26 October 2023

Dangerous substances in the trunk of my car


A representative at the Subaru dealership was evaluating my 12-year-old car to assess its trade-in value when he lifted the lid on the trunk floor and found my stash.

I was raised in Minnesota, so I have always kept "survival rations" in my cars.  They came in handy back in the 1970s when I was commuting from the university to a my rural Kentucky home and the car slid on ice off the road into a ditch literally miles from the nearest house on a midwinter night.  IIRC, my survival rations that night was a box of Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes.

The Subaru guy laughed when he saw these, but he reprimanded me (earnestly) for putting my car's integrity at risk.  He had spent decades working in the Service department and had seen numerous instances of rodents chewing their way though vital structures (including brake and fuel lines) in efforts to reach food stored in a car.

My only previous adverse experience with rodents was the discovery of a mouse's nest on top of the engine block in a garaged car.  I've also had problems (still ongoing) with squirrels eating my house and my outdoor Christmas lights.  Readers will likely have similar stories (although TBH all of these amount to "first-world problems.")

See also: "Mice ate my car" at WombatNation.

6 comments:

  1. One of our cats was named Voyageur after he nipped up into the warm engine compartment as a kitten. Our girls ~6 and ~8 y.o. only registered a faint plaintive mewing on the way back from town, and he did the rest of the journey home being hugged a lot more than he was comfortable with.

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  2. I knew a guy who would always eat the Cliff bar he packed as extra emergency food in is hiking pack. Eventually he decided the solution was to switch to dog food as his backup, and never again had that problem.

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    1. Back in the 70s, I did a lot of backpacking in the backwoods of Maine and New Hampshire, usually alone. Very few trails, no GPS or smartphone, just a map and a handheld compass. My emergency food was four Gaines Burgers, the dog food that kind of resembled a dry hamburger, individually wrapped. I ate one once, when I set up camp late in the evening and was too tired to prepare a meal. Easy to eat (a little water made it moist), mostly tasteless with a vague taste of meat.

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  3. You can use those chips to start a fire - they can be used as kindling.

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  4. Kind of the same idea - I keep several folded 20 dollar bills in amongst the credit cards in my wallet, just in case.

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  5. More than food, I would have a couple of filled bottles of water. A roll of toilet paper, small butane lighter, some plastic bags...

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