THE FOLLOWING SERVICE STORY WAS ONE OF OUR FIRST EPIC EXCLUSIONS THAT KICKED THE OLD INDUSTRY SCRPT.
Produced for Summer L. in Portland, OR
When I met Summer that day, I didn’t tell her the truth.
Not too unlike an employee working for a company, I didn’t disclose my true identity. I am only the human host of Storysold: Pest Control. The business is run by my customer service characters: The Pest Predator, Bookmaker, and one of my oldest characters, Wilderness Security Guide.
I’m not planning to introduce my characters until our Grand Opening, but Guide took a special interest in Summer’s service story.
You see, Guide knows Summer lives in prime rodent hunting territory, and she never misses an opportunity to feed her wild creature friends. Like I tried to explain during the service, we could set poison around Summer’s home and do our best to kill off every rat and mouse in the neighborhood, or we could do like the wild creatures do…and mark our territory in such a way that rats understand what happens when they cross The Line.
An owl has to make a living too! And Wilderness Guide was determined to help Summer push the rats and mice out of her home and force them back into the urban wilderness predators.
To that end, I suited up, inspected Summer’s home, and I found:
The vent along the back patio had a gap in front, but that wasn’t the entry point. Not really. It had a monster gap between the patio and the ground that offered the mice (and other creatures) easy access to the unfinished basement/crawl/wild home space. The only thing blocking their entry was a puzzle of non-load bearing, loosely stacked concrete blocks, which were held in place by a piece of wood wedged against the top sill.
Here’s the front view with the marker I stuff in it >
The most obvious Tom-and-Jerry hole (low hanging fruit) was in the front yard vent. “It’s too easy,” was Guide’s reply when we found it. I agreed, it’s an entry point, but I’m not convinced it’s the one. That’s why I set a half a dozen traps between it and Summer’s kitchen, where the activity is.
Note the beautiful shot of your flower. I’m like a photographer! Someday Guide will be in the business of supplying mason bee homes.
On the other side of that tiny crawl space in front of your home is another gap and possible entrypoint, which I marked >
That I will need to be repaired from inside and out. It’s kind of a medley of parts that don’t quite fit together.
Next up is the two vents to the left of the door. They’re not active, but the dry rot has almost completely destroyed their frames.
“Something must be done about these vents!” cried Guide aloud when she saw the gaps leading from the driveway.
Next, I found a possible runway in the unfinished basement/lair. That one runs to the bathroom.
Also there’s a clear rodent runway (which I didn’t photo) leading from the corner next to the back patio vent into the secret/mystery kitchen crawl that also borders this strange monolith >
And least I forget the two rodent holes in the kitchen (under cabinet and the side of stove), all of which I plan to exclude with foam, wood, metal, or a mouse hunting robot that shoots lasers from its eyes.
Guide ended our first service with the ritual setting of “fishing traps” to determine the level and direction of activity. Guide never feels good about killing her wilderness creature friends, but she’s knows every creature that crawls, walks, and slithers on earth kills to eat, kills to make clothes and shelter, and kills to protect their home.
As always, Guide is clear about which side of The Magic Line (between wilderness and civilization) she stands on. She had no qualms about killing the mice in Summer’s home who’d surrendered their wild for an easy roof over their heads, kitchen scraps, and late night dog food snacks.
“The wilderness is vanishing before our eyes,” she said to her human Jake as he belly crawled through the dirt setting traps. “Humans and their pets can’t be blamed for their domestication. They’re dumbed down and tamed since birth, but I cannot abide traitors. The freeborn wild mice of Southeast Portland have a choice! They know what it means to be wild.”
Chapter 2: Trapping vs. Exclusion
It was a few weeks before Guide returned to The Owl Project. She had me schedule a full four hours to do some exclusion work, believing that would be enough time to get the job done.
The Second Service started smoothly enough. Guide read her traps and discovered that she was right. The two entrypoints in front and along the driveway weren’t active. All five (or so) of her kills were in the traps she set in front of The Monster Gap below the back patio. Her theory was, the would be civilized mice—traitors!—were running from that opening right around the corner into what she was calling the “mystery crawlspace.”
The work fixing the four vents didn’t take too long, but fixing The Monster Gap was more challenging than Guide had imagined.
“Argh!” I groaned as he twisted his body into place to face the jumble of concrete blocks. “This is going to be a good one.”
After I played with the blocks for a while like a kid with Legos, a plan began to form in my mind.
“Yeah, I know…” Guide replied after she heard my plan.
“What do you mean, you know?” I shouted silently at my teammate as the sweat dripped around the sides of my respirator. “It’s my plan!”
“Yeah, I know…I gave it to you,” she smiled. “Subliminally.”
“That’s what I hate about working with characters,” I whined like I always whine when I’m tired. “You’re always trying to take credit for all the good stuff I do, when really it’s all me…me, me, me.”
“Wrong,” Guide replied coolly. “We, the employed characters of Storysold: Pest Control are the work engines of your brain…your company. You just think it’s your plan because you can’t engage The Action that finally hits you like a boardroom presentation after all its work is done.”
“Whatever you say Guide,” I huffed as I began to put the plan into action. “I don’t have time for this. We have to be in another crawlspace in a hour.”
“You know there’s no law that says trapping and exclusion have to be done separately,” Guide offered slyly. “If you don’t finish today…and you saved some for next time…wouldn’t that mean more time, in general, to really get a good read on the trapping situation here?”
I tried to process that thought as I tried to free my twisted body enough to bend a large piece of hardware cloth in position. “I like that,” I said when I finally caught up. “Checking traps isn’t much of a service anyway, and I bet in time we could get really good at closing off entrypoints one by one, and creating runways that make our traps more effective…”
“You’re welcome,” Guide beamed proudly.
“For what?!”
“Giving you another idea.”
With that, I called it a day and climbed from the darkness.
As Summer and I talked about Guide’s new action plan to trap and exclude in the same service, I remembered the last text she sent me. Summer said she discovered a new hole in the corner of her kitchen. It was then that I saw it: droppings in corner next to dog door, droppings around the corner from dog door, and the answer to the mysterious crawl space. The mice weren’t coming up, through the pipes like usual…
“Oh my god!” I cried aloud. “It was the dog door all along!”
“Yeah,” Guide said coolly. “I knew that all along…”
Then Summer weighed in. “Oh, and I was wondering if they could also be coming in, up through this vent?”
Then she took a wood panel off the step into her kitchen and we saw the end of the same vent we’d already been trapping below.
“How did you miss this?” I shouted silently at Guide. “I thought you were supposed to have the supereconomic power of the bird’s eye third person perspective?”
While I was busy talking to myself, Summer added, “Oh, and my sister also noticed a lot of burrows along the walkway…”
“Shit sticks!” I cried again—immediately realizing that was likely the spot where the mice were tunneling to The Monster Gap.
I had a sudden urge to do the classic pest control guy thing and lie, saying something like, “Yea ma’am, we saw that. We’re leaving that runway open to make our trapping more effective.”
Lie wrapped in truth. Trapping is more effective if it’s left open, but we did not see the holes. We’d been so hyper focused on the broken vent screens and The Monster Gap we’d completely missed The Big Picture.
Chapter 3: The Action
Humiliated and humbled, my third service was all action. I planned out the new frame and screen combination for The MonsterGap, drank a lot of coffee, and fashioned it into being. I was surprised how well it went together.
I only used one small piece of concrete block!
I don’t have a before photo of the Monster Gap, but try to imagine 2 concrete blocks holding up a 2×4 and a highway of entry holes running from the gap under the back patio into Summer’s home.
Next I foamed the gaps around the kitchen vent from the crawlspace, a fewfeet from The Monster Gap. I also foamed the strange monolith (not shown here) around the corner.
Then I added store bought screens to the two vents along the driveway to reinforce the work I’d already done in crawl space.
By that time, Summer was gone. She had a meeting, so she told me to lock up before I left. I remember talking to her. I was in The Action zone, and it felt like everything I said to her was jangled and awkward. Sometimes it’s hard for me—and the rest of my team—to make what I call The Leap, or The Leap of Leaps. Basically, The Leap is that transition we humans make all the time from introspection/focus/deep thought or action to relating in real time with other characters on The World Stage. It’s like staring at a movie screen for hours, then trying to speak intelligently to your friends.
The work in the kitchen went smoothly. I don’t like using foam, so I used metal and hardware cloth to exclude most of the inside entry points:
And how could I forget the dog door!
“Feel the cold steel of exclusion rodents!”
Chapter 4: Ranger Jane to The Rescue
I imagine there’s a scene that played in a parallel dimension where a cop pulled me over in our farm truck, Ranger Jane, and asked, “So what’s all this…gravel for?”
And I answer, “Pest control.”
“Yeah sure, bub,” He’d laugh. “Tell me another one!”
“No really,” I’d plead. “I’m going to drop this on a bunch of burrows.”
Then he’d laugh again, wave me on, and call all his buddies that night and tell them the story of the idiot pest control operator who hauled a truck full of gravel to his customer’s home for “pest control.”
“All you have to do is kill them,” he’d laugh. “Drop a five dollar pack of bait in their burrows and they’ll be dead by dawn!”
That’s when my New Other Self in another parallel dimension other than the first parallel dimension I introduced would ask the cop, “Wouldn’t it be ‘smarter’ to just kill criminals? Bullets are cheap and prisons are a multi-million dollar industry. Why don’t you do that?”
Meanwhile, back in reality, Guide and I cleared the weeds and built a wall to keep the gravel in, and then hung the CLOSED FOR TUNNELLING sign along her walkway.
Before our team left that day, we foamed the entry point at the bottom of Summer’s stairs, reset the traps in the basement crawl, set a few “fishing trap” outside near hot tub, and promised our patron to return to make sure all the would-be civilized house mice died a merciful death under the yoke of our traps and exclusion.
Chapter 5 (or so): That’s a Wrap
Our service story here ended many months later. I returned to patch an entry hole in my Monster Gap exclusion work, clear 3 dead rats from the outside Volehalla boxes I set, and confirm that a new uprising of activity in the upstairs room was the result of leaving the doggie door open at night.
I like to think that the owls of the neighborhood would now be a little fatter, but that might be one of those classic over-the-top romanticism of nature we Oregon born granola crunchers are known for. I do know, however, it’s not a romanticism to say I’m going to miss my chats with Summer.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ SERVICE STORY (Reviewed on Home Advisor)
“Working with Storysold was a dream. We had a huge undertaking with almost 40,000 sq ft between two properties! With both buildings being over 100 years old keeping critters out is difficult and the previous tenants of the building allowed a huge infestation to occur. Jake was able to not only eradicate the unwanted pests he also filled holes and cracks and has stopped them from having easy access. Communication was great and the pricing was fair and manageable for our small nonprofit! I will continue to work with Storysold and recommend them for any pest control needs, big or small!”
Produced for Jamie C. and her team at Sunnyside Methodist Church in SE Portland
I am Wilderness Security Guide, the Environmental Control Operator in charge of rodent services for Storysold: Pest Control. The story you’re about to read was written by my teammate Bookmaker Jake. He’s a sociopathic liar with god-like delusions of world domination, but he did OK tracking The Action at the heart of this service story. He called it, Church Mice –
Guide stepped from our little Ford Transit cargo van, hit the ground on a familiar street in the heart of SE Portland, and looked up.
Normally, it’s dangerous to look up in the middle of the street. But it’s not as dangerous when you’re receiving a vision from heaven.
No joke, Guide stopped cold in the middle of the road when she realized that the iconic old church was our destination. None of us knew why she stopped so suddenly, but we knew our teammate well enough to know she was instantly hooked: hyper focused, feet frozen waiting for her to make a direction from ten, no memory of the past or present, only two hawk-like eyes on the church and The Action that was about to unfold there. After Guide broke her heavenly stare (and crossed the street), she asked our host to use his camera/phone to document The Beginning >
None of us sawThe Grailhovering over the field of service that day, or anything so clandestine. But, each for our own oddball reasons, our whole team joined Guide on The Hook. Even the Pest Predator looked up—and saw his character producing a hit service in the old stone church. It might just have been our human’s childhood training, but the feeling—that strong sudden urge to be a part of whatever story was about to unfold there—was undeniable. The hardest part of pitching our services to the youthful Church Director, Jamie, was not looking in her eyes and saying, “Forget the money, we’ll do it for free!”
That’s about as good as it gets for “visions from heaven” these days.
The church folks set a sign along the sidewalk. It read, “IN WITH THE NEW, OUT WITH THE OLD, ONE IS SILVER, THE OTHER IS GOLD.” We felt it summed up The Action there pretty well. The first congregation had formed in 1890 at a shoe factory, and then spent the next 21 years building the beautiful stone structure that many locals know, most famously, for their dedication to feeding the city’s poor. The last “silver metal” congregation died an immaterial, other-than-physical (but not spiritual) death in the early 2000s. Not sure why. People just stopped going to church.
Since then, the church has managed to keep its commercial kitchen open to feed the poor/people experiencing homelessness. It also hosts a variety of groups, teams, and neighborhood gatherings like Alcoholics Anonymous and the preschool who is run by an instantly likable human named Joey who has made the magic happen there, with or without proper funding, for more than a decade.
Now a new organization was emerging—stirring the old spiritual stew (heavy on the method and light on the holy rolling theatrics)—with new youthful leaders like Jamie and co-stars like Josh the new maintenance guy.
The plan for a new beginning—aka The Youthful Revival–was thus:
1) Address the neighborhood’s concerns concerning the mass of humans experiencing homelessness around the church.
