My war on rats in Cayucos

November 4, 2025

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

Quaint Cayucos by the sea should not be the kind of place where you go to war against rats. Rats belong in ghettos and projects and garbage piles in New York City. I’d never in my decades in pristine, hyper-hygienic Cayucos had a problem with rats. I don’t recall one Cayucos citizen ever relate to me a horror story about an infestation of rats.

I guess the reason I never had a problem with rats is that I always had cats, and the neighbors beside me had cats always on the prowl. Now I have no cat or neighbors. And my dog Wilbur passed on, leaving me all alone facing a virulent rat infestation.

My rat problem started slowly, with scratching up in the crawl ways between ceiling and roof during wee hours, then moved to areas by cupboards and walls, and then I noticed tracks on the kitchen floor and on the rug in my bedroom and front room, and I realized, against denial, that I had a major problem.

I had my work cut out for me, and it would be odious at best. First order was to scour the place clean.

I lay awake spooked by the scratching, which seemed to come from everywhere and bombarded me into a state where I’d jump up, turn on the lights, kick walls and bellow, only to hear temporary silence. I saw a rat scurry under the fridge and got the willies.

I began having mini-nightmares of rats chewing on my toes and crawling up my chest.

I consulted a friend in San Luis Obispo, a fellow basketball player, who related to me a horror story of his rat infestation as he described how he was setting traps inside and outside and killing huge rats with long tails. He advised me to use rubber gloves to remove them from traps, as they might infect me with diseases as lethal as Bubonic plague!

The entire county was under siege from rats, he explained, from a couple heavy rains. At this point my new fear and loathing of rats had become an obsession and jolted me out of my normally placid everyday existence, and turned me into a deranged, murderous rat-killer!

In a state of gnawing panic and rage, I went to Miner’s Ace Hardware and was mucking about in the aisles, lost, when a nice lady with a name tag came upon me and asked, “Are you the man with a vermin infestation?”

I said I was that person and the nice lady went to work on my problem. She said I should place a poison box in the “sealed-shut” garage below my cottage, and set traps in my kitchen beside the wall and fridge. She explained that peanut butter on a trap worked, but it dried up, and suggested I use the bait that came in a tube on their shelves.

I purchased the biggest, meanest, quickest, most imposing traps, along with the poison box, and returned home, following her directions as well as the ones on the poison box, which I placed on the floor in the garage.

That night, as I lay awake–a man who had not slept well in weeks and feared rats would subsume me in my sleep–I heard a snapping clack around midnight. I jumped up and dashed into the kitchen, turned on the light. A huge fucking rat was trapped and squirming about, making little squealing noises.

I quickly turned off the light and returned to bed, unnerved by the constant squealing and dragging about of the killer trap.

Then I heard another snapping clack! I jumped up and dashed into the kitchen, turned on the light, and saw that both rats were dead. I opened a box of trash bags from the dollar store and stood over the dead rats, whose teeth were bared in a death grimace.

I put on a rubber glove, opened the trap, and dropped them into a bag, then reset the traps and placed them in the area by the fridge, where I suspected they were congregating. I carried the sack of dead rats outside and placed it by the front door, and jumped back into bed and awaited the murdering of more rats.

Having sealed off all non-screened windows in my cottage, I got three more that sleepless night. In the meantime, I locked up anything I felt might draw rats.

When I opened the door to my garage a few days later, the stench of dead rats was unbearable.

In the next week, my traps killed around a dozen rats! Each killing filled me with a sense of triumph tinged with revulsion. I was winning my war against rats, a war most people claimed they couldn’t win, and paid professional exterminators to execute this filthy, nasty business.

Not me.

The scratching soon dwindled. By this time I had related my war on rats to several people in Cayucos and found myself exchanging notes on rat killing with victims who seemed to know what they were talking about and respected my perspective on the subject of killing rats, though some just admitted they paid professional exterminators.

I spoke with some pride and not a little smugness of my so far successful but not yet complete war on rats. I informed whomever would listen of how it had been almost a week since a rat had dared enter my strategically placed traps, and I hadn’t heard scratching in my crawl ways and nooks and crannies in two weeks.

I related the horror and revulsion I’d experienced like a veteran warrior with PTSD, and warned others that I was still paranoid of these rats, and constantly on guard, just as our military must be wary of terrorists here and abroad!

The other night, I heard scratching while listening to a World Series baseball game and expertly surmised it was from the garage below. I went downstairs immediately and discovered my poison box was empty and gnawed upon, and quickly filled it.

I realize my cottage is an old, creaky wooden structure and I am up against it, but also feel that if anybody can win this fucking war against rats, I’m the man!

Wish me luck.