From the Slow Lane: Things that go scratch in the night

I was getting our RV ready for an eight-day trip to New England last month when I first heard the noise. It was a scraping noise. But not just scraping, really, more like scrape scrape, scratch, skitter.

I held my breath and listened harder. In case you have never been inside a recreational vehicle, it’s like a long hallway on wheels that contains all the comforts of home. At the front end of our hallway is the steering wheel, at the back end is the bed. In between are all the trappings that make a hallway a home.

The noise came from the back end of the hallway, over the bed. “What’s that noise?” I asked my favorite RV buddy (who also happens to be my husband) and his response was, as always: “What noise?” so I responded, as always, “Listen,” and he pretended to listen and said it was a branch hitting the top of the RV. Since we were parked under trees, that made sense.

We were parked in the staging area of the Cross Sound Ferry when I heard the noise again and it wasn’t from branches because we were in the middle of a parking lot where there were no trees. But there were seagulls, which is what my RV companion said was making the noise I was hearing — seagulls on the roof making noises like tree branches. That made sense, sort of, but before I could check out the roof, we boarded the ferry for the first leg of our trip to Kittery, Maine.

I have been to Maine one other time, about five years ago, when the flutter of a little bird outside the RV turned out to be a nasty old bat flying around inside the RV and I’ve been kind of afraid of Maine ever since that unfortunate incident. Imagine yourself trapped in a hallway with a bat flying around.

So when I was back in Maine again and heard a noise in the middle of the night — scrape, scrape, scratch, skitter — I thought OMG! That nasty bat’s come back to get me! But my RV buddy said that wouldn’t make sense, and the noise, which he could hear, too (Hallelujah!) was definitely coming from outside the RV. When I finally went back to sleep, I was armed with a fly swatter and had the sheet pulled up over my head. It was not a good night.

The next morning we inspected the roof. I use the term “we” loosely because it was my RV buddy who climbed up there while I stayed on the ground hollering “Are you all right?” There was nothing he could see and he decided that perhaps something was inside the air conditioner that sits on the roof over the bed. At my whiny insistence, he took the cover off the AC. Nothing. No bats, no mice and no signs of either. If you didn’t count the scratching.

For the most part, it confined its activities to nighttime and, after several days, as we moved to different New England locations, we kind of got used to the sound, the way one gets used to the gentle tinkle of wind chimes or a flag flapping in the breeze or a motorcycle revving for an hour outside your window.

It was on the fifth day that I noticed a change in the sound; it was becoming fainter, less vigorous. On the sixth night, I heard nothing. I stood on the bed and rapped three times on the AC vent. There came back a weak “scratch, scratch, scra…”.

Whatever was up there was dying right over my head and that just can’t be good for the karma. We were on Cape Cod by then, in Provincetown, when we decided to cut the trip short and return to Shelter Island in order to find the critter and save its life. Once home we (and again, I use the term loosely) did a more thorough job of taking the AC unit apart, where “we” found evidence that a third party had indeed gone on vacation with us, but no critter, dead or alive.  We surmised that, even in its weakened state, the thing had managed to make a run for it after the AC unit was taken apart.

I slept better that night. Better, that is, until I heard that familiar scraping and scratching. This time it was coming from inside my bedroom wall.

“Do you hear that?” I asked. Yes, he did. He said it was a tree.