The pack rat is native to North and South America. It’s got a long, thick tail, big ears, and wide black eyes. There are a lot of different species of pack rat – about 20 – but they all do the same thing: they hoard stuff. Over the course of their lives, they gather materials from their neighborhoods, everything from sticks and shiny objects to bones and dried droppings. They then store this material in huge nests, called middens.
Pack rats go out foraging most nights, and as they skitter along, they will happily drop something they’ve gathered in favor of a choicer tidbit. But once they’ve brought it back to the midden, it generally stays there. Some species will pee on their middens; because pack rats are desert animals, their urine is thick and viscous. As it crystallizes, it acts like glue, joining what once were separate bits of geology, biology, and vegetation into a cohesive red-orange glob. Some scientists call this substance «amberat».
The self-storage facility is also native to North America. Sure, if you make a habit of reading self-storage blogs, you will come across the repeated allegation that storage culture began 6000 years ago, when a Neolithic entrepreneur in what is now Xi’an, China decided to place his valuables in clay vessels and bury them underground. But it’s more likely it started several millennia later, around 1892. That’s when Los Angeles resident Martin Bekins decided to flesh out his moving company, which consisted of six horse-drawn vans, by building a brick structure just for storage.
The idea took hold, and by the 1950s, Bekin’s Storage had outposts across the state of California. Imitators found the concept just as popular in Florida and Texas. (An early adopter in Odessa called itself «A-1 U-Store-It-U-Lock-It-U-Carry-the-Key», thus avoiding having to explain anything about its business model to potential customers.) The big, empty cubes held an air of possibility – you could put anything in there, and no one would know. Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who stole the Pentagon Papers, kept said papers in a Bekins storage unit before leaking them to the Washington Post.
The lifespan of a pack rat is about two years. But if a midden is stuck in amberat and protected from the elements, it can survive indefinitely. Researchers have found middens that are over 50’000 years old. (They may be older, but that’s as far back as our instruments can measure.) When they find these middens, they carefully excavate them. The fossilized shells, bones, scales, seeds, fruits, and twigs within are often extremely well-preserved. Sometimes, the researchers can even figure out what species they came from.
Since pack rats don’t venture too far from their middens when foraging, researchers then know what their neighborhoods once looked like: exactly what types of cacti, flowers, birds and snakes lived or roamed nearby. They used to figure this out by studying pollen instead – small, fossilized grains of pollen are everywhere, after all. But where pack rat middens are available, they are the better choice.
«Pack rat» is a term we use for human hoarders too. (In fact, etymologists say it’s possible that we used the word for humans first, and then began applying it to the rats, which reminded us of ourselves.) In 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported on «what is thought to be the first-ever pack rat support group», which met at a bookstore in Garden Grove, California. Around the same time, psychologists in San Bernardino found that ten percent of their study subjects «suffered from compulsive saving», and that children as young as 2 years old «hoard toys, shells, coins, and other possessions.»
Of course an industry that allowed us to keep this stuff within reach, but out of sight, would thrive. At this point, if you divided the amount of self-storage space in America by the amount of selves, each American would get 7.06 square feet – enough to fit a chicken, a pot, and a little more besides.
But why has the U.S. been so susceptible? «Self-storage’s popularity clearly has something to do with American mobility», wrote Tom Vanderbilt in Slate Magazine in 2005. (Back then, everyone’s allocation was a measly 4 square feet.) «Another obvious suspect is American consumerism», and yet another is postwar architecture’s distaste for basements and attics. People within the industry talk about the «Four D’s»: divorce, dislocation, and another which no one can quite decide on, but is either «disaster», «density», or «downsizing». After we figure it out,
I suppose we can just stow the other two. Everyone agrees on the fourth: «Death».
In other words, when someone dies, you get a self-storage unit for their stuff. But when someone with a self-storage unit dies, that self-storage unit often keeps on living. «If rent is being paid automatically each month and a storage facility has no idea that a tenant has died, the contents of the unit conceivably could be untouched for months or even years», the Sparefoot blog explains. In 50’000 years, will researchers pry open these boxes to find out how we lived – what we took from our environments? Will they invent a new word from the congealed lives they find there?
As of now, three species of pack rat are extinct. Two of them, Neotoma martinensis and Neotoma anthonyi, were probably eaten to death by feral cats. The third, Neotoma bunkeri, most likely ran out of food. Saving things can’t always save you.