West Texas continued

 

We learned a lesson about tents and zippers.  We learned that when they give you two zippers so you can open or close the door from wherever you want, you should always choose to close the zippers at the top of the door.  We did not leave a zipper open when we went to bed the first night out.  There were plenty of animal noises from outside the tent, but during the night I woke to the sound of feet scuffling about inside the tent.  I rolled over and in the bright moonlight got a very good look at a black and white striped skunk about a foot from my face.  It was a beautiful creature: long hair, well groomed, its big fluffy tail held straight up, but not tense.  One more observation: when your head is on the ground looking up, skunks look *really* big.

 

I looked over at the tent door to see if it was open and it was not.  I thought: “I don’t know how he got in, but if I don’t know and he doesn’t remember and gets scared, this could be *very* bad.”  “If we inadvertently do something to alarm him….”  “There are so many ways this situation could suddenly get so much worse.”  My head held visions of an hysterical skunk running screaming laps around the inside of our tent, spraying.

 

When I rolled over and looked at the skunk, he took a few steps back but didn’t leave.  I looked at Jon to see if he had anything to offer.  He was sound asleep.  I didn’t make a sound.  I got my arms out of the sleeping bag and carefully waved the skunk back a few steps toward the door.  He stopped again.  He didn’t seem to be upset.  I sat up a little more and extended my arms to gently “guide” him to the door (without actually touching him of course).  I could see a small gap in the zippers at the bottom.  So could the skunk.  He went to the door, stuck his nose into the gap between the zippers, lifted a little to create a bigger gap, and quietly slipped through and walked off into the night.  No harm done.  I pulled the zippers tight together again and went back to bed.  It was later on as I was reliving the experience that I figured out the lesson about where the zippers should end up at night.

 

The following morning, we were visiting with our next-door-camping-neighbor.  He was packing his gear into his car.  He said: “I hope I didn’t scare you last night.”

 

“What?  Scare us how?”  We wondered to ourselves what he could have done to scare us after what we’d just been through.

 

He said “I screamed like a girl when I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that skunk in my tent!”

 

I knew from the way the skunk didn’t panic and worked that zipper so smoothly that he’d done this before.  Apparently he does it every night as much as he wants.