The Weekly Screed (#622)

What happens in the burrow, 
stays in the burrow
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — This being April, it naturally occurred to me that gay marriage is like spermophile mating season — a natural and sociable phenomenon whose outward manifestations are purely joyful, posing no disturbance to the public order.

Unfortunately, since most people haven’t had the transformative experience of bearing direct and personal witness to either, they might have a cramped and blinkered view of both gay marriage and the spring rites of the North American spermophile.

Luckily, I happened to be in Rockford, Illinois, one of the prime breeding grounds for the common spermophile — also known as the thirteen-lined ground squirrel — during the spring of my freshman year in college. As the warmth and wetness of April sent sturdy green shoots up through the winter-brown lawns that stretched across the campus of Rockford College, I began to notice underfoot, wherever I walked, dozens of lightning-quick chipmunk-like creatures scurrying hither and yon. Having studied natural history voraciously in my earlier youth, I recognized the little buggers as thirteen-lined ground squirrels, whom scientists prefer to call spermophiles — a Latinate word that translates as “seed-lovers.”

I was surprised at the ubiquity of the campus spermophiles, who had not been evident either in the autumn or winter. All of a sudden, the little rodents were everywhere. Their energy bordered on outright frenzy. What, I wondered, was up?

A quick trip to the Howard Colman Library, just across campus, filled my knowledge gap. It seems that, as the sun comes out and the ground warms, the normally burrow-dwelling spermophiles feel an upwelling in their hormones. In short, they get frisky. They can’t stand the confinement of the burrow any more than a crocus can refuse to poke its little bud from the mud and open its blossom.

April, I discovered, is spermophile mating season. And one of the irrepressible vernal rituals of the normal, healthy, frisky adult North American thirteen-lined ground squirrel is to run frantically around above-ground, bouncing and chirping, rolling in the new-spring grass and chasing other spermophiles.

Once I was fully aware of both the magnitude and brevity of the spermophile mating season — and the remarkable good fortune that I, as a Rockford College student, had to witness this charming mammalian bacchanal — I informed the fellow members of a small but influential student group, the Chapultepec Social Club (CSC). By a five-to-nothing vote, the full membership agreed to declare the next day an official CSC holiday whose sole purpose was to observe, support, celebrate and publicize Spermophile Mating Season. We conveyed the occasion to our Women’s Auxiliary, certain sympathetic members of the college administration and a host of other ecologically sensitive students, and we invited one and all to skip class and join in.

The next day, after a leisurely breakfast in Rockford College’s tastefully appointed cafeteria, the Chapultepec Social Club (and numerous hangers-on), gathered — with food, drink, blankets, guitars, big floppy hats, folding chairs, camp and camera — on a particularly spermophile-intensive area behind a dormitory known as Caster Hall. There, for several sublime and soul-replenishing hours — until the sun sank low and the wind grew chill — we shared with our rollicking, gamboling spermophile buddies the ineffable joy of the earth’s renewal of life, growth, health and fertility.

We saw the spermophiles do everything that day — except mate. Although they love to chase one another, pounce and wrestle playfully, and flirt flagrantly as they dart across the lawn, spermophiles are modest little rodents who prefer — when they engage in the sexual congress that is the basic principle of mating season — to retire to their burrows and carry on in private.

In essence, the above-ground part of spermophile mating season is like a gay-pride parade, a spectacle with which I’m familiar because I’ve lived in Paris — where gay-pride parades occur at an almost weekly frequency. These occasions tend to be more playful than proud, because everybody is overdressed and flamboyant — like spermophiles with that excess of stripes along their backs. Also, like the hormone-crazed ground squirrels of Rockford College, gay-pride paraders are contagiously exuberant and bursting with vitality. They tease, they mock, they sing and dance, they shimmy and shake, they flirt and flaunt, they make you smile. But — and this is why a gay-pride parade tends to be a weird sort of family fun (at least in Paris) — they don’t have sex on the floats.

They save that stuff for back at the burrow.

Which is why gay marriage — or any marriage — is like spermophile mating season. There’s the public part — the parade, the wedding, the party — where everybody gets together and has a good time, running around on the grass, listening to rock ‘n’ roll, drinking fizzy Portuguese wine and eating bologna sandwiches from the cafeteria. And then there’s the intimate part, which is reserved to the mating couples, which belongs in the burrow, where nobody can watch.

Or wants to watch.

As we sat on the lawn basking in the sun, we saw the spermophiles dashing down underground. We could all imagine what they were doing down there. We could even talk about it, think about it, describe it, compare it to what heterosexual humans do in their own complicated mating rituals.

But, of course, we didn’t. That would have been tacky. Worse, it would have been an insult to our fuzzy little love-struck friends, who had lured us from the classroom to celebrate the spring.