Moles were tearing up my backyard, and nothing I tried seemed to help. Flooding the holes just made a bog. I even tried cayenne pepper and managed to get some in my eye, and it hurt like mad but the moles weren't fazed.
I griped about it to one of the lab technicians at the refinery where I worked and he gave me a tip. "Get some of that stuff we odorize the LPG with, mercaptan? That'll get rid of 'em for sure."
"You got some here?"
"No, but go see ol' Snuffy down at the loading yard. He'll get you some. But be careful, that stuff is some potent."
Old Snuffy gave me a half-pint can of ethyl mercaptan, enough to odorize several railroad cars of LPG. Even with the top screwed on tight and the can in back, my pickup smelled like a bad gas stove when I got home. I got a pair of rubber gardening gloves out of the garage and went out to the back yard.
One thing about ethyl mercaptan is that it quickly overwhelms your sense of smell, so as I busily poured a spoonful into each mole hole, I couldn't smell a thing.
My house was built on a slope in Anacortes, Washington, a beautiful little town on Puget Sound. The slope gave me a view of the water. It gave my uphill neighbor a view of the water and my back yard. As I finished treating the last hole, I looked up to see my neighbor looking out his dining room window and wiggling his nose like a rabbit.
I quickly finished up, wrapped the still quarter-full can in plastic and put it in a garbage can in the garage. After washing up I went to the window overlooking the yard just as a van from the gas company slowly drove up the alley behind my fence.
They didn't find the reported gas leak, but now I was faced with getting rid of the evidence. The guys I worked with were practical jokers, and I had an idea. Ron Metcalf, an engineer, drove a horrible, beat up orange International pickup, which everyone kidded him about. It wasn't that he loved the old truck, he was just too cheap to replace it.
The next morning I sneaked into the parking lot and transferred the reeking can from the back of my truck to the inside floor of Ron's. It was a rare hot day in Anacortes and I could almost see the smell waves wafting away from the ugly piece of machinery. I made my way unseen back to my office, which I shared with Nels Enderberg, an old hand, and Tommy Atkins, a disgustingly energetic newbie rookie engineer who desperately wanted to be one of the boys.
"Whatcha been doing," he asked, possibly because of a slight hint of mercaptan in the air, although such smells are not rare at an oil refinery.
I told him about the stuff in Metcalf's truck and swore him to secrecy. He was so delighted to be in on a great joke that he could hardly sit still.
The next day Nels said that he'd seen Metcalf and he was in a foul mood, grumping about somebody ruining his truck. Tommy couldn't stand it. He grabbed the phone and called Metcalf. "Hey, Ron, I hear you have a problem with your truck, heh heh."
From across the room, we heard Metcalf screaming, "You son-of-a-bitch, it was you! I'll come over there and pound you, you mealy little worm."
Sometimes you strike out, sometimes you hit a homer. Hey, if any of you know Metcalf, I had nothing to do with it, I swear it was Atkins.
If you read this far, you might like my book, "Oil Patch" available at www.authorhouse.com/bookstore
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Comments: 6
good story.