Alaskan Range: Pack Rat
...I possess plenty of collections: miniature cannons, funny fishing lures, and baseball cards divided into categories like “Ugly Man,” and “What’s In His Mouth?” Then there are the book collections: autobiographies, first editions of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, Donald Duck comic books, and Scythian history, to name a few...
Greg Hill admits to being a pack rat.
There are a couple of paperback “Far Side” cartoon anthologies by Gary Larson near my barbeque. I savor Larson’s cartoons, and ten-to-fourteen pages are about right for cooking one side of a steak, eight-to-ten for salmon filets, and so on. While grilling sausages last night, I encountered a Larson cartoon featuring a rodent in prison telling his human cellmate, “I would have gotten away scot-free if I had just gotten rid of the evidence … But, shoot – I’m a packrat.”
A few days earlier I’d borrowed the library’s Gunsmoke DVD from 1970 that included an episode about a thieving youngster titled “The Pack Rat.” Like you, I can borrow up to seven DVDs from the library for seven days, and now it’s easier to find a particular movie or TV show because the library staff has stuck special labels on the DVD cases and split them into a separate collection.
The “pack-rat” is, according to the Random House Dictionary, “Also called ‘trade rat,’ a large, bushy-tailed rodent, Neotoma cinerea, of North America, noted for carrying off small articles to store in its nest.” Pack-rats grow up to twenty inches, including a nine-inch tail, and thrive in the arid American Southwest, often populating the same nest for hundreds of generations. Their nests, known as “middens,” are remarkable in that they are sometimes up to 40,000 years old and paleobotanists use them to research the Ice Age climate changes by cabon-dating the seeds and detritus found there. Wikipedia says “the resilience of the middens is due to three factors. The crystallized urine dramatically slows the decay of the materials in the midden. The dry climate of the American Southwest further slows the decay, and middens that are protected from the elements under rock overhangs or in caves survive even longer.”
The third meaning of the American Heritage Dictionary’s definition of “pack-rat” is “A collector or accumulator of miscellaneous objects.” Hmmm … I possess plenty of collections: miniature cannons, funny fishing lures, and baseball cards divided into categories like “Ugly Man,” and “What’s In His Mouth?” Then there are the book collections: autobiographies, first editions of Patrick O’Brian’s novels, Donald Duck comic books, and Scythian history, to name a few.
I also borrow a lot of books from the library, including Marilynn Karp’s “In Flagrant Collecto,” which I was perusing as I encountered that Gunsmoke episode. When we moved into a new house half the size of our old one a year ago, it became painfully evident that I tend to actively accumulate things, especially books. But when it comes to collecting, I am to Ms Karp as Birch Hill is to Denali.
Karp’s book is a large, coffee-table style tome packed with photographs of a few of her family’s unbelievably wide-ranging collections. It has twenty-two chapters, each featuring a bizarre array of collecting categories. The “Taste Changed” chapter, for instance, includes “Naughty Nellies” (suggestive bottle openers), “Linoleum Sample Books,” “Hairdresser Magazines,” and, what’s this? “Bookends”? A lot of people collect those, but not Karp’s collections of dried slivers of used bath soap, billiard table pockets, police mug shots, or mosquito coils.
Neotoma pack-rats could learn a thing or two from their human colleagues, like Karp. The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that “pack-rat,” meaning the rodent, is relatively recent, not being found in print before 1885. However, the meaning of “used figuratively or allusively of persons who won’t discard anything (is) from c. 1850, which means either the rat’s name is older than that (1885) or the human sense is the original one.”
Human librarians have been packing away books of all sorts since the dawn of writing. Modern public librarians regularly refresh their collections by removing dated and superfluous items that impede patrons from easily finding what they desire. It’s like a Far Side cartoon titled “Hell’s Library,” where a bespectacled man in a library with flaming floors and a horned figure in the back ground is perusing shelves of books that all have similar titles: “Big Book of Story Problems,” Story Problems, Vol. 3,” “Even More Story Problems,” “Story Problems Galore,” “Story Problems, Vol. 1,” etc. It’s a special hell for librarians, because those books are out of order.