2) Restore the safety of the neighborhood by shutting down the soup kitchen, cut off the services to the “good and bad” homeless persons, and exclude them from camping on the sidewalks.
3) Shut down the soup kitchen, cut off the food supply to the church’s rodent population, and exclude them from their cozy, predator-free nesting sites in wall voids, behind cabinets, and cupboards.
“Oh wow,” I said when I understood The Youthful Revival. “Are the mice acting as a foil for the homeless persons, or are the homeless persons acting as a foil for the mouse population here?”
“Who cares about all that literary crap?” Guide replied. “What we have here is an opportunity to flex my environmental control techniques on a hundred year old, mouse infested church!”
“This would be an honorable challenge for sure,” Pest Predator chimed in. “If we get the green light, can I join you?”
“For sure,” Guide smiled. “I’d be happy to theme up with you on this one Predator. I’m going to need your eye for spiders, ants, and other bugs to find all the entry holes.”
“Good,” Predator replied without expression. “Count me in.”
Once our team realized what Jamie was asking us to do, it became even more difficult to hold back, bite the tongue, and keep from leaping (hands in the sky) exclaiming, “Holy Moses! what more can we ask from a good service story? Name your price! We’ll start now!”
After Jamie gave us the grand tour, we communed with her in the dusty, eerily unused sanctuary. “I’m sort of new at this pricing thing,” our human host said. “What’s your budget?”
Then she told us. And Jake accepted it. All smiles. Clearly he should never be permitted to play poker.
Our first service scene was awesome. It couldn’t have looked any less like the pest control service our human performed for his 4 former employers if we tried. Instead of jumping right into the heroic acts of setting traps and poisoning God’s tiny creatures, we cranked up the tunes and clean the kitchen.
Not many humans have read our official company novel (mission statement) The Living City, but those poor souls who have read it would recognize a guest appearance by our much-loved “live action” character, Dishmaster Jones. It felt good to dust his character off and put him to work, scrubbing and cleaning. Dishmaster cleaned for almost three hours before he said anything. Then he smiled (with a tear in his eye) as he said, “Oh wow, for a while there I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear the hum of a Hobart again.” Don’t worry if you don’t get it. He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.
When I began, the mice were even shitting in the cleaning supplies. I cleaned behind this cabinet for the first time in (decades?). It reminded me of a 24hour Denny’s.
I had been mentally prepared to do the cleaning scene like a sanitary ninja; but stoic, righteous, loner, isolationist asshole hero types are not always a good fit for church work, especially when The Hero’s Journey is cleaning the microscopic devils from the dark corners of a kitchen. Church, as we knew it, thrived on group projects. And Jamie seemed to agree. She rallied a group of volunteers to clean and ready the basement for their reclamation.
Not too unlike our service story in NE with Farmer Rachel, Master Freddy, and Evanshoe—The Adventures of Ratty Claus—cleaning the old church was a true voyage of discovery. Nothing there was ubiquitous. Everything we saw, felt, and touched was alive with its own untold story. We’d become so used to generic cityscapes—strip malls, chain food joints, familiar retail stores, Beaverton (etc.)—our cleaning scene felt like we were rip roaring through an unseen wormhole at the center of the old church, emerging newborn on The Other Side with every newly discovered story.
At Storysold, usually “old” is just code for “rich with stories.” Ancient bedbug chemicals from when the church was a shelter. It’s a repellant like all of the cheap chemicals you can buy over-the-counter. Using repellants on a bedbug infestations only fans the flames. I found an old letter full of poetry stashed behind this brick. Someone put there like a time capsule for The Future. I passed it along to one of the staff members, and then I used the stash hole to trap mice. Only got 5 or so there.
God’s not big on comedy. Church Goers aren’t normally allowed wicked senses of humor, but rat catchers are known for theirs. Most of the good rat catchers get it. We’re civilization’s foil: the bumbling John Goodman Bugs Be Gone comedic sidekick character in Arachnophobia who tries and inevitably fails to control The Action of nature. With that said, I loved that Jamie called her windowless, concrete dry storage room, “The Murder Room.” When I asked her why it was called, The Murder Room, she said, “You know. It’s that room in movies where the murders happen.”
Made sense to me. I killed 5 mice in the entryway of The Murder Room after setting a few “fishing traps” in my first scene. As my righteous, gun-loving uncle likes to point out, “[group killing] war isn’t murder.” Only individuals killing individuals is murder in The Eyes of God. And no one would ever call killing mice murder. Somewhere along the way, we’ve labeled them, forever, as vectors. Rodents will always bear The Mark of Cain (marked for eradication like malaria transmitting mosquitos and meat infesting horn flies) and that means we, the pest heroes, will never have to worry about the home’s environmental backstory. It’s “see a rat, kill a rat” all day, every day. Instant diagnosis. Unlike real doctors, we pest professionals get to skip The Story, bypass The Action completely, and go straight to the part where we apply our generic treatments. “Disease” and “rat” are synonyms. Killing a mouse, rat, or vole is the same as treating a disease, because the presence of rodents in your home, or church, is always bad like the Dark Lord Satan.
And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” It was the first thing God printed, page one. Must have been important.
Can you imagine a future world where doctors and pest professionals alike enjoy the ease of instant, or nearly instant, diagnosis? You would wait in a long line (like a grocery store) to present yourself before your doctor’s customer service counter. Next you would strip and put on a ritual gown of some kind, then wait some more while the doctor scanned your body for symptoms (using a Star Trek style Google body reader) a few short minutes before they labeled you with an instant diagnosis that came complete with its Google treatment, a pill, therapy, surgery, or a combination of pills, therapy, and surgery.
Thankfully, our doctors haven’t found a way to reduce our everyday, live action stories to generic symptoms and instant diagnosis. They still bang our knees, tell us to open our mouth and say “aw,” and make kind but firm inquisitions about our drinking, drug, or sexual habits. They still have to, at least, make some show of learning our backstories before they slap us with their diagnosis and treat us, instantly on sight, like rats.
In our story, however, the consequence of not dominioning the church mice seemed clear. After a few hours of running my Ghostbuster’s-style backpack vacuum around the walls, I had a canister full of proof. If the presence of live mice in didn’t equal “bad” or “disease,” their droppings certainly did. And that was enough of a backstory for me.
When the initial cleaning scene had come to an adequate ending, I sat in the basement and performed the classic prebattle scene. You know, the scene where the Ewoks set their rolling log traps, Wylie Coyote set his new ACME roadrunner trap, or that annoying Home Alone kid set his deadfall paint cans and flame thrower traps to foil any bad guys who dared cross The Line and invade his territory.
I quickly became bored applying peanut butter on traps. Desperate for any distraction, I asked Guide to give us a call to arms speech to hearten our entry into the coming battle scene. I asked her nicely, but I also told her I didn’t want just any call to arms speech. I told her I wanted one at least as good as the one Bill Pullman used to rouse the blood and bile in his fellow earthlings before they battled their infestation of space aliens.
“We will not go quietly into the night,” the Supreme President of Earth (Bill Pullman) said, standing on his fighter jet with a bullhorn in hand. “We will not vanish without a fight. We’re going to live on. We’re going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”
Guide agreed to indulge me, but her speech did not, or would ever, meet the emotional needs of men charging into battle. If she delivered that speech, let’s say, a few moments before the trench officers of WW1 blew their whistles to “Charge!”, not one unsuspecting youth would cross heartily over The Line. They would all stand there—feeling unfilled—ready to die at the hands of their officers rather than charge bravely into battle. Guide’s “call to arms speech” was more like a calm, how-to lecture (or cooking show demonstration) on the best ways to kill the church mice.
“Just remember team,” Guide said as we shit-canned the empty jar of peanut butter and reached for a tube of green, scientifically engineered mouse attracting goo. “The mice are already hooked on free food: kitchen scraps, garage, kiddy crumbs. They’ve been living large in fancy ‘burrows’ under kitchen cabinetry without any predators around to keep their bodies fit and their minds sharp. All we have to do is ride nature’s wave and spur The Action onward to its inevitable climax. Free food is always a trap, and abundant free food is always a recipe for infestation/The Suck of tragedy, crisis, and environmental disaster. History is ripe with examples. Smart creatures, both wild and domesticate, work a little harder to find the undiscovered niche markets the predators have yet to stake out.”
Should have made this a video. Our guy is still live, swimming in circles.
I listened to her usual lines on the subject of freedom vs. security/wild vs. domestication, but, as usual, I didn’t agree with her. Guide likes to paint my character as the Asshole of our team, but she does that because she’s jealous. I’m better at seeing The Big Picture than she is…and she knows it. I mean, really, she was missing the obvious fact that we were slathering free food on traps in a soup kitchen. Doesn’t The Church sort of run on the idea of feeding and finding civilization—the Dry, Centrally Heated Body of Christ—for all the poor, homeless, wild creatures of earth?
What would The Church be without its church mice?
As we set over 250 snap traps under stoves, below cabinets, along walls, on pipes, behind boilers, in storage rooms, and other dark corners where the furry evils dwell, I pondered that question. I’m as much a rat catcher as Guide is, and any rat catcher worth their salt will tell you (likely after a few beers and a few tears) that deep down, they’re sort of rooting for the wild creatures. Real rat catchers don’t really want the mice to stand in line at our traps, eat the free food, and spill their sacred wine. Real rat catchers are half wild creatures themselves, who cross The Magic Line because they want to feed their prey to The Wilderness like an ancient offerings to the gods. For real rat catchers, killing in the name of their customers is just part of the job. No true hero ever delights in the slaying of an honorable foe. Monsters like Orkin Man, Rentokiller, and Terminixor will never understand that. That’s what makes them monsters.
I know my next line might sound confusing, contradictory, or like “circular logic,” but the wild humans among you will get it immediately: “No one on our team wants the mice to spill their sacred wine, but we’re proud as hell of catching the ones that do.” Our first real trap check service at the old church revealed 23 kills. And we shared that body count with everyone we met that day. “Including the 8 we caught in our fishing traps without really trying…we’re up to 31 already,” we reported to Jamie.
That was just 31 mice. Jamie had also put us in charge of clearing the rodents from a neighboring house. It had been vacant for some time, and its backyard had often been used for an unofficial homeless camp. In its cold, empty, dimly lit basement we found an entry hole (around a heating vent) leading to and from the house’s inaccessible front porch. It proved to be the perfect rat catching honey hole. I was able to trap and kill two healthy adults right off the bat.
We were so proud of our body count, we even told the homeless folks who wandered into the basement (right on cue) nearly every time we propped the door open. The first few poked their heads in politely hat-in-hand looking for “services.” Upon investigation, I discovered that “services” was code for free food in the soup kitchen–not the nourishing Word of God. In any case, whatever their deal was, I informed them, matching their politeness almost competitively, that I was just a humble rat catcher/small grain of sand (with 32 confirmed kills). Each time, I asked the service seeker if they wanted to help me clean mouse turds. When they said no, I excluded them from the church by shutting the door that had been opened to them. My favorite service seeker was a friendly guy I met the last time I opened the door, a few minutes before I became fully convinced the service seekers would always be there knocking and waiting for the door to be open to them. He asked me about the art classes. I told him I wasn’t staff—just a humble (but highly skilled) rat catcher. The whole time we were talking he not so slyly slipped pens, paper, and other art supplies from a nearby table into his satchel. I laughed while I watched his show, enjoying the finer arty points of the interaction immensely, before I dusted off my old social worker character and asked him to leave non-verbally (herding him to the door with my actions) all the while apologizing for something in a calm, even, non-threatening tone.
A month into our service story, Guide turned to us and said something weird. “I can see them now,” she said as we cleared another 5 mice from our traps in the kitchen.
Pest Predator took off his respirator and replied, “Funny, I don’t smell anything unusual.”
I looked at my teammates like a sports bro standing in line at a comic book convention. “Say again?” I said, making my best Trump face/you’re-the-idiot (not me) look.
“The mice,” Guide replied without making eye contact. “I can see where they’re running now.”
“You see the mice!” I laughed. “Are you adding X-ray vision to your list of supereconomic powers?”
Guide turned to Predator and said, “The traps have spoken.”
Predator nodded his understanding, leaving me to wonder if I was the “I” in our team who’d been left out of The Loop like a bad boss. After much debate and discussion over a 6 pack of Cascade Ice (because we were, as a team, still officially on another 10 month Adventure in Sobriety), I was able to piece The Action together. Here’s what Guide “saw” in our traps:
In the dark void, a few inches behind the Tom-and-Jerry hole in back of the Hobart, a few survivors of our trapping efforts (which was now well over 55 dead mice and 3 dead rats!) huddled in mass like shell-shocked refugees of a highflying bombing campaign.
“I can see him now,” a long lean mouse said to the fat footed one beside her.
“Say again?” the Fat Footed One replied with a cold, black-eyed stare.
“I can see the human,” Long Mouse said again. “I know what the rat catcher is going to do next.”
The other mice nodded agreeably at Long Mouse’s hopeful statement.
“Why do you always have to be so weird,” Fat Foot laughed. “We should be happy he hasn’t used any bait poisons yet. You know how impossible it is to train our corruptible youths to say no to drugs!”
“In small doses,” Long Mouse shot back, “anti-coagulants can be used medicinally, or to induce spiritual awakenings…”
“Is that what happened to you?” Fat Foot scoffed. “Did you ingest too much bait, and now you think you’re At One with The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky? Snap out of it. We need to do what we’ve always done: keep quiet, stay in the walls, freeze in place (stand and make The Blank Face Look) when our human masters speak their sacred words, and wait for the offerings of food to fall from Volehalla. Only then will we be loved as Holy Pets, with real parts to play, in this church’s great congregational drama.”
