For the Birds

I went to Texas A&M University for four of my five years of higher education.  For the first two years, I lived in a dorm on campus.  The parking for live-in residents was sparse and scattered all over the university grounds, so quite often I found myself having to park on the other side of campus near the Rec Center.  The long walk didn’t really bother me much unless I had groceries or had come back loaded down with stuff from a weekend with the parental units. 

No, the real issue with those parking lots was the trees.  Whoever had designed them had done so with hundreds of trees in rows throughout the entire parking lot.  They provided quite a bit of shade and made an otherwise ugly parking lot quite pretty.  So, why was this an issue, you might ask?  Because with trees comes birds, thousands of them.  And with birds comes bird crap, tons of it…literally.  To the university’s credit, after receiving a lot of complaints about the birds, they tried some creative methods to move the bird population along.

The first thing they tried was simply having maintenance people in trucks driving around the parking lot honking their horns.  This only had a moderate success rate, as the birds mostly just flew from one tree to another to get away from the crazy, honking humans.  So, that’s when the maintenance guys decided to up their game to a method with much greater success…firing very loud guns with blank cartridges at various points around the parking lot.  This imminent threat had the desired reaction as the birds fled in droves to other trees around the city.

What the maintenance guys could not have anticipated was the unforeseen side effect of firing off guns around flocks of birds.  They literally scared the crap out of them, which the birds let loose as they were fleeing, all over the cars below them.  I happened to have my car parked under a tree during this ordeal, so I got it worse than most.  Not to mention that I really only drove my car on weekends for the most part, choosing to walk anywhere I needed to go.  So, when I came back to my car after a week of them firing guns off at the birds, I couldn’t find it.  Where I had left my car, was a white, automobile-shaped pile of bird crap. 

I am not exaggerating when I tell you that it was completely covered, every inch of it, in bird crap.  I had to get an ice scraper out to clean the windows just so I could drive it.  It was Sunday, and my girlfriend and I were on our way to church.  She took one look at my car, folded her arms, shook her head, and said, “It’s not going to happen.  I am not showing up to church in that literal pile of crap.”  But I couldn’t just leave it like this, because bird crap can be corrosive to a car’s paint job, so I convinced her to go with me to try to find one of those “free” car washes that high school kids were always putting on.

And as luck would have it, I found a free car wash near to campus.  When we pulled up, you should have seen the dejected faces, the “you’ve got to be kidding me looks,” and the scattering of kids to other cars to avoid the white monster.  But one brave girl sucked it up and came over to evaluate the effort needed to get it done.  All she asked in return was the opportunity to take a picture first.  Apparently, I was the winner of the worst car ever in the history of free car washes, and they wanted to document this momentous occasion.  After taking a picture, which my girlfriend refused to be in, they set to work hosing and scrubbing my car.  The bird crap…would…not…come…off. 

It was caked and dried on there so hard, that no amount of scrubbing or washing it would soften or remove it.  They tried rags, bristled brushes, and finally someone brought out steel wool.  The steel wool finally broke through with a lot of muscle and force, and slowly, slowly they were able to chisel away the bird crap.  It slid off the car in slabs of white crust, slamming into the ground and shattering in piles of odiferous rottenness.  What I didn’t realize until afterwards was that the steel wool also took off the first layer of paint, which I had to get repaired later.

Yes, those kids earned every penny of the $5 I gave them for washing my car that day.