Gophers play a major role in the lives of most farm kids, and I was no exception.
My first gopher memory is kind of weird, and I’m not completely sure I have everything quite right.
I would have been four to seven years old, based on where we were living at the time in the mid-1960s, and I’ve got this memory of setting up a gopher trap in the ditch beside the yard road. I remember it being one of those big metal ones, and after finding a dead gopher, I hauled it home to show Mom.
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Like I said, it seems a bit of a stretch that someone that age would have been allowed to operate a gopher trap, but hey, it was the ’60s. I suppose it was possible.
If the memory is accurate, I have no idea what my mom would have done when I plopped my catch on the back step.
Fast forward a decade or so and I had graduated to the family’s .22 rifle, slaughtering gophers in the farm’s large pasture.
Of course, moving into the big city after high school didn’t mean the end of gophers.
It doesn’t seem to matter the size of the city — if there’s an expanse of land on which concrete has not been poured, there will be gophers.
For years I rode my bicycle to work on a bike path that ran through a park along the South Saskatchewan River. Needless to say, there were plenty of gophers.
It seemed that at least once a summer one of the more brainless rodents would find itself running for dear life between my front and back tires. Sometimes it would make it and other times there would be nothing but a thump of the back tire to finish the story.
So even though I haven’t lived in the country for decades, gophers have still been very much part of the landscape.
However, I was still startled recently to look out our back window to see — you guessed it — a gopher gambolling about in our very urban backyard.
I have no idea how it got there or where it ended up, but part of me wished it well, free from metal traps and killer bike tires.