Suddenly, three mice emerged from the wings of the dark wall void. They all look satisfied, fat and happy with the glow of a good meal.
“I have received a vision,” Long Mouse replied unaware of the new mice in their midst. “We’re all prey of The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky…who loves us…and wants us to prosper, thrive, and live wild, free, and keep our bodies fit and strong for our parts in The Great Game.”
When Fat Foot hear that, he roared with laughter. “The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky loves us?! Oh wow, now I know you’ve ingested bait!”
The three new mice laughed too. The most satisfied of the three, a mouse known as Light Claw, spoke up and said, “We just saw the rat catcher. He is obviously some hack the humans in our congregation hired on Home Advisor to test us. Everyone knows Home Advisor is total bullshit!”
The second new mouse snickered along with the group and added, “Yeah and we passed our newest test. Our humans placed peanut butter in little cups surrounded by a big flat alter. The answer is, as long as we nibble humbly at The Butter of Life without touching the alter, our humans will continue to offer us their blessings of food and fellowship.”
“Yes Mouse is right!” Light Claw thundered victoriously. “I got the idea from watching Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom with the security guards last night. All we have to do to continue receiving our blessings of food from Volehalla is nibble the peanut butter from the cups without touching the Alter of Unbridled Greed. You see, it’s a metaphor. Our human masters are trying to teach us to live a righteous life…as long as we’re not greedy and take what they give to us…we will continue our journey to become their Holy Pets.”
“Yes!” Yes Mouse cheered. “It’ll be rad! We’ll spend eternity eating The Butter of Life with our human masters in Volehalla!”
Long Mouse rubbed fur with all the mice in the void, before she flattened her body to the floor, and said, “I don’t know if Volehalla is real, or not; but I do know that human out there isn’t trying to teach us any lessons. Life is not a test. It’s a game, and The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky didn’t send their predator to be our gentle guiding, comfort human.”
“Predator! You mean that guy out there?” Fat Foot laughed. “That idiot couldn’t catch a rat if it jumped in his lap.”
“Yeah…and we all know mice are a lot harder to catch than dirty old, nasty street rats…he couldn’t catch us if we jumped in his lap!”
Light Claw peaked out of their Tom-and-Jerry hole. “Look everyone!” he laughed with delight. “There he is now!”
“To the choppa!” Fat Foot laughed.
“What’s he doing?” Long Mouse asked.
“Not sure,” Light Claw replied. “It looks like he’s fixing something to the bottom of our pantry door.”
“What an idiot!” Yes Mouse roared. “He’s trying to evict us from our sacred pantry. No way our masters approved that one. As long as church mice have lived in these walls…not one of our human masters have tried to block off our entry holes. Besides, we can get in the back way!”
“Not any more,” Light Claw reported from the light. “He found the hole behind the fridge. He’s filling it with some kind of gun.”
The mice suddenly grew silent. While their new reality sank in, Fat Foot spoke up. “He can’t block all our holes…there’s too many…”
Long Mouse flicked her tail and said, “I don’t think this is another one of your stupid tests. That fucker’s trying to kill us.”
“You mean the humans hired him to punish us…”
“No,” Long Mouse answered boldly. “I mean that guy’s a rat catcher…our natural predator…who won’t stop until we’re all dead.”
“Heretic! We’ve interpreted the sacred words of our masters…God put mice on the earth to bring comfort to our human masters…”
“Our humans wouldn’t kill their Holy Pets! Not without reason!”
“That would be murder!”
In that moment, Long Mouse realized her words were meaningless without action. She rubbed fur with her old friends for the last time, and then she ran from the void, through the Tom-and-Jerry hole, into the light of the kitchen like the Dark Lord Satan was nipping at her heels.
“Hey you, Rat Catcher!” she squeaked at the human standing like a giant above her, holding a foam gun. “Catch me if you can!”
“Oh my, what a bold creature you are!” Guide said when she saw Long Mouse bolt from the hole. Instead of giving chase, Guide watched her wild creature friend run across the open kitchen, through the kitchen door, to an entry hole on the side of an outer door leading to freedom.
“Sorry friend,” Guide said with a chuckle. “I already got that one.”
Then Guide opened the door for her wilderness creature friend. Shocked and surprise, still running with all her might, Long Mouse saw the trees, clouds, and sunshine on the other side of the door. She didn’t wait around to discern the Rat Catcher’s actions. She knew it wasn’t some kind of twisted loyalty test. Long Mouse ran for the open door without another thought, running from her former cozy, predator free home—out into a world she’d never known. The Wildernesswas old as the sun, sky, and grass, but to Long Mouse…it was a brand new, wild frontier fraught with danger, hidden treasure, and adventure.
“Anybody else?” Guide called into the dark hole.
Nobody moved. They all stood perfectly still—like they’d done a thousand times before—with their heads bowed (attentive as movie goers) ready for their human masters to drop their daily bread.
Guide didn’t speak. She didn’t say things—speak in the foreign tongue of The Sacred Word—that inspired the mice to stay quiet and attentive in their roles as Holy Pets behind the walls. Guide didn’t eat food and drop any daily bread to reward them for their roles in the church’s congregation that lived, like an audience, in sacrificial service to the directors (the priests, politicians, and storytellers) who rule The Fourth Wall.
She aimed her foam gun in the hole and squeezed the trigger. The black mass of chemical goop erupted in the void like Vesuvius, trapping the mice like a landslide of hot mud, embalming their bodies forever in foam. Guide had finally answered their prayers, pushed The Conflict to its natural climax, and opened the gates of Volehalla to them. They were now forever what they had always become each and every day they spent in sacrificial service to their masters. They were now true Church Mice, ever-lasting parts of The Dry, Centrally Heated Body of Christ.
In 2 short months, our team at Storysold: Pest Control caught 95 mice, 4 rats, and excluded over 62 entry holes: foaming wall voids, patching the foundation with concrete, installing door sweeps, covering open windows with plywood, and patching the bigger holes with metal and mesh.
In the midst of The Action on one of our 2 epic exclusion days, we met one of the oldest members of the congregation. He was the church’s former unofficial facilities manager. His name was Tim and he had a grandfather who was also a member of the congregation. I talked with Tim while Guide and Predator exercised their environmental control skills installing a tight fitting door sweep to keep the mice out of the pantry. It takes a lot to make me really listen to any human, but Tim had amazing stories to share, so it wasn’t an effort. Not in the least. He talked about the old church’s Golden Age like the time they built a basketball court on the third floor for the neighborhood youth, only to discover they built the ceiling too low. He smiled when he shared the part where the congregation literally raised the roof to make the court work.
In The End of any service story, it could be said that most humans work for money. Work is rarely a reward. Work is a “four letter word.” That’s humans. We, the live action characters of earth have no need for pressed and dyed fibers.
[ Never heard of live action characters? In brief, we’re earth’s smallest creatures—the unseen engines of life—who feed on The Action. For more on that check out Guide’s website: www.thewildguidingnews.com ]
All that’s to say, it was Tim, Joey, and Jamie who deposited these lines of literary gold in “our storybank accounts,” which is how you’d say it if good lines, scenes, stories were real currency like it is in The Living City:
DEPOSIT #1 – Jamie gave us the heartfelt review we display with pride at the beginning of this service story.
DEPOSIT #2 – Somewhere in our conversation, Tim said, “We’ve had mice in the church off and on over the years…but you’re the first person that I remember who has tried to seal up all the holes.”
DEPOSIT #3 – “I’ve had mice running across my desk for years,” Joey said to us in passing one day after our traps had gone silent. “When I first heard they hired someone to exterminate the mice, I didn’t expect them to actually go away. But they’re gone. I can’t believe it.”
It felt good to bank that literary gold from the humans, but the legacy we left in the dark, dim lit basement of the vacant house felt even better. The shiniest of the treasure we earned in this story was the newly formed actions we found on the wild side of the door we built from scraps:
The keys were found in the wilds under the porch. Super old.
The new door still led to our rat catching honey hole under the inaccessible front porch (and we were still catching rats there after our traps inside had all gone silent), but there was now another scene in production on the other side of that door. Two feet from the edge of the porch at the edge of our honey hole, a congregation of a different sort was growing at the base of a beautiful old oak tree.
You would never know they were there unless you read this story. They made a point never to gather in mass, or make The Blank Face Look on the audience side of a wall void for their human masters. They dug their own burrows. They gathered their own seeds. They faced their predators at night—always wary of the dangers of silence—and they rubbed fur with their loved ones whenever they could…content with the small wild pleasures The Action had to offer them.
[ Not actual tree ]
In time, Long Mouse was the only mouse under the tree that remembered Volehalla. She did not gather the youth to her side to spend their precious harvest time reviving the cautionary tales of Church Mice. She didn’t feel any need to lecture them on the dangers of free food or the madness and infestation that follow the actions of Holy Pets.
When the youth asked her what lived under the porch, Long Mouse simply smiled and said, “Why don’t you ask The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky? Some say he’s still baiting his traps with free food there…”
And the youth would laugh because they were all old enough to know that The Great Rat Catcher in The Sky—the hawks, the owls, and ferial cats—all the predators of SE Portland circled, stocked, studied, and hunted the wild markets where Long Mouse and her loved ones gathered their seeds. That was just a routine, daily part of The Great Game. The predators worked hard to stay one step ahead of their prey—and they ran, like Long Mouse had ran, with a love of The Actionin their hearts.
Stories can become pretty infested with bullshit without it. Speaking of which, isn’t it time for us to schedule another service? We have to check our traps.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ SERVICE STORY (Reviewed on Thumbtack) –
Produced for Kristin Army of NE Portland, Oregon on Jan 29th 2019 –
I am Wilderness Security Guide, the Environmental Control Character for Storysold: Pest Control, and this is the story of my service –
Often when the flurry of rat killing subsides and all the dragons and bad bugs have been slain, life once returns to normal. Without any villains to trigger The Conflict, our thoughts naturally drift to the important things of life: Who’s turn is it to take out the garbage? What show do we watch next now that we binge watched GLOW? Does the Paid sandwich I bought and ate while I was working count as a tax deductible? Is it illegal to drive and eat at the same time? And other matters of importance…
Once The Action dies, it’s perfectly normal to forget about cleaning the rat nests and or excluding the entry holes so life can return to normal for a lot longer. People do it all the time.
Even people who are in process of selling their homes forget to shore up their territorial lines. That’s normal too. Most people usually wait for a home inspector to poke around their crawl or attic spaces for half a hot minute (and not a minute more), and then emerge from his or her brief encounter with the dark corners of your home itching to launch the word “infestation” from his lips like an overpriced government missile.
But not the Almys. They decided to do it right without any professional advice-giver there to prompt them into action.
Here’s the message we read and replied to on Thumbtack:
KRISTEN: We had roof rats in two areas of our attic space a few years ago, and while they are no longer present, we are FINALLY wanting to remove the gross stuff we are assuming they left behind prior to putting our house on the market this spring.
The company who’d done their rat killing for them quoted them a lot of money to remove all the old insulation, and then clean, disinfect, and replace it with new insulation.
When the job was done, Kristen said, “I would have bought a hazmat suit and clean it myself for that price…”
And I’m no saint. I was rubbing my hands together and eyeing the couple like a money tree when I pitched my quote. Turns out, I’m not much of a hustler. It was still $200 less than the other owner/operator from Thumbtackwho bid the job.
That was the most exciting part of this story. The rest of this service story is just me, doing my best to follow the Almy’s lead and Do It Right.
I arrived as arranged on the 29that 10am. After a brief greeting, I staged all my gear on the porch.
An hour later, I was covered from head to toe in the super old, funky blown insulation someone had stapled behind three walls full of cardboard.
It wasn’t rocket science, but discovered that the removal process had a trick to it. Don’t rip away the cardboard when you’re under it.
The cardboard was only torn in two places, which made me curious about the nesting situation reported by the other company. Unfortunately, unlike regular insulation, I couldn’t inspect the space behind the cardboard without ripping it down. Here’s a few shots of the old insulation.
Once all the old was bagged and staged on the porch, I did the first wave of cleaning and disinfection. Then I drove to Home Depot for more insulation while I contemplated the legality of deducting a lunch I ate while go-getting a load of clearly, legally deductible supplies.
Hum? I thought while I waited on I-5 with the rest of the herd. What am I going to do if Plaid Pantry stops selling Portland Subs?
In the next scene, I cut and strung the unfaced (cheaper) insulation along the sides of the walls to match the preexisting style:
I had extra insulation in one of the 2 smaller sized rolls I used, and that prompted me to insulate the open floor spaces as well.
It’s always so much fun cutting open those big bags of faced (not as cheap) insulation. The pink insulation pops over the plastic like a muffin top.
When I finished stapling the faced insulation to the roof, I stood back and made sure I hadn’t missed any sections:
And that’s that. I vacuumed up all the old crap and disinfected the space again, all before midnight.
After a short, sweet parting conversation with the Almys, I was driving away in my wife’s Full Cellar Farmcargo delivery van fully loaded with old insulation and cardboard and broken boards. The soundtrack of the night had been mostly classic indie: Wilco, Radiohead, Luna, and Portland favorites like the Dandys and Decemberists.
