When we came back from Germany in 1983, we were fortunate to move into the newest housing area on Fort Ord, Abrams Park.   The houses were still duplexes and the yards were still small and all the other things about living in government housing were still true, but for the first time in our family's history, we had a house big enough for our whole family to fit in it comfortably.  In fact, it was a pretty nice, two level, house.  Never mind the strangeness of the floor plan (you literally had to stand on the toilet to close the door in the master bathroom);  we really liked the house. 

The lots were small, only about ten feet wider than the footprint of the house.  The front yard was nice;  part of it was  used up by the driveway but it was still about ten yards deep.  When we moved in the grass was patchy and uneven but with regular care it soon cleaned up and started looking really good.  I never liked yard work;  still don't, but when my dad, The Chief, retired from the Navy he became a yard fanatic...maybe because there were no yards on a ship...I don't know.  Anyway, for some reason I took great pride in our yard, especially the front.  Maybe it was because I was gone so much and when I came home the grass was the first thing I saw... so I cut the grass diagonally, cross-cutting and leaving a really sweet checkerboard pattern;  the bald spots filled in, the dandelions disappeared, the scrubby patches evened out...it looked great.  Now, I am no fan of geraniums, but we had a big bed of them under the windows in front of the house and as much as I dislike them, they did add color and we worked at keeping up with them.

The backyard, though very small, was chain-link fenced-in and had a nice little patio.  Along the wall of the house in the backyard we had the biggest, brightest, most colorful gladiolas.  Someone else had planted them there long before we moved in but Each spring they popped up and provided a smile.  Every year they seemed to be bigger and brighter.

Then one day I came home from a week away and found little mounds of dirt in the front yard.  Other yards had shown signs of gophers but I had thought ours was immune for some reason...it wasn't.  So my first thought was to drown them out.  I pushed the garden hose down the hole closest to the house and turned the water on full force.  Before long I saw signs of water seeping up from the other holes.  I rembered the Chief telling me it was hard to drown them out so I fed more hose into the hole...and more hose...and more hose.  If any of you have done that same thing, you know what is coming next.  I had at least half of a fifty-foot hose down the hole and got no more water out of the other holes than I had at first.  I recalled how the VC had constructed their tunnels with cut outs and high ground and run off tunnels and thought that this gopher was obviously of asian descent.  So I decided to pull the hose out and try a different approach.  If you haven't tried this approach before let me explain something...the water follows the path of least resistance, and collapses the wet dirt around the hose as it passes through.  Twenty feet of hose displaces a couple hundred pounds of dirt and not an ounce of it wants to let go of the hose.  It took me and my three teenage sons more than an hour and a half to get the hose out of the hole.

A few days later I tried a gas bomb.  A package of them.  You strike one of a tube like a road flare and stick in the hole.  I broke the first one trying to get it to start.  The second one fizzled and sputtered by never really got burning.  I struck the third one, expecting to have difficulties like the first two so I wasn't as careful as I should have been.  The third was the poster boy for perfect flare performance.  As soon as I struck it, it fired off like gangbusters, spraying sulphur and sodium nitrate into my face from a foot or so away.  I immediately closed my eyes and stopped breathing (that good Army training) and tossed the little bugger across the yard where it burned furiously for a few seconds, throwing its gas harmlessly in the air.  I turned into what breeze I could find just as the second flare - the fizzler - decided to fire up and filled my world with even more of the nasty stuff.  I have no idea what happened to the fourth of the set...don't much care, either.  It took a while to wash my face and hands and rinse my eyes enough so I didn't smell like a burnt match.

After a few more days  I was in a store in Seaside called Monte Mart.  I was just looking around and saw a display for gopher control.  One of the items on sale was a "fool-proof" trap.  If ever there was a fool in need of proofing, it was me.  I bought a couple of them.  They were round.  The instructions said to set the springs and slide the whole trap down into the hole.  The trap body was a heavy wire frame in the shape of a tube.  When set, there were two heavy wire spikes loaded up on the springs.  There was a latch release like a mouse trap has that released the spikes when Mr Gopher slipped into the tube.  The spike stabbed the gopher from both sides and voila!  Pull the whole rig out of the ground and toss Gopher and trap and all away.  Foolproof.

The good news is that the traps worked like a charm.  Mr Gopher got as far as getting his little nose to ground level when the trap tripped and nailed him.  The bad news is that when I checked the trap, both of my little girls were right there with me.  My youngest begged and pleaded to keep the cute little gopher as a pet.  Little gopher was making squealy little noises and was wiggling and the girls thought he was the cutest little thing and they would take care of it and they would feed it and they would find a cage he couldn't gnaw through....and on it went.  I couldn't pull Mr. Gopher out until the girls went away, and Mr. Gopher wasn't cooperating...if he would just die I could put an end to the whole discussion.  Finally I had to explain how the trap worked and that Mr. Gopher was not in any way a candidate for pethood.  I shooed them away and looked at the pitiful rodent and asked him why he couldn't just kick off and make everything easier for all of us.  I didn't want to pull him out while he was alive, and I didn't want to risk a bite...so I got the hose and drowned him in place.  He quit squealing, I pulled the trap out, and put him, trap, and all in the trash.  Everything worked out ok...except my girls thought I was a monster.  The gopher holes healed up, the lawn returned to its former glory, and eventually the girls forgot my role as a gopher-killer.  But I won't ever forget the tears on those little faces.