The Flattest Skunk in Southern Maryland

It was the summer of 1972, and I was fifteen years old. My parents had divorced a couple of years earlier, and my mother and I had moved to a trailer park in Southern Maryland. Looking back, it wasn’t anyone’s picture of home sweet home. But when you’re fifteen, almost anywhere can become the center of your universe.

Actually, it was two trailer parks separated by a wooded hill. From the county road they appeared to be entirely separate neighborhoods, each with its own sign and entrance, but a row of trailers connected them at the back. Across the road sat a middle-class housing development of three- and four-bedroom ramblers on two-acre lots. I never knew which had been built first, but I was fairly certain each side of the road believed the other had lowered the neighborhood.

All of this was situated in the middle of tobacco country. Tobacco fields stretched away in every direction, broken only by patches of woods, old farmhouses, and weathered tobacco barns. It wasn’t much to look at, but to us it was the entire world.

There wasn’t much for a group of teenage girls to do during the summer, so we invented things to do.

Mostly, we walked.

Every afternoon somebody would ask, “You wanna walk around the park?”

That was all the planning required.

A few minutes later we’d leave through one entrance, walk the county road to the other park, wander every side street, and circle back to the other park again. We must have covered the same couple of miles hundreds of times that summer, yet somehow it never became boring.

It was on one of those walks that we first noticed the skunk.

It had been hit by a car a day or two earlier.

Like any sensible people, we gave it plenty of room. The smell alone demanded respect, and it was far too fresh to examine closely.

None of us imagined we’d still be seeing that same skunk weeks later.

The walks continued, and so did life in the park.

We slept until ten o’clock. We did our chores. We listened to whatever happened to be playing on the radio. We made crank telephone calls and babysat for fifty cents an hour.

We gathered around the long row of mailboxes mounted on a weathered board, talking about school, boys, parents, teachers, and all the other subjects that seem desperately important when you’re fifteen. Between conversations we’d watch the county road to see who might cruise past.

The arrival of the Good Humor truck was always an event.

When we had enough change, we bought ice cream. When we didn’t, we pestered the driver.

The first Good Humor man wore the traditional white uniform and looked exactly as an ice cream man ought to look. Then, one day, he was replaced.

The new driver had long hair, sunglasses, blue jeans, and a T-shirt. He laughed at just about everything, let us ring the bell, and even let one of us steer the truck around the park while another rode on the side.

Then, just as suddenly as he had appeared, he disappeared too. The ice cream truck didn’t visit the park anymore that summer.

Our evenings had their own routine.

If your parents let you stay out after dark, you headed for the lonely telephone booth that stood beside the county road between the two parks. If they didn’t, you waited until your bedroom light went out, climbed out the window, and went anyway.

To this day I don’t know why there was a telephone booth sitting all by itself in the middle of tobacco country. Hardly anyone ever used the telephone. It was simply where everybody gathered. And it was also where many drivers chose to stop.

Sometimes we’d wad up little balls of aluminum foil and toss them into the glow of the streetlight, laughing as bats swooped down after them before realizing they weren’t insects after all.

Meanwhile, we kept walking.

Shoes were optional.

In fact, wearing real shoes during the summer was viewed with deep suspicion. We preferred bare feet or flip-flops, even when the blacktop was hot enough to fry an egg. If your feet became too hot, you simply stepped onto the painted edge line for a few seconds before returning to the pavement. By August the bottoms of our feet were so callused and permanently stained that they looked as though we’d been born barefoot.

Without ever discussing it, we also became the neighborhood’s unofficial dog-walking service.

Certain dogs learned our routine. They would bark from behind screen doors or chain-link fences until their owners laughed and let them out to join us.

One of our regular companions was a black Labrador Retriever named Blackie.

Blackie usually waited on his front porch for us. He didn’t need anyone to open the gate. He simply sailed over the chain-link fence with effortless grace and came bounding toward us as though someone had just announced a national holiday in his honor.

As the weeks passed, the skunk slowly changed.

Every passing car flattened it a little more.

Every hot Maryland afternoon baked it a little harder into the pavement.

After a while it no longer resembled a skunk at all. It looked like an old scrap of black-and-white leather that had somehow become fused to the road. Fur, hide, road dust, and asphalt had merged into a single substance. Had someone told me it had become an official part of the county highway, I would have believed them.

The smell gradually faded, but it never completely disappeared.

Neither did the skunk.

Eventually it became a landmark.

If someone asked for directions to the Shapiras’ trailer, you drove past the flat skunk and turned right at the next street.

By late summer we scarcely noticed it anymore.

Blackie, however, had apparently been studying it for weeks.

One afternoon, without the slightest warning, he broke away from our little procession and sprinted toward the road.

At first we assumed he was simply going to sniff it.

That assumption lasted only a few seconds.

He buried his nose in it, snorted with obvious satisfaction, then threw himself onto his back and rolled with an enthusiasm that bordered on religious devotion.

We screamed.

We grabbed for his collar.

Blackie paid no attention whatsoever.

Then he managed to hook one claw beneath the edge of the flattened skunk.

What had looked permanently attached to the road began peeling upward like an old piece of roofing felt.

Blackie had discovered treasure.

He grabbed it in his mouth.

He tossed it into the air.

He pounced on it.

Then he rolled in it again for good measure.

The smell that followed defies description. Even after more than fifty years, I remain convinced the English language simply lacks the necessary vocabulary.

A group of teenage girls scattered in every direction, screaming, laughing, and gagging all at once.