Along Oysterville Road

     Once again, I have Writer’s Envy!  I loved Cate Gable’s “Coast Chronicles” in this week’s Chinook Observer.  She titled her column “April is the cruelest month” and wrote about so many things near and dear to my heart.  Especially skunk cabbage!
     Of all the country smells, scents, and fragrances there are, skunk is my favorite.  Whether I catch a whiff on the road or highway as we drive by, or smell the copy-cat odor of skunk cabbage along the wetland verges, I am immediately drawn back to childhood.  When I was very little, a family of skunks lived under the kitchen floor of this house.
     “They’re very polite,” I remember my grandmother saying.  “They never spray their perfume near their living quarters, or ours either.”
     Over my grandmother’s kitchen sink was a large window through which she could see the woodshed.  Not only was the firewood stored there, but it was where my grandfather had his chopping block and kept a full box of kindling.
     When their children were small, my grandmother had clean sand hauled up from the bayshore (yes, there was a sandy beach in front of Oysterville in those days) and dumped in the middle of the woodshed.  There, the children could play in the sand pile during the rainy weather and she could keep an eye on them as she worked in the kitchen.
     By the time of my childhood, the woodshed was no longer in perfect repair and the skunk family had found a way to get into it and, from there, under the house.  Every once in awhile we would see them waddling to or from their headquarters, always “polite” but definitely redolent with their own distinctive aroma.   I loved watching them – but only through the window.  I had heard what happened to my Uncle Ed when he was only a few years older than I.
     He was pitching hay down from the mow one night when his fork struck something alive.  “From the smell of him,” remembered his brother Willard, “it must have been not just one but a whole family of skunks!  Mama met him outside –  she’d smelled him coming up the street – and made him take off all of his clothes.  She buried them out in the yard and made Ed bathe outside, too!  Several times!”
     I wish I’d thought to ask Ed how he felt about the smell of skunks ever afterwards.  Or even skunk cabbage, for that matter.  Eau de Pepé le Pew probably didn’t have the same appeal for him as it does for me.