The Beaver Trap
The Most Horrible Accident In The World
Beaver traps are massively powerful. You don’t want
these puppies anywhere close to your boy parts.
My little medical clinic is the best place in town for meeting people. Everybody rolls through there at some point. I have cultivated some of the most delightful friendships while talking to folks about their nagging coughs, poorly controlled hypertension, emotional challenges or hemorrhoids. For such a modest little town, we certainly have no shortage of characters.
If you’ve ever been through Oxford, Miss., it is indeed a delightful little Southern burg. The community is both quaint and charming, and the people all the more so. My small town is populated by perfect people with perfect jobs and perfect kids and perfect pets all doing perfect things. And then they come into those little exam rooms, shed their metaphorical body armor and tell me how things are really going.
It turns out pretty much everybody in the world is a hot mess. Spouses cheat on each other, businesses struggle, families are financially strained, the kids are actually certifiable monsters and the family pet takes doggie Xanax when it thunders to help him cope with anxiety. Amidst all that, however, sometimes you get some real gems. I relate this with the permission of the victim. I’m not nearly clever enough to make this stuff up.
God designed beavers to be forest cutting machines (below).
The Scourge
Our hero is a simply great guy, the kind of Southern buddy who would loan you his pickup truck or gladly keep an eye on things for you when you’re away from home. Guys like this are the salt of the earth and the backbone of our great republic. Part of this man’s world involves beavers.
I realize that in some parts of the world, beavers are our pals. Some might even think them cute. They are nature’s civil engineers, paddling briskly about constructing their own little wetlands conservation projects. That is, until they set up shop on your farm or in your backyard. Up close these massive toothy rodents are just the Devil.
You’ll never find a more long-suffering level-headed woman than my wife. Heck, she successfully lives with me. In addition to an artist’s eye, she has a deep and abiding affection for nature. One of her favorite trees on the little farm we call home is the native dogwood. This tree’s uniquely pleasing white blossoms are a reliable component of springtime down here in the Deep South. One year the beavers killed 27 of them.
They didn’t eat 27 dogwood trees, mind you. They just ringed the bases and killed them for meanness. My normally reserved bride unleashed the dogs of war, and my boys and I rid the farm of the beaver menace. My buddy, however, does this stuff on a much larger scale and then sells the hides.
They can tear up some trees. Beavers are admittedly kind of cute, but
they’re really just enormous amphibious rats. There is a persistent legend
that beavers will chew off their own testicles to escape a trap. One of these
little monsters indirectly almost subjected a friend of Will’s to gender reassignment surgery.
The Setting
My pal had a massive spring-driven beaver trap he was preparing to emplace in a pond at the base of a beaver slide. He wore neoprene chest waders and had to stand on the big trap to get it set. A grown beaver can weigh upwards of 70 lbs. This trap was of rectangular cross section and could snap a beaver’s neck. It was a beast of a thing.
With the mechanism set, my buddy oriented it facing backward and carefully lowered himself into the water. With the heavy trap now fully submerged he made his way to the slide. As fate would have it, the scary bit of the trap was now facing toward him. It was in this configuration he struck a submerged stob and inadvertently activated the device.
This trap is a simply breathtaking contrivance. The powerful spring snatched the jaws out of the unfortunate man’s hands and slammed shut around the front of his waders. In addition to an ample quantity of crushed neoprene, the trap also took an unfortunately firm hold of the poor guy’s manhood.
In his words, “I screamed … and then I cried. And then I screamed some more … and then I cried. Then I realized there wasn’t anybody around to hear me, so I just pried the blasted thing off and crawled back to the truck.”
At this point in his revelation I was struggling to maintain my composure. It is considered poor form in many cultures for your physician to laugh openly when the patient relates the details of an embarrassing problem. However, sometimes such restraint is more a voyage than a destination.
The man miraculously made the drive back home to find his wife innocently doing her thing. He pushed past her with a terse, “I really don’t want to talk about it” and retreated to the bedroom to meet Jesus in peace. The following morning his manhood had attained both a superhuman size and a disconcerting cadaverous hue. In desperation he entreated his wife to “Find whatever kind of doctor cuts this thing off because I have to have some relief.”
Fortunately, an emergency gender reassignment procedure was not ultimately necessary. He recovered fully and even went back later to retrieve his sunken trap. All the while I imagine the beaver in question lurking in the shadows laughing maniacally. Such horrible little monsters.
