The salon was once something other than the beautician, but a gathering of the finest to discuss issues if great import. Like why was there a big fat cat sleeping happily in the afternoon sunshine on my bed inside our camper when I walked by it the other day? All the doors were locked (answer: I had left the interior engine cover askew, and it jumped up from underneath). Fortunately, it hadn’t felt the need to mark it’s new favorite napping spot.
How about you? Any good car-related animal stories to share? Mitt Romney, are you out there?
Nothing as insane as that picture but…
My father was a dog man but given where we lived in the countryside of Ohio he always kept a few cats around to help with the rodent problem (he considered them safer than rat poison.) My father’s employer provided him with a succession of vehicles to drive for his job which were various Ford and Chevy trucks and B-body wagons. During the colder months the cats were notorious for climbing up on top of the engine from under the car for warmth. My father would go out to start the car in the morning, crank the starter, and a cat would run – only one was ever killed by the fan blade.
There was one cat who was truly notorius for this behavior and one morning my father went out, started the 1985 F150 he had been assigned (302V8 – 3 speed auto), and he didn’t see a cat run nor did he hear anything disturbing. He pulled out of the driveway and drove down the stop sign (about 300 ft) stopped at the sign, and heard a “thump” on the underside of the hood. He started looking around while still seated in the driver’s seat and saw a that cat bolting accross our 3 acre lot. Damn cat had ridden on the engine till he felt he had the opportunity to disembark. What an animal.
My uncle discovered a rattlesnake in his MG A early one morning in the Hollywood hills. He always thought that was fun.
A few years ago, I was driving my Crown Victoria and something felt “off” with the gas pedal – it only seemed to have partial travel. When I got home, I opened the hood, expecting to see some kind of problem with the throttle linkage.
There was: the whole intake manifold area was full of black walnuts. I started to count them as I took them out. I think it was 110. I have lived in my house for nearly 20 years and have had both squirrels and black walnut trees in the yard the entire time. But this was the first (and only) time that one of the squirrels decided to use the engine of my car to store his nuts for the winter. Really bad idea.
Actually, I checked again about a week later, and the squirrel tried again. Not as many this time, but I cleaned them out again and that was the end of it. What was strange, was I kept the car in a garage. It only stayed outside during weekend days when I was home and running around. Small window of opportunity for so many walnuts. I almost felt sorry for the squirrel. The operative word being “almost”.
We get small rodents in our air cleaners in the trucks here in Klamath County (Oregon). I had to block the screens with 1/4″ hardware cloth, but also we keep the hoods open when we park the vehicles in the garage. Haven’t seen a rat’s nest that impressive, though.
I thought that was a ‘possum under the hood.
That is an awesome possum, and I would never stop hitting it with a shovel if I had one in full facebiting position like that.
I sit corrected. Haven’t seen a possum in a long time–they used to come around my house in San Jose, looking for cat food. Out here, they’d get nailed by the coyotes or the badgers or one of the big cats (bobcats or the odd cougar). We’re pretty serious country.
Had a chipmunk nest in my wife’s Ranger manifold, and another one around one of the pulleys on my Silverado’s serpentine belt. They don’t bother with the compact tractor’s hood–too breezy, and I don’t run it often enough to give them warmth.
When I lived in Georgia, we somehow got a colony of fire ants in my old Dodge Lancer. I have no idea how this happened, 20 years later, it still make no sense.
One Sunday, my wife, daughter and I all got in the car to go to my in law’s house. As I’m driving down the driveway of our apartment building, my daughter (she was an infant then) cries out with an unusually strident cry. It was enough to startle me and I immediately pulled off the road.
We look back at her and see fire ants on her legs and crawling up her little dress. We open the door, unbuckle her from her car seat and hurl the thing into the culvert. This is when I realize that they’re not just on the seat, but in car itself. They were hard to see, as the car had a red interior, they just blended in. My wife takes our daughter back to the apartment to tend to the bites, and I’m stuck figuring out what to do with the car.
I gather up the car seat and drive back to the apartment with my skin crawling. I have a can of bug spray in the apartment and not thinking clearly, roll up the windows and spray it in the car. I come back in about an hour to look in the car and the pesticide has done it’s job, as far as I can tell, all the ants are dead.
This is the unfortunate part: I didn’t think about closing up the car; the bug spray in the closed car, in the hot weather was absorbed by the car’s upholstery. On hot days, it smelled like ‘Fresh Scent’ Raid. In fact, it retained that smell until the day I sold the car, although the intensity of it faded rather quickly.
Sometimes, laundry detergent or dryer sheets will have a similar aroma, and I’m instantly taken back to that summer, when the smell of Fresh Scent would make me nauseous as I made my hour long commutes in my old Dodge.
Yum!
I like that you mentioned the doors were locked but the cat still got in. Did you see any really small lock picks or a coathanger?
Used to work with a friend painting houses. He had a late 70’s Chevy truck with a 350 that both purred like a kitten and roared like a lion (when he stepped on it). One day after we finished our job, he turned the key and the engine turned over but something kept it from continuing. Mind you, this engine always roared to life on the first turn of the key. After a couple swear words he turned the key again…you could hear that it wanted to come to life but something was holding it back.
