146: Urban Nature
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"Hey, Arthur" became the rat columnist for New York Magazine because she believed, in some way, that rats were at the heart of life in the big city. Every New Yorker, she says, has a story about a rat. The singer and actor, RuPaul, found an alley near City Hall with, he said, a thousand rats in it. If he'd fallen off his bicycle, he swore they'd have killed him. I think he was exaggerating, but I did go to that alley at night and it was by far the most rats I've ever seen in one place. What, picturing like a carpet of rats? I was with a friend of mine who was driving and we stopped at the end of the alley and turned out her lights. And the rats were, there's so much garbage, first of all, so they were just climbing all over the place. So it was very disturbing because they were actually at our eye level and I mean, it was terrifying. And we're in a big truck and it didn't seem safe enough, to be in a Zuzu trooper. It seemed like they had the advantage. I mean, she was screaming so loudly that I became afraid of her. I mean, we were like, it was terrible, like it was like, drive, drive, like it was terrible. I'm from W.B.E.C. Chicago, a public radio international, it's this American life, I'm out of glass. Today in our program, the stories of nature creeping into the most man-made environments possible, nature sneaking in places where it's very existence is a rebuke to the notion that we as a species have it under control when vermin infiltrate your house or my house. There's this feeling of it's us versus them. It's a contest with nature where it suddenly feels like nature might actually win. I'm from Brooklyn. I mean, I'm from the streets of Brooklyn. I was born, raised and probably will die. This is from this great documentary by Mark Lewis called Simply Enough, Rats. And I mean, I know what a mentality is, a street mentality is. I know what a, I know when somebody takes on that type of a role. And when I looked into the eyes of the rats, I mean, I could see that they have an intelligence just like in the street where it's not just one kid, you're facing up to 20 kids. They all have a single-minded presence of mind to do what they have to do to you. Usually, when we talk about man versus nature and we build these urban environments and we quash nature and we control nature, there's a part of us that believes that we should be rooting for nature. The nature means beautiful greenery and the clear blue sky and the deep blue sea. But when weeds break through a perfectly paved sidewalk, when the cockroaches march in, when the rat arrives, we remember why we wanted to tame nature in the first place. Rats showed up at this guy's house and he tried sealing walls and he tried poisoning them. He tried chasing them and killing them with a two-by-four. And still they came and multiplied, terrorizing his family, finally forcing them to move. I really do believe that that they knew that they won, because remember when you do look inside of his eyes, you can see he's got a soul, he's got something inside of him and he's looking right back at you. He wants you just as bad as you want him. I mean, it's you or him.
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