Eeek! There’s a Mouse in the House

It’s no mightier than your average mouse, but Peromyscus maniculatus is a mouse with clout.

Known as the deer mouse, the fist-sized lump of fur carries the deadly hantavirus and could shut down Channel Islands National Park.

Because so many of the islands’ mice are infected, Rep. Elton Gallegly wants the park closed until rangers figure out how to best warn hikers and campers. A congressional committee is to meet on the matter June 29 and discuss extermination, among other remedies.

The solution could have been so simple. Here and there among the islands, on sand dunes and rock outcroppings, the National Park Service could have mounted tasteful, low-key, explanatory signs: “Some Bad News About Mouse Droppings.”

But now that the mice have squeaked into the political arena, the chances for hysteria are high. If you don’t see Navy jets inscribing the skull-and-crossbones over the Santa Barbara Channel, look for dire warnings at every landing, on every trail head, in every campsite: “Danger! Beware! Abandon Hope Ye Who Enter! Have a Nice Day!”

As for extermination, mouse professionals--and, for that matter, professional mice--know better. Can’t be done, they say; the deer mouse is hardy, abundant and clever, for a creature with a brain the size of a lima bean. However, the skepticism of the experts will hardly be sufficient to keep the government from putting our money where the mouse is.

What can happen when our elected representatives set out to build a better you-know-what? Anything or nothing. Here’s a likely scenario.

June 29: The House Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands holds a hantavirus hearing. Members come out solidly against infected rodents.

July 1: At an appearance in Detroit, longshot presidential contender Dan Quayle takes up the issue, expressing outrage at the most scurrilous attack ever on the U.S. automotive industry. He stops abruptly when an aide whispers: “It’s hantavirus, sir. Not Honda virus. Hantavirus.”

July 5: In Ventura County, officials put a positive spin on the troubling developments off their coast. They point out that not one of the 60,000 tourists who visit the islands yearly has come down with hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. Local tourism executives phone travel writers across the U.S., stressing the county as an attractive destination where many pleasant activities do not entail contact with mouse leavings.

July 10: In Washington, 58 congressional representatives sign up for an urgent fact-finding trip to the islands. Fifty-five of them discover other commitments after learning they can’t play golf or get a decent mai tai on the islands in question, which, except for a handful of park rangers and tens of thousands of skittering mice, are uninhabited.

July 17: Under the direction of the ad hoc Bad Mouse Subsubcommittee of the House Subcommittee on National Parks and Public Lands, research proceeds apace. Staff members hope to surround the park with huge barges, fill them with airlifted sludge and sink them, flooding the islands and terminating the mice in their burrows. No harmful chemicals will be released into the environment, they proudly point out.

July 18: Vacationing at her longtime favorite motel in East Potlatch, N.Y., Hillary Rodham Clinton denounces the plan.

“Whaddya, kidding?” she says, with the sardonic enthusiasm of the true New Yorker she insists she is. “Over my dead body they’re gonna flood the Island.”

When an aide quietly explains that it’s not Long Island, but the Channel Islands, off California, she gives him such a look.

Aug. 15: After an animal-rights commercial shows a trussed Mickey Mouse gasping for air as the waters rise, plans for Operation Drowned Rat are abandoned. The committee toys with a more humane plan involving flutists and chunks of Gouda cheese, but no decision is made.

Aug. 16: The Gouda Cheese Institute closes its Washington office.

September: Interest in the hantavirus threat wanes. Over the summer, travelers to the national parks have been attacked by mountain lions, bears, rattlesnakes, porcupines, skunks, sharks, squirrels, birds, bees and a demented fawn. One or two have been struck by lightning. A number have contracted Lyme disease and other illnesses.

But Channel Islands National Park has remained open, with tourists appropriately leery of all rodents. Despite the brouhaha, the deer mice thrive . . .

Dec. 31: Under cover of night, government scientists at a remote dock on one of the Channel Islands set loose a painstakingly engineered biological agent that will soon end the reign of Peromyscus maniculatus.

“Meow,” says the biological agent, code-named Mr. Fluffy. “Mice.”

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.