Rabbits And Recession

My next-door neighbours asked me to look after their dog for a couple of days, so last night I took the mutt for a walk at twilight. She’s a malleable black Labrador that jumps back at a rustle in the leaves and runs from runty, yapping curs a quarter of her size. I admire her pacifist leanings in showing no desire to hassle the deer we saw, or the skulking fox in the undergrowth of the nearby wood.

Our route was illuminated by thousands of fireflies, those amazing insects that are wise enough to simply light up their back-ends when they want to have sex. Other than the odd passing car, a Dad and his two boys at the playground, and a handful of others out dog walking, it was already quiet by 9pm. Even in houses with lights on, you saw no signs of life besides the odd flickering TV screen. We could just as easily be living way out in the countryside.

The other conspicuous thing since I last walked around my local streets is the comparatively high number of empty houses, either available for rent or up for sale. Until a couple of years ago, they would have been sold or inhabited almost as soon as they were empty. Now, families are suddenly gone and you never get to hear their stories. Ask a neighbour and they’ll shrug. Does that house belong to the bank now? No one knows, or wants to say. In suburbia, even the recession is silent.

This morning, I took the hound out early, watching birds of all colours and sizes at their most active hour - blue jays, cardinals, nuthatches, wrens, and three blackbirds having an argument. A woodpecker hammered away at a tree trunk, somewhere out of sight. There were also two rabbits on a front lawn, guarded but not alarmed at our approach. This year rabbits have been an increasingly common sight, and no more unusual than a grey squirrel. When I tell my daughters that dinner’s on the lawn, it just needs to be caught and cooked, they are no longer upset by my lame stab at black humour for the U-teens.

I’m not one for omens, but I recently read Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, about the recession in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, caused partly by drought, and partly by the environmental rape of the previous decades, when farmers rushed to rip up the grass lands of the High Plains and plant wheat. The only creature to thrive was the rabbit, and for thousands of poverty-beaten people its meat became one of the few sources of food, pickled for nourishment through the barren winters. Towns organised rabbit drives, where thousands of the creatures would be clubbed to death in a single afternoon, both to provide food and to control a pest that might eat any of the few crops that managed to grow.

The current economic woes haven’t yet reached the point where I’ll meet my neighbours out on the street wielding a baseball bat rather than a dog leash. At the same time, the financial news delivers little besides stagnation and slump. Walking tonight in the gloom, I may begin to imagine those empty houses filled with the wandering and the dispossessed, sleeping on bare floors and roasting culled rabbits on a rusty, flickering grill fuelled by firewood from nearby Rock Creek Park. Maybe they’ll be singing to pass the time. Finally breathing human life into suburbia.