“When we arrive Sons and Daughters,” the van speakers danced with the Decemberists. “We’ll make our homes on the water. We’ll build our walls with aluminum and fill our mouths with cinnamon…
“Here all the bombs fade away…”
It wasn’t the first time I had the thought, but I’d been too busy doing my best like a good Boy Scout—trying to Do It Right…
Where again did that other company say the rats were nesting? Because I don’t remember uncovering any runways behind the cardboard, or bagging any droppings, shelled nuts, or urine soaked insulation…
Maybe I missed it in the day’s flurry of action?I wondered as I showered, grabbed a bag of chips, plopped down in front of the TV, and finally let my body clock out for the day. Or maybe “clean outs” like this service have become so profitable to Generic Pest Control they hand their clean out proposals to every customer with rats?
No matter. The attic sure looks better now. Thanks Pioneer Pest Management!
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ SERVICE STORY (Reviewed on Home Advisor)
“Truly, I can’t say enough about this team! They are so professional, trustworthy, and for the very first time in a long time I feel that they aren t here for 1/2 hour only to run off to the next job site! Jake (I believe the owner) told me that their company prefers to have 2 home visits per day over 10!!! I can t say enough them!!!!”
Produced for Lori T. in Beaverton, OR
Chapter 1 (August 13, 2019) – The Quest Begins
I am Wilderness Security Guide, the Environmental Control Operator in charge of rodent services for Storysold: Pest Control.
I’ve always liked the idea that customers should be less like customers and more like team members. From the first phone call, I felt like I was talking shop with a pro. She knew what she was looking for in pest control service and she had a lot of interesting things to say about the industry.
“Every time I call these guys,” Lori said over the phone, “they always want to sell me on monthly services. I don’t want monthly services, I want them to take care of my problem.”
After we talked about that a while longer, I finally mustered the courage to pitch her my slogan:
“I believe pest control is like a good story,” I hedged nervously. “It should have a beginning, middle, and an end…”
That seemed to immediately ring true for Lori. And that felt good, because I knew from experience that pest control professionals and customers alike believe strongly in the idea of “routine maintenance.” You know, like The Urban Wilderness is an engine that needs regular “PMs (preventative maintenances)” as they’re called in the military.
Years ago, I had a nice long whisky conversation with my friend Joe on the subject. He argued that homeowners and business owners didn’t want to worry about pest control, so they were OK with hiring a guy to come out every month to deal with the issue. I argued that monthly services made pest control companies lazy. They only gave their techs time to run around the customer’s home: sweep the webs, spray chemicals, and change the bait. They had no time to really hunt for activity on the property. The result was, monthly “maintenance services” became rituals—like rattling the chicken bones to ward off evil spirits—that had lost their connection to reality.
I can tell you endless stories of techs “dropping invoices” and dodging in and out of homes and business like pesticide applying sports stars.
Yet, there are millions of people who believe almost superstitiously in the guys in cartoony uniforms who run around baptizing their home in toxins every month. It’s not the customers’ fault. All post industrial revolution era pest control companies from Truly Nolan and Orkin on have embraced the “nature is an engine that needs tuning” idea wholeheartedly.
And I was so glad I’d found a fellow non-believer!
After 30 minutes of poking around their home, I found the root cause of the mouse invasion. They were nesting near the shed, partying in the firewood, and entering the home through a hole in a vent three feet from the shed that also provided them shelter from natural neighborhood predators.
After I set some traps and stuffed the entrypoints with marker, I returned home feeling inspired: I wrote and sent David and Lori my action plan for controlling their mice invasion in only 2 SERVICES!
Here’s what I sent them:
(1) I will put new screen over the main entry point >
(2) I will secure these hole around cables with metal flashing and screen >
(3) I will foam the spot the pest control guy missed last time >
(4) I will use foam and 2x4s to patch these entry points >
(5) I’ll use foam and plywood to try to secure the entry under your sink >
No doubt Lori had heard the same story from other operators. In fact, the last guy claimed her crawlspace was “rodent proof.” I wanted to see this story to its end, so I made a promise to Lori and David.
Most companies give warranties on their exclusion work. They will fix the hole if the rodent destroys it.
I promised if they gave the green light to my action plan, I would promise them a rodent free home for a year. Meaning, anytime within a year they saw a rodent in their home or crawlspace, I would return for free to trap and fix the entry point. There are many reasons why this was not a smart business decision. Yet, it was the only way I could be sure. I wanted to know if my plan worked as much as they did. My quest to nail endings to pest control services (and challenge the need for monthly rituals) had begun—
Chapter 2 (August 22, 2019): The Action
I entered the crawlspace that day with a single goal in mind. I was going to find, fix, and seal every entry point, and hang the CLOSED for business sign on my customer’s home.
My service character Wilderness Security Guide (who I’ll introduce when Storysold: Pest Control has its Grand Opening) would have been proud of my efforts to do what she calls “preventative pest control” or “wilderness security.” Like Gandalf on the bridge, I stared deep into the little eyes of the rodent population around Lori’s home, and said—
“Thou shalt not pass here!”
“Or here…!”
“Oh and by the way. You can’t come in here either.”
“I don’t care if you never used the garage. You still can’t come in here.”
“And yes, I found your highway under the siding and through that big gap…”
“Stop your squeaking. You’re supposed to be the sneaky one.”
“No, I’m not the same pest control guy who left you that hole.”
“Nor am I your buddy the cable guy.”
“Why are you giving me crap? You know how this works. I’m marking this territory so you know where you stand here.”
“I know that was your favorite. I’d say sorry, but I’m not. Your pantry-raiding mouse story has finally come to an end!”
I left the crawlspace that day feeling confident. As it goes with every good conflict, I drew a new territorial line for The Urban Wilderness in Lori and David’s neighborhood. Now we get to see if the humans win.
And winning is defined as 1 year without a mouse, rat, or squirrel entering Lori and David’s home. Stay tuned to the exciting conclusion! Will my exclusion work keep Generic Pest Control at bay for a year? Or will the rabid mice of Lake Oswego find a way back into Lori’s home? Only time will tell…
– EPOLOGUE –
TESTING THE ENDING REPORT #1 – Feb 2, 2020 and still no signs of rodent activity!
TESTING THE ENDING REPORT #2 – June 21, 2020 – Lori called and said her dishwasher repairman said he found “fresh” mouse droppings. I stopped by, inspected the crawlspace and backyard, and then (after a nice chat) I was able to give Lori detailed information that proved her repair man wrong.
“I know they have problems with rats…and they do too [pointing to both sides of his house],” the neighbor said. “I don’t have a problem with rats. If I did see one, I’d invite them to sit with me and watch the television.”
Produced on Dec 17, 29, 30; Jan 2, 7, and 15 2020 in NE Portland
by Farmer Rachael, Evanshoe, Mac, Theresa the Fabulous Fix-it-Fairy, and special guest star Master Freddy
Chapter 1: The Set Up
I am Wilderness Security Guide the Environmental Control Operator in charge of rodent services for Storysold: Pest Control. And this is the story of my service –
Once upon a time, there was a goodly couple who rented a house in NE Portland. He designed world famous footwear and she farmed with Farmer Llew and Farmer Emily at Full Cellar Farm along the battlefront of The Urban Grown Boundary in Gresham. Evanshoe and Farmer Rachael (and their dog Mac) were young and in love.
Life was good, as it should be…
In those days, no one went to school to learn to farm right. Organic farmers were all “rocket scientists” with fancy degrees in journalism, literature, geology, art, or in Racheal’s case: wildlife biology. All the righteous, good, super rad farmers were what our parent’s generation called, “HIPPIES,” or Highly Intelligent People Pursuing Individual Excellence. They have to be H.I.P.P.I.E.s, because farming right (without letting the bad farm economy break you) is a production that makes sending rockets to the moon seem like kitten play.
All that’s to say, farmers don’t have time for rats. In fact, Farmer Emily is known as the Vole Hammer, because she doesn’t set and clear traps like civilized rat catchers do. After she inevitably unearths their burrows with her hoe, shovel, or rototiller, she stomps them with her boot–wham!–and death comes organically: one hundred percent rodenticide free.
For farmers, classic rodent control is almost a joke. So much so, Rachael has been entertaining their crew all season with stories of the rats that live in her basement. Rachael’s rats had become normalized like the Rat in That Restaurant (all rat catchers know at least one) where the night manager turns off the lotto machines, locks up the liquor, hits the lights, and smiles as they hear Charlie their non-pet pet rat scamper from his Tom-and-Jerry hole to manage the restaurant for the late, late shift. Rachael’s rats were like that. They’d become much loved reoccurring characters in yet another story about a rental house in NE Portland inhabited by tenants who hear, see, and cohabitate with rats everyday.
I knew all this, because our human host Jake is Of One Flesh (as humans are fond of saying) with Farmer Emily. And we can’t stop our human from all his self-absorbed jabbering about, “Emily this…” and “Emily that…” Jake’s like a window without glass. No filter whatsoever. The whole Storysold team knows Rachael and Evan had rats in their home, but none of us (not even Bookmaker Jake who’s always looking for a way to turn a dime into a buck) ever thought Rachael cared enough to want something done about them. That was until our human/receptionist received the following text:
RACHAEL: Hey Jake! So my landlord said we could go ahead and hire you to come look at our basement!
What could have prompted that move? I thought suspiciously. I don’t know how I feel about trapping and killing rats who have practically been members of their family…It doesn’t seem right somehow…
Whatever it was, it seemed that the young couple’s story had taken a radical departure from their baseline norm somewhere along the way, and I wasn’t going to miss my chance to explore The Action and discover why.
Two days later, I arrived at the rental house fresh from two other rental homes in NE with rats. Jake had spent some time talking with the goodly couple earlier that summer at the annual Full Cellar Farm Potato Dig where they successfully bypassed the expected conversation about how they’d recently engaged the human ritual of becoming Of One Flesh. Instead Rachael, Evan, Jake, and Emily all spent an hour drinking La Crack and talking about death. All that was to say, Jake had already been introduced to Rachael’s cast of characters, but I’d yet to be formally introduced.
After I walked through her home in my routine super judgy, third person, “bird’s eye” perspective (making note of the organ, movie projector, well stocked kitchen, real books on real non-Ikea shelves, and their refreshing lack of farmhouse style maxims on their walls) I delivered one of my usual lines in an effort to cut to the heart of it.
“So where’s The Action?” I asked like a salty soldier.
Rachael’s response didn’t disappoint. I expected her to launch into her story about her rat encounters, but the first thing she showed me was a mysterious fly infestation emanating from the basement. It’s hard to see, but Mac their yappy (but lovable!) family dog was a natural pest control operator, catching and eating every fly Rachael put in his path.
I stood outside of the scene and took it all in: the human holding the dog to the window, the dog gulping down flies like puppy chow, and the blue door before me. I was an experienced meta-tracking reader of live action, but I felt like I was missing something literary here. There was a force in The Action that was strangely familiar…but what?
Try as I might I couldn’t ID that action. I didn’t know what exactly I was experiencing, but I did know I wasn’t going to go anywhere interesting just standing in the kitchen, so I faced the door…which Evanshoe had excluded with blue painter’s tape to keep the flies out. Then I took a deep breath and opened The Blue Door like a portal to another world…
Downstairs, in the unfinished basement, I watched at a distance from my bird’s eye perspective as Farmer Rachael showed me her flies. She wasn’t kidding. She had hundreds of large flies, all buzzing at the windows, all banging at the glass in search of daylight. At first I wanted to blame the Handyman (the guy Racheal and Evan simply called “the man,” because he wasn’t handy) who had placed some classic Victors and bait on the water heater for the rats. I thought that, until I thought better of it. Large flies are like my wolves and ravens in epic Norse mythology. I use my insect friends to track down dead rats, locate my prey, and find their burrows. The flies in Farmer Rachael’s basement weren’t lingering around any dead things. They were flying aimless, looking for a way out.
I attempted to entertain Rachael with heroic service stories of battling flies in restaurants, but my stories fell flat. My mind was elsewhere. I was sizing up the wonky patchwork wall that failed to stand in the middle of the basement between the civil living area and the dirt filled, rat habitat in the crawlspace on the other side. The wall leaned towards us, bulging from its bottom like a pregnant Alpaca about to give birth to some mysterious new life form through its crack that ran the full length of the floor.
“I’m going in,” I reported to Rachael as I ran back to the van to grab my screwdriver. Someone had sealed the crawlspace up like an unmarked pauper’s grave. There wasn’t even the classic, an old plywood crawlspace door that someone had nailed or screwed shut. It was simply a wall, half made of plywood and sheetrock built to block off and forget.
Zip, zip, I unscrewed a plywood piece around the ductwork. A moment later, our human was wiggling his mass though the waist high opening in the wall, diving like a spelunker into the darkness.
“Hello again…rat catcher,” a voice boomed from nowhere.
Once we landed on the ledge on the other side, I flicked on Velma (my trusty rechargeable flashlight) and searched the space for its source. The black plastic was covered with rat droppings and the heat ducts that ran from the civil side of the basement into the crawl looked like a rat superhighway. I shined my light back onto the wall. No wonder that thing leans, I thought as I picked up an old magazine from the 50s featuring a article for housewives on how best to cook for their husbands. It looks like the Tenants of the Ages have been dumping their forgettables behind this wall for decades…
The crown jewel of the junk moat (between the wall and the earthen, waist high floor) was undoubtedly the pile of chimney ash and screens that leaned with the help of some old broken doll parts, luggage, canned food cans, and glass liquor bottles.
“Did you read me?” the voice boomed again. “I said ‘hello again…rat catcher!’ It’s rude to ignore an old friend…”
“Old friend?” I asked suddenly feeling a little out of control.
Click–off went my flashlight. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I looked around like a lost miner for signs of light.
“Jinkies!” I smiled inside. “I read you alright!”
On the street side of the crawlspace, I saw a long sliver of light shining along the edge of the exterior wall.
