A decade of living in Los Angeles has deeply challenged my identity as an outdoorsperson. I don’t claim to answer the call of the wild, since I’ve never been interested in the kind of outdoorsy experiences that demand bear mace and shotguns, but I was the type of kid who assumed my ability to build a fire and my overall success as a human being were absolutely linked. Hiking, camping, backpacking, canoeing, kayaking, floating… all very much my cup of tea. 

By coincidence, my daily opportunities for outdoorsiness diminished as I aged. I spent the bulk of my childhood in the Piedmont of North Carolina, where our suburban house abutted an area of trees that seemed like a large forest to me at the time. I spent hours exploring ours and the neighboring families’ fenced-in forests each week. After a brief year in Nashville, which seemed like peak city-livin’ to me, we moved to a suburb of Atlanta, where we again enjoyed a private forest, albeit a smaller piece. Miles and miles of golf cart paths gave us access to lakes and streams without parental supervision. After years of living in the forest, we moved to the prairie. Kansas had a significant dearth of trees, but our large yard overlooked a hay field and a pond. In Kansas, sports were the dominant outdoor activities, so I fell in line.

With two years of high school remaining, we moved to Orange County, CA, and had a postage stamp for a yard. Our house abutted an incredible walking trail, but I was sometimes loath to use it, and was very unlikely to use it alone. My deep respect for mountain lions might be seen by some as fear. Despite my enthusiasm for sport, the extremely competitive and time-consuming nature of private school sports in Southern California influenced me to devote my free time to my indoor passions of acting and singing. My daily communion with the outdoors was transformed into a weekly visit. I then went to Berkeley and enjoyed its incredible campus, but since I graduated, I have never had regular access to greenspace attached to my residence. Every interaction with nature must be preceded by an intentional plan to interact with nature. I have been entirely urbanized since 2009.

Last Sunday, Alan and I went to Griffith park. We have a favorite spot just up the street from our house. There is a small picnic area before the trail that leads to the Bronson Canyon Caves, also known as the Bat Caves, since Adam West’s Batmobile was filmed driving out of them. Yes, we are very fancy Hollywood people who frequent the same caves as Adam West, but I digress. Our favorite picnic spot is at the edge of the park under a tree, just a few feet away from the drainage ditch that separates the park from the unkempt hillside. We laid down our tarp and tucked into the vegan bento boxes I had lovingly prepared. After I had finished the majority of my lunch, a squirrel appeared to our left in the ditch. It made its way over to us until it was about three feet away, at which point I stood up and moved away. I had worn flip flops to the park, and I didn’t like the idea of having my bare feet on the ground near a rodent. As an experienced outdoorsperson, I feel pretty confident about the rules of small wild animals like squirrels: they will try to steal anything they can when you’re not looking, but if they’re not scared when you look at them, they might have rabies. This squirrel was coming for us as if it had never heard about caution. I mean, read a book once in a while, squirrel. You could have learned all about how bad humans are from The Rats of NIMH. My mind immediately went to rabies. I had some interactions with aggressive urban squirrels at Berkeley, but they never moved toward me with such swiftness. I was not about to let a potentially rabid squirrel have access to my soft little toes so it could easily bite me and force me to find an urgent care that was open at 7pm on a Sunday night to start rabies shots JUST IN CASE. 

Never in my life have I felt more like an idiot. I was standing behind my husband in a floral crop top, leggings, and bare feet, saying, “Go away, squirrel! No, it’s my food!” This went on for a full five minutes, during which time a man and a baby walked by. I commented, “Wow, this squirrel is really aggressive,” and the man looked at me in a way that indicated he was confident that his baby could have dealt with the situation better than I had. To the baby’s credit, she had the foresight to wear closed toe shoes to the park, so maybe he was right. Realizing that the squirrel would not leave until it had been fed, Alan gave the squirrel a piece of celery, which it proceeded to eat while standing in the spot on the tarp that I had vacated. It had successfully supplanted me and eaten my snacks. 

I sat down again and kept a close eye on the squirrel, which had moved away, but was still casing my cheese and crackers. Moments later, he was advancing again, and my ingenious plan was to toss large pieces of bark near him to startle him. Rather than being startled, he turned toward them as if I had thrown food, turning back to me quickly after he realized it didn’t smell like food. Was I doing something wrong? Why was this squirrel so aggressive? Had a decade in the city turned my wilderness brain to mush? At this point, I realized that this squirrel, whose rabidity was yet unknown, was so accustomed to eating human food that he was starving. Prior to our visit, Griffith park had been keeping unusual hours, due to both pandemic and curfew closures. For a length of time, parks had restricted all activities other than walking. I’m unsure how many people had been using the park in the days before our visit, but it seems clear that park patronage has reduced due to increased caution and limits on gatherings. All of this translates to very little squirrel food.

The squirrel advanced again, and I scampered away, per my dainty foot fears. We managed to hold out this time, giving him no additional treats. Alan was confident that the celery he continued to offer would be a deterrent, since no self-respecting squirrel would eat celery twice. For the record, before and after the squirrel made it to the tarp, I saw it nibbling on the grass. I still looked like an idiot, but I managed to hold onto my “don’t feed the wildlife” values like a real outdoorsperson. Feeding wildlife makes them assume humans are sources of food, and can cause conflicts between humans and animals that almost always lead to the injury or death of the animal. I’d rather look like an idiot than feed into this squirrel’s blind trust in humans.

In a fitting coda to my principled and somewhat sissified stand against human/squirrel interaction, after the squirrel finally gave up on us, it approached a couple nearby and was freely given many delicious snacks. RIP wilderness.

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