Are there still rats in the Village of East Hampton? Do you smell a rat?
In my youth, the presence of rats — the four-legged kind — in the best zip codes was a source of high humor. There were rats in the neighborhood of Georgica, lunching on leftover vitello tonnato, and rats who hung out near our picture-postcard Town Pond, shocking sunset cyclists right off the seats of their Schwinns as they scurried bold as brass across James Lane in pursuit of (we imagined) a tasty puddle of spilled Bloody Mary.
We had rats in our barn here on Edwards Lane for a long time. We called them “barn rats,” as if to sort them, mentally, from regular rats, but I’m fairly certain all East Hampton’s rats are regular rats, which is to say Norway rats or the common New York City gangster sort.
Like humans, rats aspire to real estate with a water view. Their assessment of property values mirrors ours. Do you remember Templeton, from “Charlotte’s Web”? He helped Charlotte and Wilbur only when offered food. He was a greedy rat, a gluttonous rat. The parallels between rats and greedy humans, gluttonous humans, are too facile, too easy to draw. I will not insert any political wisecracks here.
I’ve been the subject of “rat” jokes in my lifetime, too, but fewer than you might assume. It’s true that — as a kindergarten antagonist pointed out — my last name, Rattray, is “rats on a tray,” but the joke kind of fizzles out there. Touche.
Maybe 30 years ago, around the time of the events in Tiananmen Square, an explorer rat — a navigator rat, the Captain Cook of rats — managed to get into our pantry, and then made its way upstairs and gnawed a hole in a bedroom floorboard. (How posh is that? Pretty posh. Only the best East Hampton families have rats who swing from rafters like Errol Flynn.)
Anyway, we haven’t seen rats on this property in years and years. In deed, discounting the muskrats who call Town Pond and the Nature Trail home, I haven’t seen a rat, proper, hob-nobbing hereabouts in at least a decade.
It’s true that my family no longer maintains an attractive habitat for rats: The old barn was carted away a few years ago by the East Hampton Historical Society, and reconstructed as a brand-spanking-new incarnation of itself on the grounds of the Mulford Farm. Perhaps that’s part of the reason we no longer see them . . . but I don’t think Mulford Farm is where the rats went. The dining is not good at Mulford Farm.
My old friend Robert Sullivan wrote an excellent nonfiction book about rats, called “Rats.” I do not recommend that you read it at the dinner table. “If there is a healthy amount of garbage for the rats to eat, then a female rat will produce up to 12 litters of 20 rats each a year,” he says. “One rat’s nest can turn into a rat colony of 50 rats in six months. One pair of rats has the potential of 15,000 descendants in a year. This is a lot of rats.”
Unless there has been some unseen environmental rat-astrophe or mass-poisoning, all those rats must be somewhere. Whither the Hamptons rat?
I do wonder if the rat colonies are on the move northward, leaving South of the Highway addresses, as the water table rises and the ground becomes boggier and wetter in previously dry zones of the village. I’m thinking of the dreen that evolved into actual standing water over the last decade between the back of the Methodist Church and the Long Island Rail Road tracks; I’m thinking of the other side of the railroad tracks, and the garden hose that one homeowner installed last year to endlessly pump water — to pump Hook Pond, essentially — out of his or her basement and into the gutter on North Main.
Are rats on the inland march? Are they trading pond views and tony upstreet addresses for “north village” locales, among the oak trees and acorns? If you find one making himself comfortable on your couch with a gin and tonic in one hand and The Wall Street Journal in the other, there are consolations: Just tell people your rat’s ancestors lived on Lily Pond Lane and lunched regularly among the 400.