[ Here’s what it looked like from outside ]
“What do you think you found there?” the voice boomed with laughter. “You don’t know shit about this story yet…”
Usually the voices in my head go away after I discover where the rats are running (you know, now that I “get it” it’s time for action). I’d found the long, wide, entry gap where any rat in NE could join the wilderness party in our heroes’ home, but the voices weren’t going away. It was then that I remembered the flies…
“For certain,” I replied cool as a cucumber, as I flicked Velma back on and began to search The Junk Moat for burrows. “I don’t know you either. What did you say your name was again?”
“Oh you know, rat catcher,” the voice laughed knowingly. “We’ve crossed paths in my wilderdom many times…long before you began to host the live action character you call Wilderness Security Guide…”
That one got me. “Ok crazy voice,” I smiled. “You win. I’m taking the bait. When did we meet in your ‘wilderdom?'”
“Well, rat catcher,” the voice began. “I seem to remember that day, many years ago, when you were running around playing an overworked Sport Applicator for Northwest Pest Control. You were refilling the poison you stocked in the alley behind one of those fancy late night eateries along Mississippi Ave…I never remember their names. And who cares, right? Restaurants in my part of town change like spins of The Wheel of Fortune.”
“I remember it had fish tanks,” I said, trying to remember. “The stations on the outside, in the alley, where always wiped out every month…but the traps inside were always untouched.”
“Yes, rat catcher. That’s right. You do remember. It’s called ‘Moloko’ or some shit like that now,” it seemed to grin. “The traps inside only seemed to show no action. I only sent my veterans inside for the leftover sushi…veteran rats who’d lived long enough to avoid something as obvious as a few old rat traps set in the same place with the same stale offerings month after month. We let all the stupid youth eat your bait. You know, the same way you treat your youth. We fed all the needy youths medicides, or send them to war for an overdose of The Action. In small doses over time, your anti-coagulant bait poisons are great for mind control. One look at a bait sick rat, you’ll know they’re very good at lessening the fearful effects of having to face The Suck of Civilization everyday.”
The familiar feeling I felt at The Blue Door was growing stronger with every line. I was still digging for burrows in the darkness, breathing hard in my respirator, but I was no longer focused on the task at hand.
“As usual, you had to wait for the bartender to arrive,” the voice continued its story. “You’d developed this habit of wearing a satchel, a man purse full of rat catching gear, so you wouldn’t have to go back to your truck for supplies. On this particular occasion, in route to service the Interchangeable Fish Tank Restaurant, you passed an old woman begging change from hipsters along Mississippi. When she asked you for a dollar, you paused long enough to say, ‘No, I’m sorry. Not today. I’m busy hunting rats.’ You didn’t mean offense. It was just your classic egotistical need to report your every action to The World like we care…but she didn’t know you from Jack. ‘You mean, ‘hood rats’ don’t you?’ You were about to engage her when the bartender arrived (ringing like a school bell) and let you inside for the service. Fifteen minutes later, you were hustling out to your next stop in The Great Sport Application Game sponsored by Northwest Pest Control. As you hustled, you noticed two large men hustling down the street…drilling eyes into your brain. You grinned big and did your best to look like a no-nothing idiot (which wasn’t hard) as they passed you by very slowly. A few steps later, you rounded the corner and came face to face with the woman again. You weren’t as dumb as you seemed. You knew exactly how and why she reacted the way she did. So you offered her a few bucks and said, ‘See, I really am a rat catcher.’ Then you opened your satchel and showed her your traps. That softened her up enough to let a few of her rat stories out. She told you a great story about the restaurant you were servicing….when she was a youth, the bartender used to give a free drink for every rat killed in the very same alley you placed your stupid bait stations. The woman’s face lit up with laughter when he remembered a patron walking in, dead rat in hand like a cat, presenting his kill in exchange for a drink. I still don’t believe you deserved to hear that story…”
“Yeah,” I said as I climbed awkwardly out of the crawl. “I remember I was late to my next stop, but it was worth it. I never liked NW Pest Control’s run-and-gun approach to rat catching anyway.”
“But that was far from the first time we met…” the voice continued. “Go way back. Do you remember what NE Portland looked like before Santa flew in from Silicone Valley to drop big Christmas buyout checks in everyone’s chimneys?”
“Yeah I remember Mallory St,” I said, remembering all the trips I took to NE to visit my Grandmother’s boyfriend. “Leon made sure I understood what a Red Line District was…I remember when Alberta was filled with a variety of small businesses. Not just restaurants and bars. Now it’s trendy to start up fancy sewing shops in storefronts where bigger sewing factories had failed decades before because they weren’t selling to The Cool Kids.”
“Do you know me now rat catcher?”
No I don’t know you, Mystery Voice, I said as I walked upstairs to share our story of how I believed the rats were entering the home. You’re not a real thing…not really…you’re just another strangely familiar, untold story running though our mental habitat that I haven’t had the time to track, ID, name, and control literarily.
After Farmer Rachael and I made a plan to contact her landlord Theresa and share my plan for rat control with her, I said goodbye to Rachael and Mac and sauntered across the street to our work van.
It wasn’t until I was alone, with my doors closed to the outside world, did the unidentified character make its sounds again.
I tried to drown it out with music from my playlist–The Good Old 90s–but it was stronger than the loud voice of Pulp’s Common People. I wanted to be a good listener, but I was rocking with rat services. I didn’t have time to track, ID, and name a free floating apparition from our human’s past.
I didn’t have time to track the voice, but my teammate Bookmaker Jake did. I hate to admit it (because he’s a lying Asshole), but I was relieved when he clocked in and began the literary process of engaging, controlling, and containing the obnoxious free-floating character like Ghostbusters.
Chapter 2: Bookmaker Clocks In
I’m Bookmaker Jake the Character Control Operator in charge of fictions and publications for Storysold: Pest Control. And this is the story of my service –
To begin, I apologize for my teammate Guide. She’s an ignoramus. My process for controlling characters is nothing like Ghostbusters. That movie was a waste of Bill Murray’s talent. I have to contain the character in my human host first, before I can “go hot” and hit the strange, unidentified thing with my streams of electrochemical medicide…
Not that any of that matters. I already I nailed this so-called “mystery voice” character down a long time ago. It’s a Christmas story about a character called, “Ratty Claws.”
The real action of this service story actually began when Wilderness Guide sent a formal action plan to Rachael and Evan’s landlord, Theresa the Fabulous Fix-It Fairy. I have to hand it to her, Guide was unmoved by the normal limits of pest control. She proposed that: A) we remove the junk moat and free the inner wall from rodent harborage; B) we tear down the old cardboard wall inside and exclude the long gap around exterior foundation; C) trap to determine the level of rodent activity present; and C) remove all the old plastic, clean, disinfect, and put new plastic in.
The night before we submitted our proposal, Evanshoe returned from a long day of cobbling shoe designs at Niketown to find Farmer Rachael watching the flies escape from one of their basement windows. Her arms were folded on the window ledge, chin on arms, watching the darkness fall on their backyard. In the distance, beyond the long fingers of their little fruit trees, a rare showing of stars shone through a passing gap in the grey of Portland’s winter blanket.
[ FYI – right now Bookmaker is pretending he’s an Author. This scene never happened ]
As soon as she saw Evan (and the hopeless look in her lover’s eyes that often appear in the eyes of tenants who have been living with rats), Rachael broke into song…and they danced. Not like Disney dancers.
The song had a simple chorus that went something like, “Oh please Fix It Fairy! No, no, no, no more rats!”
Suddenly, apparently out of nowhere, a Portland folk band joined the couple in their basement. They came armed to battle the rats with banjos, drums, fiddles, and kombucha. They hoped all their noise and activity would repel their rat troubles like one of those scammy ultrasonic rat repellers.
“Dance! Be merry!” the couple sang. “We have to sing and protest for our rats to be gone!”
And they danced and sang The No Rats Song to Theresa the Fabulous Fix It Fairy all night long…at great risk to their personal economies. No doubt, the band all had kids and jobs waiting for them when the sun shone.
As the sun creep through the basement windows, the Anti-Rat Singers all packed their drums and fiddles and faded off to greet their true audiences: work days filled with kids, coworkers, clients, and customers. In the final moments of their gathering, the newlywed couple held each other tight.
Looking longingly into Farmer Rachael’s eyes, Evan popped the big question: “Why now?”
Rachael didn’t skip a beat. “Because I love you!”
“No,” he replied with a knowing chuckle. “I mean the rats…”
“Oh,” she smiled big like they were sharing a milkshake with 2 straws.
When Evan’s eyes met hers, he laughed again, and asked, “I thought you were ‘ok’ with rats?”
“I am…but I hate flies. Keeping the rats out of the basement can’t hurt.”
Then they kissed and went to work with the help of a bag full of organic energy drinks.
I’d like to say that Theresa the Landlord heard their sweet Anti-Rat Protest Song, but she lived in another city all together. No matter. Within minutes of sending off her proposal, Wilderness Guide received the following message:
THERESA: Let’s do the whole amount of work so we have happy tenants!
No doubt we were preaching to The Choir! The next day, the following texts were exchanged:
STORYSOLD: I’m hired. Game on!
FARMER RACHAEL: Oh great! I’m glad she saw the light!
STORYSOLD: Looking forward to cleaning out that crawlspace! Good times 🙂
FARMER RACHAEL: It’ll be so nice to have that back area cleaned and sealed up. I’ve just avoided it for three years haha
Chapter 3: The Action Begins
Unlike Guide, I knew all about Ratty Claws. Not because our human had hosted its character (living and working with it day in and day out) or anything like that. I don’t have much more than an overactive empathy for the way Ratty Claws flows. As my teammates will all tell you, I’m a notorious know-it-all who uses my empathic imagination to put myself in other characters “shoes.” I don’t always use that power for good. Most of the time I just use it to try and sound smart. You know, so I don’t sound dumb. Or like some uncultured savage.
That’s why, when Guide found the key Rachael hid after they’d left for their honeymoon, turned the key, and suited up for her first service in Theresa’s now vacant house, I took a few moments to remember The True Meaning of Christmas…
It took me more than a few moments, but I came to the conclusion that Christmas didn’t have much to do with The True Meaning of Christmas, because all those well-cultured memories only reminded me of an older story. I know, even as the Future Famous Author I am, I won’t do justice to this story; but here’s a sold, rough draft effort:
– The Origin Story of Ratty Claws (AKA The True Meaning of Christmas) –
Long before human began to generically engineer characters like Santa Claus to build The Fourth Wall of Civilization, our planet was filled with wild creatures who hosted wild, live action characters like Ratty Claws. Around this time of year, the wild creatures used to gather with their family and friends in their dens, nests, burrows, and homes (with the snow and wind blowing outside) and they’d take turns trying to reenact The Good Times of their summers. They didn’t actually try to recreate the event, or anything as silly as that. They’d just feel it–glowing in the warmth of remembering without words–basking in their memories of sun, harvests, and victories over predators. Then, moments before the winter sun set, they would ration their hard earned supply of nuts, seeds, and such. No home had exactly the same ritual, but it was common for the youngest, smallest, and weakest of them to find a few old things that hadn’t used all year (aka junk) and set them on the edge of their Homefront with a few fresh helpings from their feast. They called the junk and food helpings, The Offering. At dawn, the wild creatures would gather again at the edge of their Homefront to see if Ratty Claws had paid them a visit.
“See,” the wisest rabbit in the burrow would say. “All the junk and food we left for Ratty Claws is still here! Praise Ratty Claws! Our home is secure!”
Or alternately they might say, “Ratty Claws was here here last night. He ate all our offerings and shit in our junk.”
“What does that mean, Ma?”
“It means we have some work to do…”
And the creatures were thankful for Ratty Claws, because he wasn’t there to eat them. He was just there to eat their leftovers and shit in their junk. As The Action always flows, every wild creature had its own ritual, but all wild creatures understood what happened next. If Ratty Claws took The Offering (snuck down their “chimney” and took their cookies) the next course of action was clear. They had to dig, build, and or reenforce The Magic Line they called home. And then they continued to set out their offerings just inside their New Homefront, night after night, waiting to see if Ratty Claws would cross The Line again, or cross their home off his list of “easy pickings.”
“Yes that’s right young whipper snapper,” the older rabbit would say. “We love Ratty Claws. He reminds us to never forget, never take our homes for granted, remember the past, and never give an inch…because the next creature who comes to test the security of our Homefront may want to do more than eat our leftovers and shit in our junk.”
Wild creatures understand this story. They all still believe in Ratty Claws in some way, but civilization lost that ritual a long time ago. I don’t expect you to know this unless you’ve read The Rise and Fall of The Novel Corporation, but Ratty Claws is what we characters call a “live action character.” Long ago we, the few remaining live action characters of earth, were enslaved and made to build The Fourth Wall of civilization by a race of generically engineered characters we know as The Generics…
The Generics are would-be immortals. They don’t want their homes to rot like nurse logs and feed The Urban Wilderness. They want their real estate value to always and forever increase, so most of them spend a lot of time and effort to exterminate wild, live action creatures from their homes. It’s far more than a simple matter of function, The Generics don’t want to be reminded of all the things Ratty Claws stands for. They’ve risen above the base need to watch The Magic Line, tend their territory every day, and remember that somewhere deep down they’re wild creatures too.
Long story short, one of the markets The Generics set aside for Ratty Claws and his “ratonauts” was a territory you humans call a “Red Line District.” These neighborhoods were the territories The Generics didn’t care to invest in. They didn’t care if Ratty Claws reduced every house and business to food for trees. The Red Line was a demarkation that set The Generics apart from the wild characters they relied on, like air or water, to build their immortal Fourth Wall for them everyday.
