I had one of those experiences the other day that was interesting and brutal and tragic and horrific all at the same time, and it left me feeling bad for a bunch of different reasons. Bad that I couldn’t figure out a better way to handle it, and bad because the whole thing was just incredibly violent. Anyway, let me back up.
My younger son plays baseball. He’s played for years now — I don’t even remember exactly when he started. T-ball, and he kept going through it, and he’s been playing travel ball since he was eight. He’s twelve now, and the team is going to Cooperstown. Part of the problem with the whole thing is that he says he likes it, but he never practices. There’s this big tournament they do at Cooperstown, New York, and we had to raise a bunch of money to get there. So I told him, all right, we’re committed to this, we’re doing it — but after this we’re done, because you’re not proving you actually want to keep going.
He goes through phases. He’ll say he’s going to practice, do it for a day or two, and then stop. But we were committed, so I said okay, this is what we’re doing, and then that’s it. And honestly, because there was a countdown, because there was a definitive end to it, it stopped being all that frustrating for me. We were paying for travel, it took up a ton of time, I was driving all over the place. It even got to the point where I stopped taking him to the far tournaments. The team does tournaments in New Jersey, which is two to three hours from our house, and I finally said, you’re not going to practice, so I’m not taking you to those. I’ll just tell coach you’re not available. I’d been doing that for a while.
And unfortunately his play fell off, and this is starting to sound like a baseball post — it’s not, I’m just giving you the backstory of how I ended up where I ended up, and I’m sure it’s the same with most kids. His play got so bad that I actually started making him practice more, because he was letting the team down. Coach would put him in and he’d make mistake after mistake. He couldn’t hit anymore. This is a kid who used to be one of the best on the team, and all the other kids passed him by because they practiced.
If you’ve got a kid in sports, you know how the equipment goes. They drag it out, and they’re supposed to practice with it every day, but instead they take it out one time and leave it out. The main piece is a Bownet — for anyone not familiar, it’s this athletic net with a “mouth” in it that catches the balls. You can hit off a tee into it, throw into it, whatever. It’s a loose net, meant to absorb the energy of the ball and drop it into a pocket. We’ve got everything, but the other piece is a pitchback, one of those rebounders — you throw the ball, it bounces back, and he can practice fielding.
So he drags this stuff out, does it once, and then just leaves it there. What happens with the Bownet is the wind knocks it over and it ends up lying flat on the ground. His net, just lying in the grass. I try telling him he’s got to put it away. He doesn’t. And when I don’t feel like getting on him and forcing it, it just sits there.
The other day I pulled in — I forget where I was coming from — and of course the net was on the ground again. I don’t even know how many days he’d left it out without touching it. And I saw something moving over in it. It looked like a squirrel playing around the net, and I thought, that’s weird, I hope it’s not stuck. So I walked over, and I saw it was a small groundhog. A woodchuck. And at first I thought maybe it was just messing around in there, but as I got closer I realized this thing was tangled up in a way that was almost unbelievable.
I could see through part of it, but there was a hole cinched around its neck, no way it was chewing out of that, and the rest of it was all tangled through its legs. It had shit itself — I don’t know if that’s a reflex, or if it’s just because it had been stuck there so long. I have no idea how long it had been there. Its eyes were glassed over, like it was completely exhausted. I don’t know if part of what these animals do when they’re caught in something is try to make themselves as skinny as possible to slip out — that would actually be smart for an animal like that — but I don’t know. It was sitting in its own feces and it was just a mess.
And I’m standing there thinking, how the heck am I going to get this thing out? I didn’t want it biting me. I don’t want to go get rabies shots because a groundhog got stuck in a net. Now, there’s no love lost between me and groundhogs. They’re destructive. I won’t bother them if they don’t bother me, but if they get under your foundation they can cause real problems. They did it at my parents’ house. So far I’ve been lucky — they haven’t gone crazy by us. There was one point where they were getting into the drain pipes, but another fix I did to keep the pipes from freezing in the winter ended up keeping them out of there too.
Whatever — they’re destructive, but I believe in live and let live. I always feel terrible if I hit something with my car or hurt an animal by accident. I try to avoid everything on the road when I’m driving, and sometimes it’s impossible, or they dart the wrong way, and it always makes me feel awful. I never want to needlessly take a life. I like the way Native Americans do it, where they give thanks to the animal for giving its life. That’s how I want to be about it.
So I was really, really perplexed about what to do. I went and got some work gloves and a pair of scissors, thinking, okay, let me try to cut this thing out. I wasn’t even sure how I was going to cut it, because it was so tangled — the net’s not taut, and that’s the whole problem. If it had been taut it wouldn’t have gotten so stuck, but it’s loose and flimsy, so every move it made just wrapped it tighter.
I wasn’t sure how to hold it down, so I figured I’d try cutting it from behind since it seemed pretty worn out. I started cutting the net away from its body to try to free it. But I couldn’t cut all the way around it — it was like a turtle with a net wrapped around its shell. There was no getting the whole net off, and I couldn’t cut one big patch, so I had to cut right where it was stuck. Every time I got close it would twist around and try to bite me. And at that point I was just at a loss. I was trying to hold the net still where it was caught so it wouldn’t move, but I couldn’t reach and hold and cut all at once, and I couldn’t picture how to get it out without ending up scratched or bitten, with feces all over everything.
In hindsight, I think what I should have done was put on my work boots and press down on it with my foot to hold it still while I cut it out. That probably would’ve been the best move. Instead, what I resorted to was going and getting a shovel and smashing it on the head to kill it, so I could get it out of there. I hit it once and it looked done, but I wasn’t sure, so I hit it again. There was blood splatter on me. Blood and shit everywhere, and this thing still stuck in the net.
And I feel horrible about it. First of all because it’s a really violent thing to smash an animal, and I did it not once but twice. And because the poor thing only got stuck in the first place because my son was too lazy to put his equipment away. So there’s a whole pile of reasons to feel bad and guilty.
Then — because it just gets better — once it was dead I figured, all right, let me untangle it and get it out, and maybe I can still use the net now that I don’t have to cut it. It took me five minutes to work that thing loose without cutting, because it was so unbelievably convoluted, the way it had gotten itself wrapped up. Five minutes. And of course it turned out the thing had already chewed through too many holes and the net was useless anyway.
I didn’t even bury it. I was so distraught from crushing it that it didn’t even occur to me. I just took it and threw it into the woods, into the brush, back to nature. Said my little thing to it. In hindsight — and hindsight is 2020 — I don’t know why my brain wouldn’t come up with any of the better solutions in the moment. I thought of them all afterward, unfortunately for the woodchuck, that it took me that long. And I still feel bad about it, even though some people consider these things pests. I knew a guy who hated them so much he’d try to run them down on the road. I don’t know about all that. And I’m still not even sure I had to worry about rabies — I probably should’ve looked it up, but I was caught in the moment, and sometimes you just have to do the thing.
So I feel bad about it. But I also told my son: this is what happens when you don’t put away the things you’re supposed to put away. Animals lose their lives. Things get hurt. And he’s actually been better about putting the net away since. Meanwhile I had to order a new one, because the old one was soaked with blood and shit and full of holes.
So yeah. It was a good time. Mistakes were made.
Even that's Odd 
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