bounties couldn't shake its hold on this new land.

This is where many of the European ships docked in the mid 1700s. Where the rats got their foothold in this new world. I had to see the point of origin, if you will. I went to the water.

I stood at the harbor longer than I should've, watching the water, picturing that small dark animal coming down a rope with no idea it was about to win big. Every rat in this hemisphere is a relative of the ones who made that trip. This is where the family got off the boat. This is the old country.

Then I walked. In issue four I discussed terroir. I said a rat raised behind a Sichuan place in October is not the same animal as a rat raised behind a bakery in spring. I wrote about single-alley micro-lots. Well, I live in a part of the country where the alleys are three hundred yards apart and mostly full of nothing. This week, I was finally able to explore what was mostly just theory before.

I walked from a block where the whole alley smells like fermented beans and hot oil, just four minutes north, to an alley that was nothing but yeast and burnt sugar. Four minutes. Then there was a stretch of rotting fish, a corner where it looked like somebody had been putting lamb and oregano over fire on the same twenty feet of sidewalk for a generation.

Every one of those microcosms is a unique diet. Each providing a completely different nutritional base. And the animals on that first block will probably never meet the animals four minutes down the road.

France has hillsides, but this city has a hundred thousand kitchens stacked eight floors high, and the rats are eating their scraps.

I know how I must've looked. A large bald man standing at the mouth of an alley at midnight, not moving, breathing deeply through his nose, taking in the unique aroma of each alley. If I were anywhere else I'd be stared at, but not here.

8 million people walk past one of the richest and most diverse concentrations of terroir in the world, and see nothing but trash.

The trip turned darker the next day. I learned that the city has an office; a mandate written into an executive order. The title is, Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation. The job pays north of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

I'll be honest, when I read that, I was moved. For eight issues I've been saying this animal deserves to be taken seriously by serious people. That was my ask in issue five. Stop giggling, come to the adults' table, build the binder, write the rules down while we're still small and agile.

Then I come to New York City, and find that they did exactly that. They named an office after the animal. They gave it a director, and put it in an executive order so it would outlive the man who signed it. Somebody finally took the rat seriously enough to hire staff. But then I read what the job is. They got it the wrong way around.

Every dollar in that office is spent on reducing the number of rats. There are an estimated three million rats in this city, and the office exists to make that number smaller.

I’m standing on the largest mischief in the Western Hemisphere and the city is spending public money to shrink it.

They're taking two strategies. The first is they are regulating the trash. Imposing rules for containerizing it. Bins, lids, schedules, fines, with more of it rolling out this year. And I'll say it plainly: it's a good policy, it's clean and orderly.

It is also the end of terroir. Everything I walked past, all the aromas in all those alleys, is the vineyard’s soil. A single-alley micro-lot is really just a bag on the curb at night, and the city is putting a lid on it.

They think they're just taking away garbage, but they're taking away the only thing that makes one block's animal taste different from the next block's. Over the next twenty generations, New York rats will be eating from fewer and fewer unique sources and, within fifty years, all of their milk will taste the same.

The second thing is worse, however. They're deploying rat contraceptives. Bait that sterilizes. It's clever, and considering the alternatives it's merciful. I understand exactly why a city would do that over laying poison, but milk comes from a lactating dam. A dam lactates because she's had a litter. No litter, no milk.

There’s no version of this business, hand or machine, artisan or fourteen-thousand-dollar pump, that survives if a mischief cannot reproduce. Twenty percent of her body weight turned to milk every day, and it only exists because she had pups.

I've been in this city for three days, and I can't be angry at them. I went house to house in issue seven and learned to take my hat off to people who got somewhere ahead of me. This is that same lesson.

This city has taken the rat more seriously than I have. They've done more real fieldwork on this animal in three years than I will do in my life. They have every reason to do what they're doing. Nobody in that office is being stupid. They're doing what the people asked for; providing a cleaner city. I’m not going to stand on a corner and tell four million households they're wrong to want their own kitchens rat-free.

But I will say this, they will not win. Two hundred years of poison, traps, and now a full government office, and there are still three million of them. Three million. After everything they’ve tried.

Three million strong, after the full attention of the richest city on earth has been pointed at this animal for two centuries. You cannot eradicate a thing so determined to survive.

So the rat will go on doing what it did in the hold of that ship, which is to survive.

There's an opening, by the way. Last I checked the chair had been empty a while. Six figures, a seat in City Hall, and the most amazing title, ‘Rat Czar’.

I would be very good at that job. I know more about this animal than most. I'd only have the arrow pointed the other direction; commercialize them. Turn them into a revenue stream. I don't believe that's what they're paying for.

Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter, and three million of them inside the city where I'm sitting right now. Somebody is going to run that math eventually. It may as well be a man who came to look at the water.

Stay bold, my friends.

– BigCrazyBaldhead