5 Dangers Nesting in Your Woodshed Right Now. The Third One Comes Into the House With the Firewood

Tonight, around nine, you are going to walk out to the woodshed in the dark and reach into the pile with a bare hand, for the bottom row, without looking. Five things moved into that shed between April and now. Four of them stay in the shed. The third one comes into the house in your arms, in the middle of the armload, and it is behind the woodbox by the stove before your boots are off. In order: what is hanging from the rafters, and why October is the month it turns on you. What is under the second row, and the three words my crosscut partner learned the hard way on the Cranberry in 1984. The third, which the university entomologists say rides into houses with firewood every fall, and the rule my wife has kept about the woodbox since 1977. What is on top of the pile that nobody looks at, and the one thing the CDC says actually works on it. And the fifth, under the bottom row, which the CDC has a page about, and the single change to the shed that takes care of four of the five. Look, then poke, then reach. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five Octobers turning the shed. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: I am not a doctor. Any bite that spreads, any sting on someone who swells, any raccoon mess where a child plays, is a call to someone with a license. Snakebite: no tourniquet, no cutting, no ice, rings off, hand below the heart, hospital. Rodent nests: air the shed thirty minutes, gloves, wet it down with water and a splash of bleach, five minutes, bag it, never a dry broom or a shop vacuum. Sources: CDC (rodent clean-up guidance, hantavirus surveillance, Baylisascaris prevention), WSU Extension (widow spiders), NC State Extension (snakes), CDC MMWR (Randolph County, WV, 2004).