It seems kind of funny that one measly wire can bring down an entire car. Actually, I’m not sure who should get the credit for bringing my car to a dead halt, the wire or the rat. You decide.

Here’s my side of the story: yesterday I popped my temporary dog
in the back seat of the car. (the dog wasn’t temporary, my having her was temporary.) Meet Megan, the sweetest black & white dog you’ll ever meet. I’ve been dog-sitting for the last week and a half.)

Back the car up, go about half a block and notice the red check-engine-light-of-death is on. Funny, the accelerator isn’t doing what it’s supposed to either. There’s a slight hill to get up to the stoplight and my little hybrid is not going to make it. I back up into a convenient empty lot and turn the car off. I felt like such a wuss. “Duh, my car won’t go.”

It took for my friend John to show up and say, “pop the hood” for me to pop the hood. When he said that, images immediately flashed across my mind–four or five guys standing around the front of a car pulled over on the side of the road, gazing in the engine compartment, nodding to themselves, “yup” one might say.

My car is a hybrid, it’s technologically past auto shop and the home mechanic. What is he thinking we’re going to see?? I walk around to the join in the gazing fun.

Well, what I saw was what you see in the picture minus the Temporary Fix, i.e. speaker wire, patching together a chewed-through wire. (Compliments to the genius-master-mechanic-speaker-wire-genius, aka my dad.)

It would appear that the electrical wire casing and one wire were chewed through. No evidence of heat or melting, just plastic shavings.

Now, in a seemingly unrelated event on Friday, I arrived home to see a large billow of smoke issuing upwards from what appeared to be my backyard. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be five guys with chainsaws, rakes and loppers eradicating the blackberry vines that had overtaken the neighbors lower yard. These vines were going to make the upcoming work of redoing their sewer line rather uncomfortable. This is, more or less, what the yard used to look like:

The smoke came from the controlled burn (see the black spot in the upper right of the picture?) which is still smoldering today, four days after Friday.

What I’ve since learned from more experienced and long-time neighbors is that because a small creek runs along that lower yard, it is prime real estate for a healthy rat population. Their homes were majorly disturbed on Friday. One of them seems to have felt welcomed by my warm car on New Year’s Eve and began the arduous task of building a nest using my cars convenient and cheap building materials. Until I started the car on new year’s day, that is.

This is all conjecture of course. I haven’t actually met and interrogated the rat yet.

one rat + one wire = useless car