At that moment I saw something crawling out from underneath the passenger side. I couldn’t even identify what it was at first. Then I realized it was a small sized cat that was severely limping and missing at least half the fur off its back. He got out and opened the hood to find fur (and blood) all over the engine fan and front of the block. It turned out that the cat had been laying/sleeping in the fan shroud. Sad fate for that little cat unfortunately…
LOL! There goes one of the cat’s nine lives! Didn’t you at least hear it’s meowing? Surely it can’t keep quiet as the fan blades were mauling it.
This is why my 1989 Landrover accessory catalog lists a cat guard to keep animals out of the fan shroud area.
Even if it was meowing, you can’t seriously be suggesting that a cat’s meow is louder (from inside the cabin) than the sound of a 350 starting up…
Just a couple of pedestrian memories. First, was that my mother’s cat of four decades past…it was an “outdoors” cat, it came in at times but spent much of its time ouside…it took to sleeping on the warm engine of our old Rambler. In those innocent days, we’d leave the garage door open all the time, including when we were out on short trips…so it was no challenge for the cat to get in and out. But he found a way to climb up into the engine compartment…my mother was alerted to this when she went out, started the thing, and saw a tan blur whip around the garage door opening. We never caught it in the act, so there’s no way of knowing how far away from the belts and fan was that cat. She took to blowing the horn every time she’d start the car, to get that thing outta there…
The other…fifteen years later, I bought a rusted-out Pinto from a country gent…he’d had the car parked in the barn for a few months before I came along. It ran rough, and I figured a tune-up – and I was right, but I didn’t know how right.
It was running rough because mice had built a nice little nest all around the distributor cap – and it was shorting the plug wires. And killing them…had to clear that mess out before I could go in their with points and rotor; and a new cap, as it turned out.
Back when I was a VW tech, I worked on a New Beetle that had (what seemed like) the better part of a 20 pound sack of dog food stashed under the hood in the air box, under the wiper cowl, and in the hood skeleton. Every time you opened the hood it sounded like you were shaking a box of Captain Crunch.
This spring a mouse lived in my RX7 long enough to stink it up pretty badly. With the car in the garage I’d left the driver’s window down a couple of inches, and the thing got in and apparently couldn’t get back out again. That’s one of the problems with keeping a car that is not driven often enough. As soon as I realized what was going on I set a trap, and the next morning found that it had done its job. Then I brought the car outside, let it stand with the doors open for a while, and thoroughly vacuumed it. It still stinks – I’m probably going to have to replace the carpet to get rid of the smell, which sucks because it’s the original and still otherwise in nice shape.
About a month after I bought my first car, I took it on a 3000 km road-trip from the Canadian Prairies to southern Ontario, to visit my then pregnant sister. The car was a 1987 Toyota Camry with a five speed stick, and it had 350,000 kms on it. It had been well maintained, and did all that distance and back again without a single misstep. Being from the 80s, the Camry was about as big as a Civic today, while being considerably lighter, so it got good mileage, too.
The Car was fine, nay, perfect. The most exciting parts of the drive was provided by the animals.
Most of the trip, I was driving through Northern Ontario. For those of you who don’t know, Southern Ontario is a green and pleasant land, filled with farms, towns, and cities. Just north of Sue St. Marie, however, the Canadian shield asserts itself, and Ontario turns into a kind of Canadian Siberia – filled with destitute logging towns and endless kilometers of nothing in particular. Even the bleakest parts of the prairies feel inhabited; parts of northern Ontario I had been warned by several people not to drive at night due to animal dangers; mostly moose.
So I was not very pleased to find myself around midnight driving through drizzle and heavy mist toward my campsite, absolutely knackered, having driven about 14 hours that day. The first deer scampered across the road almost like a dog, its bright eyes the only distinct thing about it. From that deer to my camp site, I counted 17 distinct animals on or about the road. The car helped me even here, as I kept it in third on the winding narrow road. I had to stop three times: the first time, a deer was standing by the roadside, next to my lane, all ready (my sleepy mind understood) to jump right into my grille. That I actually slowed down and stopped before it could do that actually seemed to confuse it. It minced about by the roadside, not crossing, not fleeing, just standing there. I actually managed to stick my camera out the window and snap a few pictures of it before it flounced off into the darkness of the trees. The second time, two deer were in my lane, and something else. When I came along one of the deer had been sniffing something; this turned out to be a duck sitting in the road, about where my left wheel would have been. It seemed indignant that somebody would come along and disturb it. It paced back and forth in my headlight beams many times before walking off into the mist. The third time I stopped as five pairs of disembodied eyes were crossing the road as I crested a hill. These deer actually moved aside quickly, but allowed me to creep next to them. Even standing on the grassy verge before the trees, I could barely make out their shapes.
At the campsite the next day, I was one of the few campers, and you couldn’t turn around without seeing some deer dart into the trees. At the ranger station, the pretty girl at the desk told me that a long winter and a late spring had seen the forest emptied of the food deer eat, and so they had been coming out to the roadsides and the park to eat the grass and what-have-you there. So I think I was quite lucky.