I walk on the cliffs by Monterey Bay multiple times a week, yet yesterday was the first time I had ever seen a rat, so I posted to Nextdoor asking if that was a possibility. The first reply was, Welcome to Pleasure Point. The second opined that we had more rats than people here. Those were followed by multiple posts listing the types of rats, what the rats do, where the rats live, and so forth, including the post from which I stole this blog’s title. One person also posted a description of seeing “hundreds” of mice at a beach picnic are one night for variety.

It happened yesterday evening and I worked this morning, so I haven’t been back. Will the landscape look different to me, now that I know it is rat-invested? Will I walk a little farther from the vegetation? Will I look for rats while I walk, or keep my gaze firmly fixed on the water?

While walking near the ocean, one does tend to look at it, and perhaps that’s why I hadn’t noticed rats before. Despite the descriptions from the posters, it isn’t as though rodents are actually running over your feet while you walk. Most people, myself included, use stairs to access the beach from the cliffs, and that behavior is certainly solidified, now that I realize there are questionable creatures lurking in the scrub.

There were mentions of rats living among the rocks as well, though.

Last weekend, I was walking up those stairs and was startled to glimpse a full-grown surfer lying under my feet. He had just found a rock niche below the stairs in which to rest. At the time I wondered whether creatures would come to inspect someone in such a spot; now I feel sure it would happen.

I know rats are animals, and wild rats are wild animals, or if not, people have none but ourselves to blame for their ubiquity and proximity. Nonetheless, the landscape does seem a bit more fraught at the moment. The upside is, I am now pleased to live one-quarter mile from the water, rather than closer, as I had sometimes wished. Of course I know rats can travel, but we have regular pest inspections, and so far the ancient dust in our crawl space remains undisturbed.

Just another example of learning something about one’s world that isn’t new, yet it changes your perceptions once you know it, a phenomenon which happens to me periodically. Internet porn sites get more visitors than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined*?  30% of Americans think our population is between one and two billion people**? My husband doesn’t like beets?

I still prefer knowing to not knowing, about the rats at least. I’m also pretty experienced at not dwelling on things I don’t want to think about, a useful, though not boast-worthy, task.

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* Huffpost.com, ca. 2017. Youtube gets almost twice as many visitors as porn sites.

** Harper’s index, ca. 2018.