Skunked

It's three-thirty in the morning, and I reach for my gas mask, only to remember I don't own one. What is this smell ripping at my lungs? Is plastic burning? Is gas leaking from the kitchen stove? I struggle out of bed and begin checking space heaters for proximity to flammable materials, and go to the kitchen. Negative results on both concerns, and then I suspect the wall heater which is quite old and not perfect.
Fearful we'll not wake up in the morning, I rouse my husband who doesn't seem interested in his own mortality, but with some persistence on my part, he stumbles out of bed and dresses. Purse,keys, cell phone, Rocky (our Chihuahua mix) in hand, we head for the front door, and Fausto is about to vomit from the smell. We get into the Nissan, and the dog is so thrilled to be going somewhere. At this early hour,this trip must be special. We call 911, and ask for someone to perform a safety check on the house. The Fire Department arrives in 5 minutes with two big trucks, much to their credit, but to my frustration, I have a hard time convincing them to enter the house and check for gas leaks.
"Lady, it's a skunk."
"I know it smells like skunk out here, but inside, it smells like something different and stronger. The living area is at the top of a flight of stairs, not down here at entry level. How could it smell stronger up there? Would you please just check for a gas leak?"
He probably decides to get things over with and get back to bed as quickly as possible by entering and checking the apartment. "Lady, it's a skunk." We now feel we have to put aside our reservations and accept his professional assessment. "Sorry, Rocky, no more drama for the night." We go back to bed, wondering how many neighbors we woke up.
By morning, I'm thinking over the skunk smell and recent conversations with neighbors. Both of us grew up in the country, so we found it humorous when the neighbors below had called the landlord asking for an exterminator for skunks. We've smelled them occasionally in the mornings for twenty years, and it never was a problem. And there was the other neighbor who claimed a mother had raised five babies under his house, and that they made a mess eating the grapefruit that fell from the tree in his backyard. We wondered if he had entered the crawl space to conduct the census, and were amazed he had noticed anything going on in the mostly unused backyard. Now we are feeling a little sheepish/skunkish at our own lack of sympathy and our inability to recognize skunk musk.
I grow more curious about the smell mimicking plastic and want to know what chemical components of skunk spray could account for that impression, and I hit the Internet which leads me to the website of the Dragoo Institute for the Betterment of Skunks and Skunk Reputations (http://www.dragoo.org/), an anti-defamation league for skunks. Grasping for any straw of plausible explanation to my relatives, all of whom think I should never have left the country and that I have been gone far too long now that I can't recognize skunk musk, I am so glad to find that some skunk species produce thiols and thioacetate compounds. I am sure the thioacetate compounds might make a reasonable explanation for plastic-like qualities to the smell, and perhaps I might not seem quite so dumb.
Just as I'm preparing to put all of this skunk episode behind me, I find our neighbor in the adjacent apartment coming home with large quantities of tomato juice. Biff, the sweetest and most docile Australian-Shepherd-Corgi mix, had been outside during the night and didn't like the skunk anymore than we had. Biff grabbed it by the neck, and the more Biff shook the skunk's neck, the more the skunk sprayed, and the more the skunk sprayed, the more Biff shook its neck until dog evolution won out over skunk evolution. Biff still walks about resembling a large, battery-operated toy dog, but demands more awe and respect after his transmutation to Exterminator. Whether he started it or ended it, Biff clearly considers himself a hero, and we now know a skunk(ing) when we smell one.