Wetlands and Nutrias

The Times-Pic just started an incredible series about Louisiana's vanishing coast. It's a must-read.

I wanted to relate a tale about those pesky little nutria.

I had the same roommate freshman and sophomore year. I elected to stay on campus and got into Aron. Roger decided to live off campus junior year. He rented a nice apartment with two other students near Audubon Park for $300 a month (remember when rents were reasonable?). Roger moved in the summer before junior year with a female friend to take some summer classes at UNO.

Late the first night, he awoke to the sound of his female roommate shrieking. It turns out they had an extra roommate.

There was a nutria living in the wall of his apartment in Uptown New Orleans.

He first tired barricading the nutria into the wall using a desk wedged against the wall. He came home the next day with a huge hole gnawed through the formica.

Next, he tried using rat poison. He put down enough to kill a rottweiler. Unfortunately, he didn't use enough, so he was forced to stay up all night listening to the nutria puke it's guts out in the wall. The nutria survived.

A friend of his from Chicago was in town the next night, so the two of them decide to lay out a bunch of Funions, stay up all night, and ambush the little fucker with clubs and baseball bats. The nutria did come out to and did eat the Funions, but was way to quick for these two. By this point, the female had taken to staying in the hotels with strange men she picked up at the bar she worked at as a shot girl. Can't say I blamed her.

I suggested that Roger bite the bullet and hire an exterminator. The landlord (of course) was reluctant to pony up the dough and so was Roger. It was his all-consuming mission to eradicate his nemesis.

My dad offered his .357 magnum to dispatch the beast. Having already visited the Third Wold shithole known as Central Lockup once, Roger politely declined.

Roger looked on the internet and found a new and better poison. He put down enough to kill an elephant. Sure enough, it worked. The nutria puked and puked all night long, but to no avail. He was dead. Unfortunately for Roger, he was entombed in the wall.

Roger called up the landlord and tells him the story and threatens to leave the nutria in the wall if the landlord didn't man up and cough up some money for being a douche. The landlord gave him $100 for new sheetrock and pain and suffering.

True story. Moral of the story: first off, landlords don't like to pay for anything until it gets really, really bad. Second off, those nutria are tenacious little vermin.