When Rabbits Attack!

The Bunny Whisperer. Nah, too wimpy. Night of the Killer Bunnies!

Such were the headlines that flashed through my addled brain. Despite having witnessed many strange and exotic things in my short life, this night was surely the creepiest I had ever encountered. Adventure need not require crocodiles in Costa Rica or echoes of the Oracle at Delphi (two very cool things, to be sure). Sometimes adventure is right outside.

Happily, I was with two exotic, foreign women. This is something I try to do as often as possible, to assuage my usually moribund ego (yeah, right). My friend Mihaela is a petite brunette with amazingly long, witch-like hair. That makes sense, seeing as she is from Transylvania. Mihaela is the childhood friend of my elusive Bianca, and in fact originally introduced us. Bianca, of course, is my counterpart with her alluring, vivacious lust for adventure. There I was, simple, boring Brian from Iowa with two Eastern-bloc babes. The ingredients were there for a smorgasbord of adventures, but in the end was merely rabbit stew.

“Weather.com is obviously messed up,” I called out as we gathered supplies for the day trip. “It says over 50% chance of rain and probably snow, with dense clouds.”

“In Nevada?” Mihaela asked, incredulously. “Surely you were wrong.”

“I don’t know exactly where our destination is on the map, so I looked up the nearest zip code I could find, which may be a ways off. I mean, come on, it hasn’t rained at Black Rock since men were painting animals in caves and stuff. But true, I am usually wrong about things.”

“Lots of things,” Bianca added wryly.

“The radar on the website claims all of Nevada is under a cloud right now, which is obviously not the case. It’s sunny here in Reno, so let’s just go. After we stop for some cookies, that is. Being surrounding by chicks makes me feel sinful, but cookies are probably all I can get away with.”

“You’re not wrong about that,” Mihaela agreed.

So we went. Our destination was northern Nevada’s amazing Black Rock Desert. It is the largest, flattest place on Earth. Literally. Most land speed records were broken here because it’s perfectly flat, dusty earth as far as the eye can see. On one trip I experimented by picking a direction at random and driving as fast as I could for a full thirty minutes, just to see if I could find the end. Nope, it continued forever, like sailing on a calm sea.

The playa itself is ringed with rugged, arid mountains. They are not dead mountains, to be sure, but perhaps mortally wounded: hot water pumps through them like lifeblood, but seeps out continuously at their base. Geothermal hot springs are everywhere in pools and ditches: many too hot to touch. There have been several fatalities. What a romantic place to entertain ladies!

Mihaela drove us in her Volkswagen Passat. Used to a Jeep with no roof or even doors, it was quite a change to be sitting in heated, leather seats. We went north out of Reno and towards massive Pyramid Lake. Wind pushed at the car, but otherwise the weather was sunny and warm. As we drove, Bianca commented in the front with Bianca about the beauty of the desert. This was high desert, which meant mile after mile of silver sage brush and huge Manzanita plants extending up to magnificent, ugly mountains.

“National Wild Horse and Burro Center?” Bianca asked, eyeing a sprawling ranch that nudged up to a huge brown hillock punctuated with jagged black boulders.

“Sure,” I answered from the backseat. “We have tons of wildlife in Nevada. Most of the state is avoided by man, of course, so the animals have plenty of room to roam. We have hundreds of wild horses here, whereas the wild burros are around Vegas.”

“Have you seen any?”

“Many. You should see a herd of wild horses running free through silver sage. It’s a wonderful sight. You know, once I pissed off a wild stallion. He thought I was after his women.”

“You’d try to sleep with anything.”

“Seriously,” I clarified. “I was running in the Virginia City foothills. I was about two miles from my Jeep when I slowed to admire a small herd of horses. There were five or six of them, including some young ones. The colts were sleek and pretty still, unlike their more haggard moms. What I didn’t know was that way behind me was big daddy, who did not like me being between him and his harem. He was quite belligerent.”

“Oh, please,” Bianca scoffed. “You’ve fought a wild stallion?”

“I didn’t say that,” I protested. “Why do people always read into what I say? I was jogging slowly past the horses when he trotted towards me and made all sorts of menacing gestures. He snorted and tossed his head and jumped around and stuff. Do you have any freakin’ idea how intimidating a pissed off stallion is? He was huge, man! I was two miles away from my Jeep and way further from the nearest building.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m serious!” I snapped. “I really had no options, of course. It’s not like I could outrun a stallion back to my Jeep. Even if I could, it didn’t have a roof or even doors so he would have still kicked my ass. So I kept jogging slowly, intentionally not stopping, acting cool and angling away from the herd. He stomped after me a bit, but was satisfied once I left the vicinity.”

“Wow, you really are serious,” Bianca said, brightening with surprise. “You aren’t just saying that you fought a stallion to impress me, are you? Next you’ll say a gaggle of coyotes attacked you.”

“I’ve never seen a pack of coyotes,” I replied. “But I don’t need to seek them, it’s the other way around. Last year, one was in my parking spot at the office.”

“Oh, please.”

