chipmunks on the prowl

Be wary of that cute little chipmunk who just snatched your proffered acorn. He might be carrying the next pandemic in his puffy little cheeks. Or not.

Last week, while reading the morning newspaper, I ran across a headline that had the type of fanfare usually reserved for the apocalyptic warnings from Weatherman Bob about The Next Killer Storm.

"Several Lake Tahoe sites closed due to chipmunks carrying bubonic plague."

Bubonic plague? Isn't that what the latter-day Jeremiahs were predicting would befall us after covid-19 had its way with us?

And chipmunks? What could be more benign than Chip and Dale. (The Disney characters, not the men who confuse taking off their clothes with entertainment.) What is next? Bambi signing up to spread chronic wasting disease?

My first impression was that I had opened The Onion by mistake or that one of my Day of the Innocent posts had made its way into the newspaper (even though animals are off limits in my Day of Irony essays).

For some reason, I thought of one of my favorite writers -- Ann Lamott. In her essay, "Knocking on Heaven's Door," she recounted a particularly unnerving flight with long delays, departing passengers, delays for unloading the luggage of the departing passengers, a white-knuckle turbulence rode, and, then, to top it off, a passenger had a heart attack.

Ann turns to her seatmates. "Man," I said. "I wonder when the snakes will get out of the cargo hold."

That is how I would usually have felt about the prospect that the black death is amongst us. The statistics are somewhat ill-defined, but nonetheless harrowing. Between 30% and 60% of Europeans died in the Black Death. The surviving European society was forever-altered by the plague.

That number is fresh in my mind because about a year ago an acquaintance of mine posted an article on Facebook reporting that several people in Inner Mongolia had contracted the plague. He wondered if it was going to be The Next Disease out of China.

He need not have worried. With a little bit of research, I discovered the plague has never really gone away. But it seems to have found a stasis in nature.

The first outbreak of plague in The States occurred in 1900 when Chinese immigrants brought it to California. There was a large outbreak in Asia at the time. The last American outbreak was in Los Angeles in 1925.

Between 2009 and 2019, there have been 58 cases of the plague in The States. Almost all of them in the western states. And it is a nasty way to die. Of those 58 people, 7 did.

And Mexico? The plagues that affected The States in the early Twentieth Century also spread to Mexico. Some Chinese immigrants also brought it in. But it did not survive long.

Scientists have often wondered why the several waves of plagues have not reached into the tropics. It turns out the bacterium that drives fleas to blood madness only operates that way in temperate areas. In higher temperatures, the bacterium, the fleas, and the rodents abide by an entente. And that is why Mexico was so lightly touched by the plague.

But, just as in The States, the bacterium is still here. Living quietly.

So, despite the headline, killer chipmunks are not about to turn Lake Tahoe -- or anywhere else -- into a Monty Python skit.

There are plenty of other things in life to worry about -- like bad newspaper editing.