(HOST) Recently, commentator Deborah Luskin had an emergency and her local volunteer fire department responded. She appreciates both their quick action – and their tact.
(LUSKIN) I’m used to my doctor-husband getting called out at odd hours, so I didn’t pay much attention the other morning, when he dressed to leave for the ER before five. But he didn’t leave. He returned to the bedroom and said, "You better get up. There’s a terrible stench outside." By the time I joined him in the kitchen, he was calling 911.
I stepped outside the kitchen door on the east side of the house and nearly gagged. The odor was something awful and unfamiliar. In these dark days of environmental disasters, we were both thinking: chemical spill. There’s construction next door – so maybe building materials caught fire.
Early as it was, I phoned our neighbors. Of course, I woke them. They didn’t smell anything, which was a relief – but odd. Meanwhile, the odor was infiltrating our house. Tim turned off the furnace while I shut windows. Then, underneath the stench I started to recognize a more familiar odor. The three firemen who showed up in the pumper confirmed it. "Skunk."
They figured it must have sprayed right up against the house. Already, the stink was abating. Relieved, we all had a laugh. Then, the men headed back to the firehouse, Tim took off to the hospital, and I walked down the hall to work. As usual, the dog and cats came with me.
My office is on the west side of the house, where the air quality was okay at first, but over the course of the morning, I kept catching whiffs of skunk. When the day dawned clear and breezy, I reopened the windows to air the place out. At noon, I stopped for lunch, and the kitchen smelled fine, so I figured the stink was traveling east to west and would simply exit the house in time. It wasn’t until I whistled up the dog for our constitutional, that I realized she was the indoor culprit.
While she hadn’t been sprayed directly – she’d been asleep at the foot of the bed – she’d undoubtedly taken the opportunity to roll where it smelled good – to her. My dog thinks she’s invisible when she’s masked by noxious odors. Back from our walk, I bathed her and did some fall chores: I removed screens and latched windows, and I put fresh batteries in my smoke detectors. I made a mental note to stock up on white vinegar and to double my donation to the local fire brigade.
Over the next few days, whenever I ran into one of the village volunteers, I expected to be kidded about Doc and his wife calling them out for a skunk, but to a man, the guys said, "I’d rather be called out a hundred times for nothing than not get called out when we’re needed."