“Really! Mihaela, can back me up on that. I took a picture of him. As I was saying, we have loads of wildlife here. You need to realize that Reno is right next to Lake Tahoe, which is right next to Yosemite National Park. There is a huge, huge wilderness area loaded with bears and mountain lions and all sorts of cool stuff like that.”

“Anything going to attack us today, Mr. Wilderness Adventure Man?”

“Nah, nothing attacks people unless they are being stupid. Well, except the occasional mountain lion. One of the routes I used to run through the desert mountains west of Reno had a fatality actually, a few years back. A mountain lion took out a high school football player. Very unwisely he ran after sunset out in the foothills, the same place and same time daily. Turns out the mountain lion had been hunting him for a few days, following him from up above the brow of a cliff. The Park Rangers found its trail, which apparently indicated it had been there several days to shadow him. One day the lion decided to pounce, and that was it. As you can imagine, I never told my mother about that one.”

Bianca looked at Mihaela for confirmation, but she just shrugged. We continued deeper into northern Nevada and soon passed Pyramid Lake. This was an amazing lake. Imagine driving an hour into the bleak, blasted desert and suddenly encountering a brilliant blue lake so large that you can’t see the far shores. It takes several hours to drive around the beast. The clouds above were thick and bunched menacingly, casting a shadow on the famous pyramid itself. A huge tufa formation rose up from the crystal waters some forty feet to create a four-sided pyramid. So symmetrical and perfected were the angles that it was very, very hard to believe it was not man-made.

And it was snowing.

Now, I believe it last rained here the year Leif Ericsson arrived in America, about 960 A.D. or so. Yet it was now snowing. We drove past entire lakebeds of brilliant white salt, which looked very misleading indeed when the mountains above were dusted with snow. But we were in a warm, happy car with music and laughter, so it was all good... for now.

After another hour of desert driving we reached the town of Gerlach, the closest to Black Rock Desert and headquarters for the great Burning Man festival. This counter-culture party happens annually, when no less than 40,000 people build a city in the desert for one week. An entire culture is created, where money is not allowed but only trade or charity. It is all about art, with the most fantastic and bizarre creations you can possibly imagine. It is not uncommon to see a man wearing nothing but yellow body paint with a big red circle around his privates, perhaps riding a camel. This is a level of self expression that I have yet to achieve, to the relief of everyone.

As we passed the headquarters, Mihaela narrated tales of Burning Man adventure for Bianca. The thousands of tents and buildings form the city around a colossal effigy of a man. At the end of the week, amidst a frenzy of human flesh of all shapes, colors, sizes, and ages, it is set ablaze. They dance around the gargantuan bonfire it creates like some sort of primitive sex-art-orgy-thing. I simply cannot fathom why I had not yet attended.

“It’s amazing!” Mihaela continued. “The whole week culminates in this one moment of… Diablo! Diablo!”

I blinked as she spat out the strange word, absolutely like Gollum in the movies. It sounded deep and throaty, like she had a hairball. Why she chose to interrupt her story to gibber that was beyond me.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked politely.

“That street back there was called ‘Diablo.’ It means ‘devil’.”

“I see,” I said, not really seeing. It didn’t matter because we passed out of Gerlach and deeper into the desert. The sheer size of Nevada can be a humbling thing, and it took us another thirty minutes of driving to find the entrance to the playa. We drove along the edge of the vast, vast plain and frowned. The clouds were pulled tightly to the ground, like a clenched blanket pulled to your chin when you’re cold. We could hardly see the mountains directly beside the road, though we sensed their bulk. It was windy and spitting rain. Ordinarily the Black Rock Desert feels like you are on the surface of the moon, but this was more like Saturn’s moon Titan, lashed by storms of liquid methane.

We were careful not to drive onto the playa. The flat surface is made of gypsum over a thin layer of air. In the summer the sun and heat could be literally 100 degrees around you, yet the ground comfortably cool under bare feet. But when wet, it was a monster with an insatiable appetite. The gypsum collapses and draws you in. There was no cell phone service out here, so if we got stuck Bri Bri would have a pleasant jog of about 15 miles to the town and another story to tell.

We only spent a few minutes there, lamenting the unbelievable harshness of the weather. It was more than a little awe-inspiring, to be sure. Not knowing what she was missing, Bianca handled her disappointment with the cool detachment she usually exhibited. That is, until the lashing wind denied her a cigarette. Only then did she unleash an enchanting blend of Romanian and Jamaican profanity.

I had assumed our adventure was aborted at this point. We were not able to see what we wanted to see, and we had prudently avoided entrapment on the quagmire of the playa. Yet adventure is always there, lurking, ready to pounce. Pounce being the operative word.

We drove back through Gerlach and Bianca inserted a CD of early Beatles tunes. “I wanna hold your hand,” began playing when suddenly Mihaela was overcome again by her strange urge to chant.

“Diablo!” she croaked. “Diablo! Diablo!”

The attacks began almost immediately thereafter.

Exiting tiny Gerlach took only a few minutes, and suddenly Mihaela cried in pleasure, “Look, a bunny!”

