Jun 19 2008
A Mouse in the House
The Turn 3 Race Team just had another meeting at its home track, Texas Motor Speedway. The annual summer show features Craftsman Truck races on Friday night and Indy cars on Saturday night.
We were blessed with typical Texas summer heat, stout wind and good racing. The mainstream media sources did their typical job of reporting the racing news…but they completely overlooked the mouse in the house. I’ll explain.
One of the race team indulgences at the palatial Turn 3 campsites is the rental of the little blue building – the Porta-Potty. It’s always spotlessly clean and smells fresh as a summer rain. It does of a great job of lightening the load of the holding tanks, eliminating the need for a pump-out during the weekend.
After Friday’s long drive from Austin to Fort Worth, we greeted the other team members and Jeanette excused herself to the Porta-Potty.
We weren’t timing her, but somewhere around two minutes later, Jeanette was back in the motor home, where the air conditioner was waging a noble battle with the track heat. Jeanette wasn’t panicked, but her heart rate was definitely above the resting level.
“There’s an animal in that thing!” she let us know. As one, five surprised non-believers looked up from our beers and challenged, “where?”
“In the outhouse!”
“What is it?” A quick, mental inventory of possibilities ran through my mind: a moose wouldn’t fit, a bear might, a raccoon or possum was realistic. Then she answered, “I think it’s a rat.”
So, six beer-toting race fans gave up air-conditioned comfort to bear witness to the unlikely prospect of a rat in our always-clean facility.
Jeanette bravely led the way. She opened the door with no apparent fear of attack and stepped in.
I followed her in – and then saw where she was looking. “Aw crap…not down there!” I thought.
It took a flashlight and a couple of minutes to locate — but there, in the corner, was a very wet, very tiny, very BLUE mouse. It looked for all the world that the mouse was hoping against odds that the next thing to come down that hall would be a mouse ladder.
Then, for some reason still unknown, blue mouse turned and started swimming across the facility. I was amazed – and pressed the video button on the camera. The recording was clear – too clear – and I have just enough good taste to not post it here because I know you would watch it and then declare it to be in bad taste.
While Mr. Mouse was doing the backstroke, Deanna and Jeanette were planning the rescue. It was a given that nobody was going to sit on that throne with a living creature down below. So, with mouse murder out of the question, the only solution was to save its dumb, little life.
Jeanette frequently amazes me with some of the things she does. And I was left in awe once again, as she donned Deanna’s rubber gloves and went after the pesky rodent. Another moment and it was a flying mouse – over the fence and scampering safely away.
A hearty toast to the now-empty outhouse, and we found our ways back to the air conditioning, where mouse jokes were the new order of the day.
From that time on, anyone headed for the outhouse was accused of going mouse hunting. And naming rights for Blue Mouse were argued, debated and ongoing. Some of the suggestions: Busch (because of the ears), Crap Rat (self-explanatory) and Teenage Mutant Mouse.
It was a first for the race team, and we’ll always remember the summer of ’08 as the race we had a mouse in the house.
