The Stink Shack

(Cool, drippy—around 40)

Camp was built in many stages, starting in the 20s. I’m sure that in their first years, all of camp’s buildings were beautiful, well-thought-out, and utilitarian. The Stink Shack is no exception. It’s the original maintenance building, and it has gorgeous racks custom-built for axes, hatchets, shovels, cross-cut saws, and the like. It has the beautiful little windows characteristic of camp’s older buildings, and it’s a little, unassuming building, brimming with character.

Now, though, it’s kind of a sad place. You walk in, through a sliding door that doesn’t quite slide right, and the first thing you notice is the stink, a potent mix of chemicals and years' worth of rat urine. The first thing you see is insulation, falling off the ceiling and dangling from the rafters. This insulation is coated in rat turds. The place is piled high with molding, unused stuff, from ancient herbicide to copper toilet parts. This could be fun—all the relics of the past in one building—if it didn’t also feel kind of toxic, and if the building wasn’t intended for current use.

One of my ongoing projects is to clean this little shop. Today I tackled the plumbing corner, sorting sections of pipe, little fittings, and plumber’s putty. I also found a whole bunch of unidentifiable stuff, as usual, and just kind of hung it up wherever. One of the perennial problems with the Stink Shack is that its floor is constantly littered with junk, which may sit there for years, accumulating mold and leaching stuff into the floor. After I cleaned up one particular crate, a fine cream-colored powder was left all over the floor, and I had no idea what it was. It’s that sort of stuff that makes the Stink Shack simultaneously charming and worrisome.

I was sweeping up in this corner, picking up chunks of insulation, when I heard a distinct and awful crunch beneath my foot. I looked down, and saw a little pile of gray; when I picked it up, I discovered it was a dried-up mouse, pictured here. Now, I might have thought this was gross, or I might have thought I would get hanta virus, or I might have lamented the poor little guy’s fate, if this had been the first dessicated rodent I had found in the Stink Shack. But this fellow was not unique; last year, when I’d spend entire days in the Stink Shack, I’d find five or six pruney rodents a day, most of them considerably larger than mice.

And sometimes I’d find rotting ones, especially rats. So here’s my question: What makes some rats rot, whereas some just dry up? The rotting ones still have their beady little eyes, which makes them more forbidding. They all have whiskers, which creeps me out. Does rotting lead to dessication? Hmm.

On a brighter note, a mom and yearling deer were chilling by the Stink Shack while I worked in there; they kept sneaking glances my way, while munching on plants. It was pretty sweet. They cocked their gigantic ears whenever I made the slightest little noise. Hooray for charismatic megafauna! I can go for cute deer over dessicated mice any day.