A rabbit sat at the side of the road, a little unsure if he wanted to leave the shelter of a sagebrush. OK, so it wasn’t a wild horse or a coyote, but it was still wildlife. He had the huge, erect ears of a desert rabbit. Our headlights now the only source of light, we flashed on past.

“There’s another.” Bianca casually pointed out. “He’s cute.”

“And another, look at that!” Mihaela said, growing agitated. Being in the backseat, I had to crane my neck to see more clearly through the front window. Sure enough, several rabbits were venturing out into the highway. We were in the middle of nowhere, on a thin strip of pavement that cut through a vast valley of sage and scrub. Venturing from both sides of the road came more and more rabbits.

Suddenly the car veered sharply to the side. Bianca almost hit her head against the window and barked something appropriate to Mihaela in Romanian.

“I almost hit him!” Mihaela snapped. “What’s wrong with him?”

Surging from the scrub came an inexhaustible supply of rabbits. I had never seen anything like it. I had never even heard of anything like it. Tens of bunnies, as Mihaela would say. They hopped casually to the side of the road and waited patiently for us to approach.

Then they hurled their little furry bodies under our crushing tires.

It was horrifying. Mihaela drove like a maniac, swerving this way and that. Fluffy, adorable bunnies flooded into the road, easily topping a hundred already. The sage brush boiled with their numbers as they scrambled to get onto the road, only to leap into death. One in particular caught our eye. He met my gaze and refused to move even as we careened towards him. Mihaela shrieked and nearly buried her face in her hands, despite driving at 65 mph, but we passed harmlessly over the little guy. Bianca and I laughed at Mihaela’s melodramatic behavior, but not for long.

Then one brave bunny raced towards us from the far side of the road. This little bastard was Hell-bent on ending his bunny life. I could see his thoughts clearly in his eyes, ‘You’re mine, bitch.’

Now, I have read The Bunny Suicides and know that sometimes even cute little fluffy bunnies can’t take it anymore and will find incredibly bizarre ways to end it all. This rabbit was a contender. The car bounced as we ran over him. Dozens of little eyes flashed in the headlights, and more rabbits continued to hop onto the road to the Beatle’s “Eight days a week.”

“I wonder if the road is warmer or something than the desert?” I wondered aloud. “What would bring so many out?”

“Mihaela’s bloody summoning of the devil, that’s what,” Bianca snapped. “Bamboclat!”

“I don’t know what that means!” Mihaela cried as she swerved onto the shoulder… of the far lane… to avoid a tight grouping bent on mass suicide, a la Jonestown. We squashed another bunny, and then yet another one.

“How many have you hit?” Bianca screeched. “Four, five? Come on, Mihaela!”

“I think that last one was already dead,” I chimed in cheerily. “So that only counts as half.”

“Shut up!”

“What the Hell is going on?”

“Maybe they can smell the cookies in the car. You know a bear can smell meat through a tin can through a cooler through a car. Maybe they are just hungry.”

“Shut up!”

Bianca and Mihaela began shouting at each other in Romanian. I didn’t really know what they were saying, but there were more than a few words I recognized that I won’t repeat here in English.

“Damn, Mihaela,” I asked as I was tumbled about the back like laundry in a dryer. “You want me to drive?”

“Oh yeah, stop when we are being attacked like this? They are crazy, you can see it in their eyes! I’m not getting out of the car. And turn off that damn music, it’s freaking me out.”

The attack of the bunnies suddenly halted, replaced instead by another, more common form of nature’s fury. Rain lashed at us, the wind battered us. Indeed, the wind pushed the car around the road almost as much as if we were still dodging suicidal bunnies. Mihaela, panting and wild-eyed and wind-blown hair, looked like a witch riding her broom through the stormy skies of Halloween.

Rain drummed maniacally on the roof and the wind pushed us all over the road. Wave after wave of rain slashed at us, struck the pavement, and rushed off downhill. With the rabbit fury past, I began to seriously worry about a flash flood. There was more than enough rain for it and, even though the mountains were miles away, I had seen water levels rise a full meter in less than thirty minutes on a plain many miles wide. I opted to remain silent about that.

Time passed slowly now, though our hearts continued to thump and our breaths came in ragged pants. The silence became oppressive to me, and I felt the need to break it. I couldn’t help it.

“Did you know,” I said. “That a former President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, once claimed to have been attacked by a rabbit?”

The two sour looks I received propelled me onward. “It’s true. He was fishing with his brother, or someone like that, in a boat in the middle of a lake. They both claim a rabbit swam out there and attacked them.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Mihaela snapped.

“Carter was the first U.S. President to visit Romania,” Bianca added.

“See?” I said. “I know nothing of his presidency, but he knew how hot those Romanian women were. Now I find him more credible. Besides, can you imagine the balls it would take to be the President of the United States and say something like that?”

“And you actually wonder why no one ever believes a word you say?” Mihaela asked.

The punch line of the story? The next time I saw Mihaela, she had gone out and purchased a rabbit-fur coat.