Fresh Hell Does Not Appreciate Chipmunk Summer One Bit

Welcome to the Fresh Hell Newsletter, where this week, cuteness and evil collide. Also, a diatribe against coal-rollers.

If you live in or among nature-type stuff, you know that each summer brings a dominant critter. Like Brat Summer/ Hot Girl Summer/Knicks Summer but for animals. At our house, five years ago, it was squirrels. The ground was a heaving mass of the gray, twitching fat-tailed creatures, each moving at one of their two speeds: perfectly still or running like hell. The streets around our home were glistening with the mortal remains of the ones that did not look both ways. Which they never do. It was bad. Though not as bad Mule Deer Summer, during which I was driving on I-70 near Vail and came upon the remnants of a herd of migrating mule deer that had tried to cross and turned the highway into an abattoir. (No lie, I saw an entire deer embedded in the front grill of Peterbilt 18-wheeler.) But Squirrel Summer was pretty bad.

The following year we had a rafter (I had to look that up) of 50 turkeys that made our front yard a stop on their daily walk-about. We did not go outside when they were passing through because a single pissed-off turkey can mess you all the way up if it so chooses. A rafter of 50 could send an Army battalion into retreat. That was followed by Rabbit Summer, which was pretty cute, but was hell on our plants. Red-tail hawks dominated the skies last summer, resulting in a complete absence of turkeys, rabbits, all types of rodents, and small cats and dogs, whose owners wisely kept them inside.

But of all the critter summers, the current one is the one I dread most.

Hellions, gird your loins. It’s Chipmunk Summer.

Chipmunks are a lethal combination of evil and adorable. They are the fubsy, one-year-old pre-toddlers of the animal world. Much like a pre-toddler, they can lull you into complacency with their evolutionarily irresistible body proportions.

But chipmunks, like pre-toddlers, are programmed to sow terror. It is their one and only end-game.

“Oh, look at you,” you say to the little chipmunk on your porch. “Aren’t you just a little cutie-face? Whose the cutest little chipmunk in da whole world..who is…”

Then you realize that adorable chipmunk is moving closer. Now just two feet away, chirping at you, daring you. You look up at your yard. There are 20 more scattered at strategic positions around your perimeter. You freeze. They’re all staring at you. They seem to be waiting for some sort of signal from their leader, which is obviously the little cutie-face doing recon on the porch. The hair on the back of your neck stands up and you become oddly terrified, yet mesmerized by the cuteness. Finally, you manage to slowly back up into your house. You close the door. You wait a moment. Then you approach the window, pull back the curtain and look outside.

They are still there, but now they are looking at you at the window. Like they knew you’d be there.

You move back, letting the curtain drop. What do they want? It doesn’t appear to be food. They’re all fat. What… or whom… were they feasting on before they arrived at your doorstep?

You try to peer through the slit between the curtains without moving them. The chipmunks are now all on your porch.

Rather than do the yard work you promised your spouse that you would do while he or she was out grocery shopping, you decide to spend the afternoon on your couch drinking scotch and watching scary movies, which are less terrifying than what is on your porch.

It occurs to you that you should probably warn your spouse about the chipmunk threat, but your spouse would just laugh at you. I mean, you’d laugh if you got a call like that.

So you wait.

You hear the car pull up. The car door slams, the trunk rises, there comes the rustle of grocery bags.

You wait.

Your phone rings.

“Hi hon,” your spouse says. “I’m back. Can you please come out and help me with the bags?”

“I’m ah… actually….”

“Hurry up, the ice cream will melt.”

“I’m, uh, taking a dump.”

“Why do you have the phone with you on the toilet?”

“It was in my back pocket.”

“Fine…..” says your spouse and you can hear him or her walking up the front sidewalk toward the porch. “Oh my god, babe, there’s a bunch of the cutest little chipm…hey, you little cutie-faces…wow, they’re not even a little bit afraid of me. So brazen. Um… they’re all staring at me…babe, can you…”

You hang up. You don’t want the last memory you have of your beloved spouse to be the sound he or she makes when being torn to shreds, or whatever the hell the plan was, by chipmunks.

Chipmunk Summer. Coming to a yard near you. Be very afraid.

I’m a lifelong cyclist and I’ve ridden all over the world. I’ve never been hit by a car, but I have been hit by baseball bats, food and bottles hurled by car occupants as they pass. I’ve gotten swerved at by crazy people. All of these assailants seem to think this is the absolutely funniest thing in the world, based on how hard I hear them laughing as they drive away. I feel bad for them and the people in their world, but mostly I fear for their pets cause if they’re doing this shit to defenseless humans on the side of the road who are just trying to get some exercise, imagine what they do to their animals.

Sadly, if you are a road cyclist, these are the things you deal with in order to enjoy your sport. I do everything in my power to be visible, safe, predictable, predictive, and I have developed a self-preservation instinct that is second to none.

What I never bargained for in the places where I have spent the bulk of my cycling life, and what is rewriting my mortality calculus on cycling on the open road, is idiots who think it’s fun to roll coal on cyclists.

Rolling coal is when a specially modified pickup truck, driven by a white man (always white, always man) with, we must assume based on how large the truck tires are, a very small penis, drives past you while you’re peacefully cycling, flips a special switch, and blasts a thick black cloud of diesel smoke directly into your face.

Rolling coal is, apparently, so funny and awesome that it is worth recording and posting on YouTube. Modifying a diesel truck in this fashion is against federal law, and rolling coal is illegal in many states, and locally citable as hazardous driving, so we can add “incredibly stupid” to the coal-roller’s description. I won't help any of their view counts by posting a video here. You can find them easy enough.

Not only does the thick diesel smoke temporarily blind you, but it makes it impossible to breath. More dangerously, it blinds the cars that are behind you, making it even more likely that one of them might accidentally run you over, which is the exact opposite of the purpose of cycling, which is fun.

Rolling coal has long been a pastime in diesel-truck dominated states out west like Texas, where one small-penised incredibly stupid white man nearly killed six cyclists when he ran them over while rolling coal on them. But, until a year ago, I had never encountered this in New England or the Tri-State area. I’m not saying they weren’t there, but they’d never come for me.

Then, in the past 10 months, I’ve had coal rolled on me three times on the tiny rural roads of Cape Cod. Cape fucking Cod. Seriously? Is nowhere safe from stupid white men with inferiority complexes and zero understanding of the law of cause and effect.

What am I saying? Of course, nowhere is safe. I mean, one of them has the nuclear codes.

These days, when I ride, I can hear a jacked-up, big-tired diesel pick-up coming from 1/4 mile away. When I do, I pull over, or turn off the main road and wait for them to pass. If one comes in the opposite direction, I wait to hear if they’re slowing down to do a U-turn and come back to coal me (this has happened). It’s a shitty thing to have to think about when you’re out enjoying nature and life and feeling joy, but insulating my life from the selfish, mindless stupidity of tiny-penised white men must take precedent. I think, in general, that’s a good policy for all of us, cyclists or not.

Also, if anyone reading this has ever rolled coal on another human being on purpose—be they cyclist, walker or other vehicles— go fuck yourself. Though you likely won’t feel it because of your extremely tiny member.

Ever been coal-rolled or terrorized by chipmunks? Are they perhaps, mysteriously, THE SAME THING? Vulgarity-laden comments only—leave them below.

Leave a comment

If you would like to relive all the former Fresh Hell MAJESTY, click on over to krisfrieswick.substack.com for the entire Hellish archive.