I was bicycling the painfully quaint streets of Wilmette this past weekend (painful in the sense that the cobblestone lanes, originally constructed to give horse hooves better traction, deliver juddering jolts to the drivers and bike riders of today) when I came across this recently expired creature:

I think I’ve seen a live skunk only once in my life, and I had skirted her by a wide margin, although, to be fair, she had avoided me every bit as assiduously.  But this fellow, who was thoroughly dead though not yet decomposed, gave me an opportunity to investigate up close what a skunk really looked like and smelled like.

Though not, I should add, felt like — I’m neither a scientist nor a taxidermist, and although I’m curious about wild creatures, I thought it best to leave the up close and personal stuff to the few early-arriving flies already busily doing whatever it is they do to flattened, car-killed carcasses.

 And yet this one wasn’t flattened at all.  There was no blood to be seen, no odor in the air that would suggest a failed attempt to ward off a predator, and no other clues as to his untimely demise.  His luxurious-looking white stripe on full display, he was stretched languorously across seven rows of paving brick, although his legs were tucked in fairly tightly as if he were braced for a fall from a long distance.  Do skunks, like cats, always land on their feet?  It’s probably impossible to know, because no one, upon spying a skunk about to leap, would ever stick around long enough for the landing. 

And even if skunks did possess this useful ability, it would hardly matter as regards their larger reputation.  Like virtually all of the wild creatures who invisibly surround us, skunks have been given only one notable characteristic — and landing on his feet ain’t it.  

Like a one-dimensional, poorly written pulp novel character or a sub-Superman comic book hero (you know, the Flash is fast, the Incredible Hulk is angry, Plastic Man is impressively flexible, etcetera), the skunk has been reduced to one easy-to-remember super power:  He really, really stinks.  Possums play dead, raccoons wash their food before eating it, squirrels hoard nuts and filch seeds, armadillos roll up into a ball, skunks have notably bad B.O.:  One-trick ponies, every one of them.

A dozen or so times a year ever since I was a child, driving cross country or even in the northern suburbs of Chicago, I’d detect the scent of skunk, always from what I surmised to be a long, long distance.  You may have seen the recent news report that up to one out of every four mammal species may soon be extinct:  For most of us, given how rarely we encounter them outside a zoo or a video, they might as well already be.  And yet the skunk is different; though he skulks around in the dark just like the foxes and coyotes we also never see, he manages to make his presence known.  Even from the other side of a forest, he’s got a kind of primitive communications protocol that announces his presence, and the fact that he was recently displeased.

To tell the truth, I never thought a skunk’s odor was particularly unpleasant.  To me, at least, it smells a bit like crushed lemons with a coppery tinge.  While other people may find the smell a lot less pleasant than that, I suspect that the real issue, for those who got too close, is the intensity and ineradicability of the odor, rather than its intrinsically disgusting qualities.    

I got off my bike, snapped a memorial photograph with my cellphone, and stooped over the skunk’s body.  I put my face as close as I could to its fur without coming into contact with it and, sure enough, there was a very faint lemony smell. 

And nothing else. 

The fact that skunks, and so many other creatures, possess only one notable characteristic each isn’t just a human construction; it’s the way it really does seem to be.  After all, why aren’t skunks, while still maintaining their distinctly skunk-like essence, also able to play dead like opossums and roll up into a ball like armadillos and tunnel instantly underground like shrews and slash predators to ribbons like badgers and plot raids on bird feeders like squirrels — in addition to stinking up the joint? 

To this layman, at least, it’s as if there was a great evolutionary tournament in which every creature was granted a single frail lance with which to contend with his competitors for territory and food, and with his predators as well. 

Though if this is the case, the experiment may not be working out as well as it could for all concerned.  Consider that there is, in fact, one creature that, like Superman, possesses a whole host of super powers instead of just that one gimmick.  I  think it’s safe to say that our multifarious abilities — big brain, opposable thumbs, and all the rest — are what have allowed us to claim a resounding victory over our fellow creatures through extinction or alienation and, in the process, to also claim defeat. 

 

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