As a result, the territories on the wild side of The Fourth Wall were isolated and poor, cut off from the treasures of civilization. And that created a hunger (a real demand) for The Generic Way of Life that The Generics used to control the characters that lived in their redlined wilderdoms. The poster character for that demand was Santa Claus.
Santa hijacked the natural, generically immune ritual of leaving junk and leftovers out for Ratty Claws a long time ago. Jolly “Old” St. Nick turned the practical act into yet another sales pitch for The Immortal New: new baby kings, new stuff, and new homes all shinning with lights and decorations that don’t remind anyone of anything specific to their stories. There’s nothing Santa and his billions of followers hate more than regifting an unused gift (or even worse: making a gift from materials salvaged in someone’s junk) because Santa’s working with the predators.
Santa wants you to feel warm, and cozy, and forget the fact that He (rather easily) slipped down your chimney and ate all your cookies. A fury of action always followed a visit by Ratty Claws. After Santa visits a cozy home nestled behind The Fourth Wall of Civilization, the only fury of action that follows is more baking scenes featuring more cookies for Santa.
Humans may have forgotten Ratty Claws, but the rats of Portland haven’t forgot him. They know Ratty taught Santa all he knows about sneaking into homes “quiet as mice.” Civilized histories never remember there origins, but The Action never forgets anything worthwhile. Every origin of its goods are present in action now.
– Thus Ends The Origin Story of Ratty Claws –
Speaking of rats shitting in junk, five hours of digging later Wilderness Guide reemerged from the wild side of the pregnant-alpaca wall in Rachael’s basement with some real treasures in hand…
Chemicals mean clean! but Guide was anything but clean. Our human’s face was covered in ash, earth, and rat dust. It was clear that Ratty Claws had been crossing Theresa’s Homefront (and eating the leftovers and shitting in the junk) for many, many years. Not too unlike the edge of a wild creature’s home, the dark earthen space behind the pregnant-alpaca wall in the basement was The Wild Place where the Tenants of The Ages dumped the things they wanted to forget…
And The Tenants of the Ages had lots of things they wanted to forget: torn pictures, unopened mail (looked like bills!), canned food cans, quack medicine and booze bottles, magazines, and rusted tools and toys. The Offerings were so great we had to pack it in bags, stage it, and return for a special service with Farmer Emily’s delivery van to haul it all out.
Chapter 4: The Rising Action
Guide worked hard to remove all the junk from the junk moat, as well as the many piles of broken glass and junk she found under the plastic. Ratty Claw’s ratonauts (Ratty’s handpicked explorers, missionaries, social workers, and soldiers) had long established a moon colony there, but their presence wasn’t obvious. The undiscovered country behind the wonkie wall didn’t have any of that wonderful, pink, cozy insulation Ratty loved so much. So all the burrows Guide discovered were under the plastic (so classic!) or dug into The Wild Side of the junk moat.
As any tracker who tracks The Action of The Generic Way of Life, it’s super unmanly to do physical work. “Real men” are decision makers and deligators who get their employees or housewives to work for them. The ultimate proof of that is, The Generics pay Hollywood actors millions of dollars to host the shirtless, jackhammering, jungle-fighting “Real Man” characters, so they can continue to inspire their armies of “Real Men” who work for them.
Can you imagine the horror those shirtless jackhammering employees feel when they realize, at age 64, that for all their steel pounding, gun slinging, and motorcycle riding they never earned that real man respect and power they fought for? What do “Real Men” do when they realize all that acting only earned them a cold beer and TV? So tragic.
The point of all that was, on what my teammates call my “bad days” I have a strong compulsion to become that Author (The Man Behind The Real Men) who delegates all the hard work to the characters in my story. On my “good days” I kind of, sort of, feel like I should maybe do some real, measurable work to help our team…other than clacking my braincells together to crank out quality decisions. On this day, as I watched my teammate Guide trying (in a sweaty mess) to hoist her bags full of junk over the wall like some kind of prison slave, I decided to help. For real.
But first I had to warm up to The Action. “Come on! You can do it!” I coached. “Lift with your legs!”
“Will you shut your entry hole and help!” Guide replied. “It feels like I suck dust every time you open your mouth.”
“Would you rather work with Ratty Claws?”
“Yeah,” Guide shot back, perking up a little. “What happened to that voice anyway? It’s like it vanished the moment you took over the writing of this service story.”
I grinned big. I knew Guide’s ability to tolerate my character AND move decades worth of junk were two actions that didn’t jive. So I threw her a bone…
“I made the whole backstory about Ratty Claws up,” I grinned like a pat on the back. “The voice was me all along…in disguise. Ever since Storysold’s less than grand opening in August, you’ve been working so hard, cranking out exclusion scenes and killing rats, I wanted a piece of The Action.”
“Apparently not enough to help do the heavy lifting…”
“Come now, Guide,” I said cheerfully. “You know inspiration is the most powerful force on earth…and I’m here like your hero to supply that most valuable resource for you…my valued teammate!”
Cough, cough–Guide belly crawled across her homemade ramp, through the hole in the wall, and popped into the basement like a rabbit in a garden. Collapsing on the cold concrete, she looked up at the ceiling (still coughing) as if she was praying to the gods. “I’m glad you admitted to making all that crap up,” she said, completely serious. “I don’t want our producers to think we actually believe Ratty Claws runs this wilderdom. He’s stuck here like the rest of us…only an Asshole like you would try to push the responsibility for running this old red line territory onto one of my wild creature friends.”
“I never said Ratty Claws ran shit here,” I said, defending myself. “I was just saying that all wild, live action characters will take any unused part of The Generic’s blessed civilization, claim it, and make it their home. It’s only natural. No doubt, even that ‘great man’ of civilization, Christopher Columbus, did the same. He hit land, look around, and saw an entire continent that didn’t fit his collective vision of civilization. And like a rat, he took it like an offering from God…”
Guide’s coughing grew louder and louder, until it drowned my character out. We prompted our host to take a break and walk upstairs to get a glass of water.
“I’m am real, Guide,” a voice boomed suddenly. “All you need to do is believe in me…”
“Ratty Claws!?” we said in unison.
“Yes, it is I…the one and only Ratty Claws!”
For some reason, Guide was immediately sold by this fiction. “I want to believe,” she said as our human chugged water, “but you’re who story just sounds so generic…like some Asshole made it up to paste yet another label on the character of this wonderfully rich, old neighborhood.”
“I love my Portland rats…all my I-5ers and Down Spout Rats in NE, Water Ave Norways, and Tabor Tree Rats,” the voice replied. “I love my rats, because they maintain their wild sides. They don’t support The Suck…the super massive singular infestation at the core of civilization. They do their jobs…helping you all flesh your stories out.”
Guide laughed knowingly at that line. “I agree,” she smiled. “How our so-called civil characters treat our so-called pesky characters…how they win or lose the conflict…is the heart of every story.”
“Look in the mirror,” Ratty said suddenly very serious. “I want you to see me.”
Guide and I both laughed nervously. “Oh yeah?” I said like a challenge.
“Yes,” Ratty replied. “Do it now…”
“No,” I said instinctively.
“Do it now, and I shall reveal my true literary nature to your team!”
After a short team meeting, we prompted our human to creep into Farmer Rachael’s bathroom (being careful not to track dirt everywhere), flip the lights, and look in the mirror. No doubt, we thought in union, “He’s 42 and aging rapidly.” And he doesn’t like looking in the mirror. But he did it…and behold!
“Now how do you feel?” Ratty Claws asked as we continued to face our nature in the mirror.
“I dunno…” I replied thoughtfully. “I like the way our human looks. He fits the part. All he’s missing is the eye-patch and the cape. He’s totally nailing the fidgety fear of people and crawlspace stoop.”
“I agree,” Guide replied. “For some reason, this image makes me feel like a bona fide badass rat catcher.”
And the rest of our team agreed too. There was something beautiful and good in remembering the old, aging unwanted things we throw away after Christmas.
Ratty Claws smiled in the mirror and said, “Theresa, Farmer Rachael, Evanshoe, and Mac will be proud of the way you’re hauling all the junk to the edge of their territory in observation of my wild, time-honored mid-winter ritual…but you haven’t reached a good ending yet. Not by a long shot.”
The home’s Homefront was still suffering from a serious case of Entry Hole Disorder.
Chapter 5: Master Freddy to The Rescue!
Numbers aren’t our strength. Even our prices are sometimes a reflection of how we feel about a given service story. Is it raining? Do you own a pet? And so on. I suppose, taken our hatred of number, in retrospect it wasn’t too weird that we had the young couple’s return home date marked for JANUARY 20TH.
One of the many benefits of knowing the characters and their characteristics “we” host well is, I know numbers aren’t our strength. So, naturally, on the morning of the 7th (after my first cup of coffee) I followed my gut feeling/manemotion and decided to check that fact with Farmer Emily. Sure enough I watched my love with baited eyes, standing before me in her overalls, rain jacket, and bogs, as she said, “They’re getting home tomorrow.”
“Holy Moses!” I thought as I kissed Emily goodbye like a soldier. “I have 2 scenes to perform for other folks today before I can do any work on Rachael’s story!”
I had no real plan to deal with this literary curve ball, but (as the writer I am) I launched into The Action of the day anyway in hopes that some kind of inspiration would strike. Our second stop turned out to be an awesome discovery on par with discovering dinosaurs at the center of the earth. The producer of that service story, Marti, had been working with our human’s old employer, a generic, commercial character called “Pioneer Pest Management.” She was not happy with the classic/generic industry model where the rat catchers don’t track down entry holes until after the trapping is completed. That seemingly small fact in Marti’s live-action story was enough, alone, to make us want to swan dive into her action. And so it goes with awesome stories, right? The better (or more interesting) they are, the harder it is for us to want to sink forever into their warm, boozy, trap of love.
So yeah, I wasn’t “on my way” to NE until almost 2 o’ clock…
I was about to surrender the idea of nailing an ending to our service story before Evanshoe and Farmer Rachael returned home, until we heard the voice of Ratty Claws suddenly announce, “No! That’s not good enough!” It was like the got-damned king’s trumpet had sounded throughout the land: 100% full buzz killing Amber Alert.
“And why not?” Guide asked, being as 3rd person as possible.
Ratty didn’t even flinch. He replied, “Because this is what your human would call a ‘Christmas story.'”
“And how does that matter?” I, Bookmaker Jake, asked like a tenured professor.
“Because it would make a better story if you did…and your word in action is all you own in The End.”
We heard what Ratty had said, but we were also watching yet another production of Bumper-to-Bumper Traffic. “And how the hell do you suggest we make that kind of magic happen?”
Ratty was calm and smooth with the answer, “A rat would ask for help. That’s what we do…”
“I thought you rats were out for #1 like humans who host profit-driven Generics?” Guide snapped back.
“Really?” Ratty sighed. “I know you know The Action better than that.”
“Yeah ok,” Guide agreed when she realized she knew rats were often a lot more communal than humans. “We can save that Disney moment for later.”
“Good, ” Ratty replied. “Now why don’t you at least entertain the idea of asking for help?”
While I tried to decide if rats or humans asked each other for help more, our human blinked dumbed-eyed at traffic and tried to find some music that would stimulate and ignite some kind of action.
Left to our own literary devices we would have never made it to the next scene, but we got lucky. Our human’s playlist just happened to hit Break My Stride by Mathew Wilder. Only 3 humans in our world fully understand the literary significance of that song, and they’re all runners: 1) Go Faster (our human’s runner character); 2) Farmer Emily (human without a stop button), and Jim Clem (AKA Master Freddy the Running Guru) who also has no stop button.
“FUCKing hell!!” we cried in anguish when I realized I had to ask for help.
The logistics of that decision wasn’t easy, because I’m a reclusive, anti-social, generic hating rat catcher. I didn’t know many friends who would be OK (and not resentful) about answering a call for help. Save one. Master Freddy was an old friend who was, also, a myth runner. Bearded, bouncy, light of foot, Master Freddy worked The Counter at Plaid Pantry (as a manger) during the workday, and spent his evenings running the streets and trails of Portland–Mt. Tabor, Powell Butte, the Waterfront, Springwater, Forest Park–like a lost member of the Raramuri running tribe.
Never mind his character name. That’s a story for another time. The conversation began when Jim texted our teammate Go Faster asking if Jake wanted to run that day.
STORYSOLD: Can’t run today. I’m going to be at that job until after dark.
MASTER FREDDY: Dang. Ok man stay strong
STORYSOLD: I forgot they are coming home tomorrow. I’ll pay you $20 cash an hour plus any food you want to bring us. No rat shit. Should be easy work…and you get to be a guest star in the story
MASTER FREDDY: What are you proposing?
STORYSOLD: Helping at that house you picked me up in [last time we went running] if you want
MASTER FREDDY: If you need help today I’m in. How long will it take? I won’t get done until 3, but I can head straight over there after I’m done.
STORYSOLD: That would be awesome 🙂 It’s mostly moral support.
MASTER FREDDY: Ok. Can we use the microwave over there? Cuz I can bring Plaid food. Or I can stop some where and pick something up
STORYSOLD: Plaid food is great!
I know I said “mostly moral support,” but I’m also a big fat liar. Luckily Jim aka Master Freddy isn’t a “Real Man” who can not help his friends when there’s work to be done. After he arrived on the scene (and ate some Portland sub sandwiches) we launched right into The Action. Jim was indispensable. Instead of our having to crawl out behind the wall every time we made a cut, Guide marked the 2x6s, handed it to Jim, and Jim used Farmer Rachael’s chop saw to cut the pieces like a pro.
