It all started when the night reached its calmest point, as all the greatest stories do.  The boys were asleep, the chores were done, I had just settled in to a comfortable spot on the bed.  I was not asleep, mind you, genius never sleeps. I was simply relaxing with my wife beside me. Something changed in the atmosphere.  Using my olfactory sense, I detected a smell that didn’t belong. Skunk. That was the smell. “Someone ran over a skunk,” I thought to myself.  Yes. Yes. Surely that was it. But the smell lingered and I was not satisfied with my guess. I had to know more. From which direction did the wind blow?  What time was sunset? In which phase was the moon? Who’s on first? On the front side of the house, the side with the road, the smell was fainter. In the kitchen on the back side of the house, the smell was stronger.  I call this the smelling game. It is not unlike Hot Or Cold, except that it has a darker side and often ends with exclamations of shear horror.  

Then I heard Jackson, our dumb, fool cat, outside.  He was doing his normal thing which is to paw at the door, cry and howl to be let in as if he was Jack in the ocean clinging to the edge of the makeshift raft and we were Rose, passively refusing to let him join us.  Except in this analogy, he did not draw a topless sketch of us. I mean, he is still a cat and he has no artistic merits. Even so, I decided to open the door for him.

This is the part of the story where the iceberg (skunk smell source) hits the boat (my face).

For whatever reason, I did not open the door wide and let him run in.  I cracked the door and quickly decided to smell Jackson thinking that perhaps he had rolled in some dead animal nearby.  For better, or in this case I have to think worse, I lifted him toward my face and was immediately assaulted with the worst and most intense odor of my lifetime, millimeters from my nose.  I surrendered him to the night, scrambled backward on the floor of the kitchen and tried not to lose my bodily fluids through any of my orifices, orifi, orifixes, or holes as one might call them.  

A person may wander upon the smell of skunks often as they are struck on the road and release their nastiness.  It’s like a self-destruct sequence is activated by the car striking the skunk and then the skunk crawls on one arm/elbow/paw/limb and is determined to position itself for maximum carnage when the final odor is expelled.  Upon taking its last breath, the skunk whispers, “For Flower.”

And now I understand why Pepe Le Pew would always knock people out or kill tulips when he came prancing by.  As I have frequently said since reaching adulthood, “Looney Tunes, you brilliant bastards.”

After I came to my senses, I rushed to the sink to cut my arm off.  I saw Arnold do it once in Terminator 2 Judgment Day so I thought it could work for me.  He didn’t even wince when he did it. My arm smelled worse than anything that has ever come out of my body.  My wife poured some tomato juice on it, which I thought was a bit mean-spirited because the acidiy was going to burn on the open stump that once held the rest of my arm.  And for the thousandth time in my life, I wished we had the technology from Star Wars and then I could have a fully functioning robot arm and hand. Alas, we currently live in a world of technology akin to A Walk In The Clouds.  That was for you, Mom.

I scrubbed the arm vigorously until the smell was tolerable enough to decide to keep the arm.  The knowledge came to me then, that I would have to get the cat, bring him in the house, and give him sixty to seventy baths.  And we might need to burn the house down.

The scene was set.  I donned elbow length gloves, old jeans and a sweatshirt, a particle mask and safety glasses.  And it wasn’t nearly enough. I pulled him from the porch to the bathtub and he was covered in a yellow/green goop.  The skunk had sprayed him one or ten times IN THE FACE! I turned away frequently during the bathing process, for the odor penetrated beyond all magical concealments and personal protective equipment.  We washed Jackson with various combinations of products as suggested by the greatest of all sages, the Internet. But we did not have every product that we needed and did our best with what we had available.  I forced him to the basement and began the second phase of the night’s reckoning, home cleanup.

You can read about the chemical process that allows you to neutralize the skunk smell elsewhere because I passed chemistry in college and I’m never going back.  It involves vinegar. Specifically, we had to bring vinegar to a boil and place it in the areas that had the worst smell. Not sure if you have had the chance, nay, privilege of boiling vinegar in your life.  It has quite the potent smell itself. And worse, when boiling occurs, the humid vapor fills the room and it literally chokes you when you walk through or near it. I imagine this is similar to the conditions in Mordor that Boromir spoke of.  You know, the guy in that meme you’ve seen? If you haven’t seen Lord of the Rings, let me give you a pro tip. Watch the original trilogy, skip the scenes where Frodo and Sam walk around, skip the Hobbit films entirely unless you like watching 45 minute dinner sequences.  We are now all on the same page that a single book doesn’t require three movies to cover it.

The rest of the night was spent attempting to fall asleep to the serenity of the combined scents of skunk and boiled vinegar.  Now I know what Vincent Clortho meant when he said, “Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of a Sloar that day I can tell you.”  Rick Moranis, we miss you.

Blah, blah, blah.  We cleaned every single surface and object in the bathroom.  Blah, blah. We picked up the other suggested products and washed Jackson several more times.  Blah, blah. I threw away some of my clothes. Overall, the skunk got in several good shots, but I feel I won the war.