Essay: Of Mice and Man

I picked up my kids from their school on my electric bike and zipped through the Arboretum. Lake Wingra glistened at us and the tall oak trees provided a sheltering canopy. My daughter counted several turkeys, while my son counted “one old man.” I hadn’t planned anything special for the sunny day; it was just a regular summer evening in Madison. I gave the kids string cheese after we got home and they ran in and out of the backyard through the family room. Then my summer evening turned dark.

As I chased after my son in the house, a little critter among the kids’ toys forced me to do a double take. On our hardwood floor in the family room lay a baby mouse. Furless, tiny, immobile and — as I would later learn from my incessant online reading — blind. At 2 weeks old, mice develop fur and begin to open their eyes. This one, clearly, was a newborn.

I knew I had a problem. I had encountered a mouse in our home before, but anytime an animal is found in the house, it’s not the one in front of you that’s the problem — it’s the millions of others that might also live around the house (but mostly in your head). A baby is also a different kind of animal. Its sudden appearance meant that two mice had gotten together and decided to start their own family under my family’s roof. My daughter jumped up and down with joy as if a Disney character had moved in, but I felt like Indiana Jones in “The Last Crusade.” While searching for the Holy Grail underneath a Venetian library, Indiana Jones, in a scene that was hard for me to watch as a kid, was deluged by rats in the catacombs.

The first time we ever found a mouse in our house, my wife, Jillian, stated that it was a normal discovery for an old home. She had encountered a similar problem growing up in her old house in Door County. Our house in Madison was built in 1936, and it was bound to have a few cracks the tiny rascals could get through. I refused to believe this, though. I called the previous homeowner, Chris, who stated that they had never encountered mice before.

What a relief — our house isn’t bound to be a mouse motel , I thought.

“But, we had a cat,” Chris explained.

Shoot. Not an option for us, since my daughter and I have cat allergies.

“Let’s just get a dog!” said Jillian. Admittedly, I’m not a dog person. I couldn’t deal with all their shedding. And I already had two children to clean up after.

In my work as a physician, the mantra I follow is “do no harm,” but in this situation my mode was “do all harm.” I called pest control. Jim, a gray-haired man in a navy-blue coat, pulled up to my street. His 30 years of experience in the industry inspired confidence in me. However, the next thing he said did not.

“I was just at your neighbor’s house across the street yesterday,” he said.

They’re everywhere , I thought.

Jim did a walk-around. “These little guys love the air conditioning in the summer,” he said. “They get a whiff of nice cold air and it lures them in. Same thing in the winter; if they get a whiff of warmth, they’ll follow that.”

Don’t try to humanize them, Jim .

He sprayed foam on several areas of the exterior of our limestone house and put bait in and around the interior. When Jim came back two weeks later, he said the mice had eaten 16 blocks of bait.

After hearing that, I realized there was a real possibility we might lose the battle against the hairy little furballs. Zillow said our house value had gone up 20% from when we’d bought it three years earlier, but did they really know what was going on inside?

After Jillian heroically discarded the baby mouse, all subsequent encounters with my son’s miniature dinosaur figurines lying in wait became difficult. What was I approaching? A plastic toy resembling an animal that lived 165 million years ago, or a small, live rodent that evolved 75 million years ago?

After pest control came by again, I did a closer inspection of the family room, which had been added to the house in the mid-’70s. The exterminator said that additions were a common weak point for entry. Where the hardwood floor joined the limestone wall at a perpendicular angle, there was a centimeter-wide sliver of an opening — that’s all the little devils needed to infiltrate. I knew what I needed to do. I went to Home Depot and came back armed with supplies. I jammed loads of steel wool into the skinny opening and squeezed a light-tan-colored trim sealant over the steel wool.

The point of entry was also near the crawl space.

I went outside and looked at that, a 2-by-2-foot opening under the addition, and thought, Why the hell do you exist? Crawl spaces are perfect spots for little animals to enter and perfect for the little girl from “The Ring” to emerge from. In summary, crawl spaces should not exist. But I guess if you build an addition to your home without putting in a basement, these spaces are necessary for heating, cooling, ductwork and electrical wiring. I foamed around the crawl space door. I felt good about fortifying my defenses — but to think that I won’t ever see a rodent again seems foolish.

In between the home invasions, I clicked on an article about a Florida woman who was attacked by an alligator while walking her dog. How can people live there with so many alligators? I wondered. The article explained that it wasn’t the first or last attack that will occur in Florida, and there wasn’t going to be a resolution to the problem. The problem with alligators would continue to occur for one simple reason: They were there first. For a much longer time, alligators, the descendants of dinosaurs, had called Florida home, and then Homo sapiens came to live on the land. It was a humbling read. It made me question, when it came to my conflict with mice, who was there first? Not me.

I like thinking that the owners of old homes are just brief caretakers until they pass them on to the next generation. In some way, I’m simply an occupant of the old home I live in. After I’m gone, a new family will move in.

And, every now and then, Mickey Mouse might come by to say hello.

Istiaq Mian is a physician and writer in Madison whose work has appeared in The New York Times . Follow his writing at istiaq.substack.com .

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