When we’d finished with the exclusion work, Jim swept the basement while Guide disinfected the crawl and put the new plastic in place.
[ I asked Jim to take an action shot ]
Three hours later, we hauled the remaining bags of junk and tools back to our work van. It was dark and raining when I shook Master Freddy’s hand and thanked him for flying in like Han Solo to make this service story truly great. As a testament to his team of characters, he refused my offering of money. Instead, after some haggling, he agreed to join us for dinner at Full Cellar Farm with Farmer Emily. What a badass!
Chapter 6: Life Returns to Normal
In spite of forgetting to put Emily’s weekly share of vegetables in the fridge and forgetting to deliver the fresh farm eggs we wanted to gift the honeymooners, our completed service story was met with enthusiasm.
STORYSOLD: Welcome home, I am almost done with your rat story. No hurry, but one you get settled I would like you guys to pick your favorite pieces from my junk collection in your basement. I’m going to make something from them…it’s part of your story 🙂
FARMER RACHAEL: I just peaked down there. No flies and it looks and feels so clean. Honestly I can’t thank you enough. We will pick out a favorite treasure and let you know!
STORYSOLD: Crawl is 90% cleaner, but the basement now has a coat of dust…sorry
FARMER RACHAEL: I didn’t notice that! But honestly as long as the rats are gone it’s cleaner than before. It feels good down there. Whatever curse we had feels lifted!
A week or so later, we made good on our promise to finish the story. In addition to sealing a few gaps around the foundation from the exterior and removing the last bag of junk, our team enjoyed a brief moment of togetherness when we performed a long forgotten, mid-winter ritual….
Evanhoe liked the shoes and Farmer Rachael liked the photos we stashed in the old Budweiser can of vegetables. The jars have dog food and water in them, marked with lines to see if Ratty Claws had crossed The Magic Line onto the civilized side of their pregnant alpaca wall.
Even with all that work, you can never be sure. No matter how small, Ratty and his ratonauts will find all the undiscovered territories Generic Santa Claus and his followers have walled off, tossed out, wasted, and forgotten long ago. So don’t forget to put out some junk and leftovers at the edge of your territory for Ratty Claus to shit in.
And if he comes to reclaim your wildness, we suggest that you listen to what the young couple’s Neighbor Will said when we talked rats with him in passing…
“I know they have problems with rats…and they do too [pointing to both sides of his house],” Neighbor Will said. “I don’t have a problem with rats. If I did see one, I’d invite them to sit with me and watch the television.”
Yes that’s right. We are formally recommending Will’s action plan: sit down with your wild creature friend, serve him up some peanut butter, watch some TV (with the old rabbit ears), and then, when you’re done binge watching The Newest Show, we suggest you call Storysold: Pest Control.
You need to call, because the fact of that rat (munching popcorn with you on the couch watching Game of Thrones) means your home territory still has at least one open entry hole. And the next creature that scampers through that door may not be as cool, or as hip, as Ratty Claws. The next creature that scampers through that entry hole might have a thirst for human blood, or even worse…some kind of working contract with Edge Pest Control.
In The End, we made a new crawlspace door for The Wild Place in classic Portland style, using a few items of junk someone had tried, long ago, to forget. It was our token ode to reminding you humans that, as long as civilization persists, Ratty Claws will be there, ready as always, to eat your scraps and shit in your junk.
“Jake went above and beyond from when I first met him at the first evaluation. We had a rodent problem that I had got several other company’s to review and were left with the feeling that they couldn’t fully evaluate the problem because the low crawl space in our 1940s home. Then Jake showed up friendly and knowledgeable as ever and had no problem getting under our house and really giving us a full review(with photos) to where the rats were getting in and how to stop them. He was always professional and on time, and more than that really seemed like he liked his job and helping people that didn’t know how to handle pest invasions. He did a full enclosing and it’s has been 2 months and I haven’t seen a rodent. He is responsive and always asked for follow up…. and on top of that a great writer…. just check out his website? I fully recommend if you ever get any unexpected creatures to have him save the day. He will solve the problem and is reasonable priced. Thanks Jake!”
Produced for Stephanie and the Brockways on Dec 11, 12, and Jan 9 in Tualatin, OR
I am Wilderness Security Guide, the Environmental Control Operator for Storysold: Pest Control, and this is the story of my service –
It was my third service mud diving into the crawlspace of a home set on a gravel, dead end road that looked more country than suburban. A high canopy of evergreens gave the road a cosy, watchful feel, which reminded me of one of my favorite wilderness homes in The Northern Cascades: dark, wet, green, and rich in active rot and earth. On the other side of the road, a creek ran parallel giving more life to the wild neighborhood, critters that that no doubt belled up to it everyday like Norm from Cheers.
As our readers know, I’m a female. Yet my human host Jake is a male. And I often try to empathize and understand his maleness, sort of like Data or Spock on Star Trek–struggling to understand humankind. Or maybe a better analogy is being like a female employee working in a corporate governing body who operates as a male character–like Orkin Man, Michelin Man, or Maytag Man–everyday.
I don’t often waste our customers’ time with musings like these, but there wasn’t any other headline flashing above this service story and it came to me naturally in a perfect all male moment: (a) I was alone with no one at home or on the road outside, which was very manly in the same way working on cars alone in the garage is, or watching sports on TV in silence in a one person recliner is. (b) I was cold, hungry, muddy, and my hands were bleeding from wangling hardware cloth in tight spaces, which was also very manly because its not “real work” unless I feel the sacrifice like a bloody boxer, calloused ditch digger, or Jesus on the cross. And the best part, I didn’t have anyone around to argue with me. It was just us (me, my host, and our small team of characters) and our thoughts. There was no know-it-all co-worker or nagging boss to tell me that my thoughts were dumb, or didn’t make sense. I could think of anything I wanted to think about, and then wrap it up, mummify it, and save my wisdom for all time like buried treasure.
My all male moment began with a flash question. I was inspecting my work from my initial exclusion service with the same sort of pride that comes from thinking great thoughts with no one around to burst my bubble.
This is my biggest exclusion space to date! It’s a crawlspace door opening that someone built a front porch over…for the raccoons and all God’s wilderness to enter.
A rat had burrowed under the jankie busted old wooden screen that was there >
The burrow. Must have been there before the screen was busted…
The question just popped in. “What was more manly?” I thought as I low crawled to my next entry hole. “Grinding steel with my shirt on, or nuking them until they glowed?”
Translated from Male-ese back to Wilderness Guide the 2 choices (because with human males its always wrong or right, or 2 choices): (a) making the effort to draw a clear territorial line (aka The Magic Line) and exclude the raccoons, possums, rats, and mice from their home, OR (b) killing every rat, raccoon, squirrel, and wild creature in the neighborhood like Captain Bug Killer with his lifetime of monthly “maintenance” contracts.
Why was this question important to our story here?
Well it’s sort of retrospective. There was a moment at the end of my first service when I had to recommend a course of action to Stephanie…
I was tired and rambled a little, but stood on her front porch and said something like, “You have 4 broken vents, an open wildlife-sized door under your porch, at least one active tunnel, large gaps and entry holes around all 4 closable crawl doors, a hill full of old/inactive burrows in the side crawl under the living room, at least 3 easy entry holes leading into house (like the one under sink where you caught the rats), a fat gap under back patio porch leading into crawl, a handful of possible entry holes, and signs of activity in the floorboards in the back crawl.”
For anyone reading who’s not a Brockway, their territory has two add-on crawlspaces for a total of three. Based on my tracking of signs, it seemed that the main crawl space was raccoon territory, the side crawl under the living room was mostly abandoned, and the back crawl space was the hangout of what I guessed was a single, savvy old loner/male rat. But I wasn’t sure about the gender of the rat. That tracking of the signs could easily be a classic projection on my part.
“So what do you recommend?” Stephanie asked very matter of factly.
Any classic, male pest control operator (and no joke, they’re all male) in my position wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the regular killing contract, place an arsenal of bait stations around the property, and then drive home in time for The Game and beers without thinking twice about it.
“If I were you,” I said without a thought to how. “I would spend my hard earned money on making an effort to exclude your home…instead of what I call ‘going to war with The Wilderness,’ trying to kill every creature in the neighborhood who creeps into your open crawlspace.”
After all, that’s what Snow White would do.
[ The Pied Piper also used music to control the wildlife ]
I was impressed with our producers. They didn’t immediately take my word for it. You know, just nod and take my professional recommendation like I was a benevolent white haired doctor or something. They asked for an action plan and proposal, and I wrote them one. Then they made their decision, and hired me to exclude the rats from their home.
Two services later, I was standing in their front yard covered head to toe in mud, still trying to catch my breath from 5 hours of work. No doubt if any neighbors saw me, they would have turned to their son, daughter, or anthropomorphized pet and say, “Oh my…” they’d say like they were riding the zoo train. “Now that’s a real man.”
I wasn’t grinding steel with my shirt on. That scene happened in the first exclusion scene, when I dragged my grinder down into the darkness with a sheet of expanded steel and cut it to size in a shower of sparks. But I was muddy, inspecting my work in the hands-on-hips warrior stance; and I knew from watching action movies that passed, nearly everyday, as manly.
Not that it mattered what the neighbors thought they saw. Characters aren’t made of flesh, blood, and bone anyway. You can’t really see, or put concrete words, to creatures made of The Action.
And believe you me, we’re chalk full of words that end with “ing.” Nouns are only good for fooling readers into believing this strange code–painted in black and white–is somehow saying something worthwhile.
Speaking of which, I feel like I just crossed a line there. As anyone who’s ever sat next to that guy on the plane knows, righteous monologuing is a classic form of pestilence. But a very manly one at that.
As the neighborhood began to stir with kids returning from school and parents coming home from work, I set my traps, placed my bait, and set a handful of free pet food in all three of the crawlspaces. The time for testing the newly excluded territorial line of Stephanie’s Homefront had come. A few moments after I closed the crawl doors, threw my tools and materials in the back of my van, turned the key, cranked with wheel, and headed down the road with “Solitary Man” by Neil Diamond blasting through my speakers, the answer sounded loud like a trumpet call.
The answer wasn’t (a) grinding steel with my shirt on, building a wall to keep the critters at bay, or (b) nuking The Wilderness with poisons and pesticides until it glowed. It was (c) something new.
And I was doing something new. I wasn’t naive enough to believe a wall would be enough to teach the wild creatures to respect our producers’s home. For this to work, I’d have to change the core characters of the rats, mice, and raccoons who had, for years, believed this home was open for business. Because the heart of pest control is the power struggle/central conflict, the good old fashioned trying to tell any earth creature, “No, you can’t have that thing you think you really need anymore.”
And the only way to make that kind of radical change in a wild creature’s character is a making a radical change in their environment. Can you imagine a future war, not so long from now, where our heroes hit the ground running, gunfire all around, with hammers in their hand? And a squadron of bombers flying above them, all dropping expanded steel, hardware cloth, foam, concrete, and DYI Youtube videos for a city now controlled by villains who’ve long lost control of their own stories to easy money, free food, and a predator free home they didn’t build?
With lightning speed and efficiency, our heroes change everything about the villains environment overnight. And force them to change:
Bust through the old rat burrows to make way to the gap under the back porch.
Cover the gap with hardware cloth, so they can’t sneak in and out under the porch.
Patch the holes in the crawl door with concrete.
On the other side too!
Rats can rip through foam, but they only have so much energy to spend looking for new territories. As it goes with us, no action happens without a cost benefit analysis.
As promised, I reenforced the foam I used to exclude the holes under the sink on the first service. It’s hard to see, but one of the wires had been chewed.
Exclusion complements of wire, foam, and rock. That one was hard to reach…
I could see the backyard through that peep hole.
That’s a “vent” opening between the front and back crawlspaces. The only reason why I excluded it (and the next one) is a strong desire to make your territory as uninhabitable as possible for wild creatures. This limits their range of motion greatly.
Here’s what the only active tunnel I found looked like when I unearthed it. The concrete was clearly not as deep in that spot, so I added more.
This door is, by far, the worse of them. I filled the entry hole on upper left side with concrete as well as reenforced the old foam along the sides.
And even more concrete…
Random thought: I think The Math on that one active tunnel to the right of the door shown above is: shallow foundation + nearby tree roots + old abandoned house next door + water = rat tunnel. This spot is high on my list for future weakness in your Homefront. I’m curious to see how my plan works when I return for the 4th service to check in.
I don’t think I told you about this one. This rot/entry hole(s) are in the back crawl and they seem to give access to spaces inside, or at least floorboards.
Here’s the view looking up…
Another creative exclusion fix brought to you by Wilderness Guide
Here’s the other side of the back crawl where I had some activity since my second service. One bait pack was eaten, two traps tripped, but no dead rat. Was it Professor Plum in the study, or Miss. Scarlet? It daintily ate enough bait to die.
I used every material in my truck. I used light metal flashing here because I had wood to fix it to. I buried it down to the hard soil.
Fun with my rotary hammer drill…
So folks, what do you think? Will my radical change in the environment be enough to make a radical change in The Action of the wild creatures in the neighborhood? Does “dropping The Exclusion Bomb” feel like real pest control if all that time and money was spent to kill one stubborn rat?
Because that’s what happened. A month after my last exclusion service, I returned and finally caught the sneaky guy I knew was nesting in the back corner.
Was it manly as grinding steel with my shirt on, or nuking them until they glow? The world may never know.
Story Sold Pest Control is rated 5 out of 5.0 stars based on 83 review(s).
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- Jake is great! He was referred to me by a friend and he was thorough, very knowledgeable and put my mind at ease! Thanks for all the help!
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- I contacted Storysold Pest control for mice/rat problems for a rental property. I was very impressed with their website about the process they use to keep out rodents not just catching them and calling it good. They are very professional, explained the process in detail and showed up on time for our appointment. It’s been a week or so since he came out and my tenant hasn’t heard or seen any mice/rats. Jake, the owner is passionate about helping people and very knowledgeable in all aspects of pest control! Don’t waste your time on any other company call him first. Teri C
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- Keith B
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- Abby and Dave
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- Paige and Kris
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- Kammie James
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- Ed Robertson
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We had a great experience and highly recommend Jake. He is responsive, effective and thoughtful.
- Eddie B
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Jake at Storysold Pest Control is knowledgeable and professional. He is quick to respond and reasonably priced. I find him to be trustworthy and ethical, he does not sell unnecessary services and he works with customers that are willing to do some of the work themselves as well as with customers who just want the whole service done without being involved themselves. While other companies told me I needed to replace all my insulation and do massive crawl space renovations, he offered several affordable options. With his help we no longer have a mouse problem and it was done at a fraction of what other companies quoted us. I appreciate his flexibility and fun, friendly personality. If I ever have another pest control issue, he will be my first call.
- Darian C.
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- Joyce R
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Jake has been helping me trap rodents at my farm with his Volehalla rodent boxes. He's friendly, knowledgeable, and effective: we've trapped a lot of rodents!
- Emily C
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Jake was fantastic! Fast response. Reliable and honest. Great rates. Hope not to have any more rodent problems, but if I do I will be calling Jake again. I would recommend him to anybody that needs help with Pest Control.
- Janet D.
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Truly, I can t say enough about this team! They are so professional, trustworthy, and for the very first time in a long time I feel that they aren t here for 1/2 hour only to run off to the next job site! Jake (I believe the owner) told me that their company prefers to have 2 home visits per day over 10!!! I can t say enough them!!!!
- Lori T.
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Working with Storysold was a dream. We had a huge undertaking with almost 40,000 sq ft between two properties! With both buildings being over 100 years old keeping critters out is difficult and the previous tenants of the building allowed a huge infestation to occur. Jake was able to not only eradicate the unwanted pests he also filled holes and cracks and has stopped them from having easy access. Communication was great and the pricing was fair and manageable for our small nonprofit! I will continue to work with Storysold and recommend them for any pest control needs, big or small!
- Jamie C
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Mouse in the house!!!! I texted Sunday morning after having chased a mouse through the house Saturday all day and Sunday at 3am... they came out to the house by 12:30 that Sunday. Jake got in the crawl space and checked the outside of the house for entry points. While there was no evidence of a major problem, I opt ed for the full attack. He came in with an Arsenal of traps that he placed in the kitchen and crawl space. He didn t hard sell and his prices were very affordable! He was also very honest with potential outcomes which I appreciate. He literally just left and I haven t heard any traps go off but just based on his customer service, I would totes recommend him! He s coming back in a week to check traps. I ve read some horror stories about other companies but I feel very confident that I m working with an upstanding professional. And he s dog friendly!
- Taaj A.
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Great company.
- Ed S
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A pro. Showed on time. Knew what to do
- Mike B.
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Jake of StorySold is proficient, affordable, and punctual. He took his time with carefully evaluating my problem, fixed my issue, and did extras like helping me fix my mattress which he treated for bed bugs. Can't recommend him enough and will use him and his company in the future. Got two other quotes which were much higher each quoting at least $1,000 without a guarantee.
- James J.
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Jake is prompt, skilled, authentic and friendly! I couldn't be happier. I'm so glad that I talked to all three bidders before choosing. Even before he got here, I knew he was the best choice!
- Linda B.
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Great!!! Next day service, very knowledgeable and trustworthy, affordable. Didn t try to sell me any extra services I didn t need. Would gladly hire again.Great!!! Next day service, very knowledgeable and trustworthy, affordable. Didn t try to sell me any extra services I didn t need. Would gladly hire again.
- Shelly A.
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Very good
- Larry A
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Jake actually arrived early. He did a good job of removing a large hornet's nest of very aggressive hornets. He will definitely be our first choice on any future pest removal we might need.
- Barbara B.
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Jake went above and beyond of what was asked of him! Will not use anyone else!
- Ted M
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Jake was extremely respectful and responsive. Came promptly and did a thorough inspection. He gave us options and his honest opinion about what we needed to do. He was very helpful in solving the problem simply and cost effectively! Will definitely call again.
- Michelle C.
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Came to our home right away and set live traps in our chimneys and made screens for the tops. Returned the next day to find a squirrel in one of the traps. We were very pleased with our results and appreciated the great customer service
- Kathleen
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Friendly, fast and efficient. Very pleased with the service Jake provided
- Joli P.
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Refreshing to work with Jake. He is collaborative and communicative. Great improvement since his visit.
- Seth W
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He's friendly, professional, punctual & extremely affordable. Would hire again & recommend to my friends.
- Max K
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- We’ve struggled with mice in our home for years. Stoysold came out in February of 2020, found the access spots, blocked them, and we haven’t had a single mouse inside in over a year. I highly recommend their service. KH in Sandy, OR
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- Jake was professional, friendly, educational on the process. I would recommend his services to anyone needing a exterminator for insects or rodents.
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- Boann
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- We are so happy with the work Storysold did to fortify our house against unwelcome creatures! They were courteous, efficient, and communicative throughout the process.
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- Jake took care of our unwanted guest (roof rat!) and identified and took care of entry points to prevent future problems. We have been paying for a pest control service for years that we are going to be able to cancel thanks to Jake’s work. He’s very professional and responsive and we highly recommend him! – Mary
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- Dustin
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- Dani Rathke
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- Thorough, effective and reliable. I’ve used other exterminator services that seem more concerned with signing you up for annual contracts than actually solving the rodent issue. This company is the opposite. They care the most about solving the problem, billing customers comes second. I’d highly recommend.
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- Paul
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- Kristy L
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- Darlene Warren
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- Erika Glancy
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Jake has been helping me trap rodents at my farm with his Volehalla rodent boxes. He's friendly, knowledgeable, and effective: we've trapped a lot of rodents!
- Emily C.
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Truly, I can t say enough about this team! They are so professional, trustworthy, and for the very first time in a long time I feel that they aren t here for 1/2 hour only to run off to the next job site! Jake (I believe the owner) told me that their company prefers to have 2 home visits per day over 10!!! I can t say enough them!!!!
- Lori T.
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Great!!! Next day service, very knowledgeable and trustworthy, affordable. Didn t try to sell me any extra services I didn t need. Would gladly hire again.
- Shelly A.
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Jake actually arrived early. He did a good job of removing a large hornet's nest of very aggressive hornets. He will definitely be our first choice on any future pest removal we might need.
- Barbara B.
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Jake went above and beyond of what was asked of him! Will not use anyone else!
- Ted M.
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Jake was extremely respectful and responsive. Came promptly and did a thorough inspection. He gave us options and his honest opinion about what we needed to do. He was very helpful in solving the problem simply and cost effectively! Will definitely call again.
- Michelle C.
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Friendly, fast and efficient. Very pleased with the service Jake provided
- Joli P.
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He's friendly, professional, punctual & extremely affordable. Would hire again & recommend to my friends.
- Max K.
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Jake at Storysold Pest Control is knowledgeable and professional. He is quick to respond and reasonably priced. I find him to be trustworthy and ethical, he does not sell unnecessary services and he works with customers that are willing to do some of the work themselves as well as with customers who just want the whole service done without being involved themselves. While other companies told me I needed to replace all my insulation and do massive crawl space renovations, he offered several affordable options. With his help we no longer have a mouse problem and it was done at a fraction of what other companies quoted us. I appreciate his flexibility and fun, friendly personality. If I ever have another pest control issue, he will be my first call.
- Darian C.
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Went above and beyond my expectations! Would recommend to anyone, knowledgeable and experienced. Thanks again!!
- Jaimie D.
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Jake will give you friendly, personalized, and timely service, and you get the story of the service at the end!
- Emily C.
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Very honest, friendly and informative. Excellent work.
- Terry B.
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Refreshing to work with Jake. He is collaborative and communicative. Great improvement since his visit.
- Seth W
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- Zack C.
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We had a great experience and highly recommend Jake. He is responsive, effective and thoughtful.
- Eddie B.
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Very honest, identified the problem in a remote corner of the property, operated quickly, provided photos of the work done and is coming back to verify the problem has been solved.
- Matteo V.
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Jake was fantastic! Fast response. Reliable and honest. Great rates. Hope not to have any more rodent problems, but if I do I will be calling Jake again. I would recommend him to anybody that needs help with Pest Control.
- Janet D.
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- Taney R.
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Working with Storysold was a dream. We had a huge undertaking with almost 40,000 sq ft between two properties! With both buildings being over 100 years old keeping critters out is difficult and the previous tenants of the building allowed a huge infestation to occur. Jake was able to not only eradicate the unwanted pests he also filled holes and cracks and has stopped them from having easy access. Communication was great and the pricing was fair and manageable for our small nonprofit! I will continue to work with Storysold and recommend them for any pest control needs, big or small!
- Jamie C.
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Came out next day and took care of our wasp nest! Easy to schedule and very responsive. Thank you!
- Jacoba G.
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Mouse in the house!!!! I texted Sunday morning after having chased a mouse through the house Saturday all day and Sunday at 3am... they came out to the house by 12:30 that Sunday. Jake got in the crawl space and checked the outside of the house for entry points. While there was no evidence of a major problem, I opt ed for the full attack. He came in with an Arsenal of traps that he placed in the kitchen and crawl space. He didn t hard sell and his prices were very affordable! He was also very honest with potential outcomes which I appreciate. He literally just left and I haven t heard any traps go off but just based on his customer service, I would totes recommend him! He s coming back in a week to check traps. I ve read some horror stories about other companies but I feel very confident that I m working with an upstanding professional. And he s dog friendly!
- Taaj A.
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Jake was straight forward and was happy to answer all questions. Thank you!
- April B.
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A pro. Showed on time. Knew what to do
- Mike B.
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Did an amazing job fixing some visitors to my crawl space. Sanitized, cleaned, and locked down from future uninvited guests!
- Stephen I.
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Jake of StorySold is proficient, affordable, and punctual. He took his time with carefully evaluating my problem, fixed my issue, and did extras like helping me fix my mattress which he treated for bed bugs. Can't recommend him enough and will use him and his company in the future. Got two other quotes which were much higher each quoting at least $1,000 without a guarantee.
- James J.
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He arrived on time, knew precisely what to do to resolve my problem and completed the job.
- Jeff J.
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Jake is prompt, skilled, authentic and friendly! I couldn't be happier. I'm so glad that I talked to all three bidders before choosing. Even before he got here, I knew he was the best choice!
- Linda B.
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Amazing! Jake is amazing! He came out because I had a squirrel in my attic. He has a vent he can put in so they can get out but not back in! Theres no trauma to the animal by trapping it and you will save yourself hearing it scream and cry in a trap! He walked around my entire house and attic looking for all entry points. He is very knowledgable and kind and looking to help you exist w wildlife w the option of not euthanizing. Years of experience. I was so pleased q his company I would highly highly recommend him for any of your critter/pest? needs! Thank you Jake!
- Susan K.
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- Loa H.
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We knew we had several openings to our crawl space where rodents were coming in. To come out and give us a quote, Jake was flexible with making an appointment at our convenience. He is personable and professional. We accepted his quote on the spot and he did the work at that time. He was thorough and gave us an excellent report with pictures after he was done. I highly recommend him and will use him again should the need arise.
- Larry a.
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- Paige L.
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Jake was a huge help with our recent rodent adventure. He was a great communicator and his work and knowledge were superb. He was thorough with his assessment of our property and honest with his recommendations. There was no attempt to unnecessarily sell us on any packages, in fact Jake gave us resources to get our situation under control and to maintain that going forward. Will absolutely be calling Jake in the future if the situation arises.
- Graham H.
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Great service and very affordable pricing.
- Humberto Z.
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- Deanna M.
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- Michelle H.
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Jake was very quick, informative. He not only took care of the rodent, but spent time helping to prevent it happening again.
- Em W.
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Excellent job! Jake was wonderful to work with.
- Kathy M.
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Jake went above and beyond. I had tiny ants in my cupboards and on my kitchen floor. He went outside the property and went underneath my condo. Not only did he take care of the ants but took care of a small rodent issue. Charged me exactly what he quoted me. All the extra work he did I thought for sure it would cost more but he stuck to his quote and was very polite, kind and quick.
- Brenda H.
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Jake was great to work with. He responded quickly to my request. He was able to do the job by being creative. He sent a follow up email to let me know when he would check back. His rate was very reasonable.
- Kelly A.
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Jake is really a 10/10 person and it shows in his work. Thankfully we did not have an infestation but his thoroughness, promptness, and overall attitude towards his profession was something that stuck out to me. I will be recommending him to everyone for pest control. I know who I'm calling when I need one!
- Samantha A.
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Amazing! Jake is amazing! He came out because I had a squirrel in my attic. He has a vent he can put in so they can get out but not back in! Theres no trauma to the animal by trapping it and you will save yourself hearing it scream and cry in a trap! He walked around my entire house and attic looking for all entry points. He is very knowledgable and kind and looking to help you exist w wildlife w the option of not euthanizing. Years of experience. I was so pleased q his company I would highly highly recommend him for any of your critter/pest? needs! Thank you Jake!
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