Here in Harrisburg my preferred jogging route is a pretty, paved path along the Susquehanna River two blocks from my apartment. Manicured and tree-lined with a peaceful, aquatic view, the path is the perfect place for my three to four weekly runs.

During the winter I often had the path to myself, especially in the mornings when I was one of the few people dumb enough to venture outside in the freezing wind. As the temperature has grown warmer, the path has grown more crowded, and I now share the riverfront with bikers, walkers, people with their dogs, couples taking a late-night stroll, birds, bugs, the occasional bunny and, of course, lots more joggers. We’re a happy crew, reveling together ‘neath the early-summer sun.

It was mid-May or so when a furry invader joined our ranks. It was a warm, brisk morning, and I came across a scene that looked something like this:

It scared the living bejesus out of me. Fears of a fierce, remorseless mauling flashed through my mind - the critter being the mauler, I the maulee. Who knew what dagger-like claws and fang-like teeth the thing had hidden beneath its plump, fuzzy facade? I sure didn’t. And I was not going to hang around to find out.

Now, before you conclude I’m crazy (because who the hell is afraid of something so cute?), let me tell you about my childhood:

Growing up in the Northeast during a severe rabies epidemic, I was trained at a young age to fear large, rodent-looking creatures rollicking about in the broad light of day. Being nocturnal, such animals were meant to be sound asleep when the sun came out, resting up for a long night of scavenging for maggots or rotting banana peels or Big Mac wrappers or whatever it is they eat. Most vile, oversized rats are nocturnal, Mama always said, although not in those words. If you see one scampering about, run and hide. Do not - do not, I repeat: no, never ever - do not try to pet it. It is mean.

Mom also told me that if a child were unlucky enough to come across a raccoon or skunk or opossum midday, slobbering venomous slobber and staring you down with its beady little most-likely-red-like-the-devil eyes, events would transpire something like this: you, the unsuspecting child, would be lunged at, assailed and scratched by remorseless claws, and then sharp, saliva-coated teeth would dig into your flesh and infect you with a disease that got Old Yeller a bullet to the head. You would be subjected to three rounds of very painful shots - shots, which you hated even when they were “just a pinch” - and as for your animal arch-nemesis, animal control will decapitate him. Yes, that’s right, kiddo - they’ll cut off his head. Then they’ll send his brain to a lab to test it for germs, because that’s the only way they’ll know for sure if your assailant gave you rabies.

For you, the child, the decapitation of your attacker would be no panacea or just revenge but instead a source of pained guilt. The thought of it would make you sad, because even though the beast just bit you and maybe gave you a disease that could cause you to go bat-shit crazy, you like animals and do not want any of them to die in such a horrific way. Not on your watch. No sirree.

What I mean to say is: I am instilled with the fear of rabies and, thus, of large rodents. Also of their kin (raccoons, for example, are of the order Carnivora, not Rodentia). So when I first ran past two beaveresque, gopher-like fuzzballs nibbling clovers along the riverfront around 8 a.m., I have to admit I tensed a bit, and also lurched to the side and maybe even let out a pitchy little yelp.

Eek! I thought. What. The eff. Was that. Am I going to die? I hope I’m not going to die. Please, thing, stay away!

They let me be, thank goodness, and I continued jogging.

But i kept on seeing the damn things - day after day, run after run, morning or evening or mid-afternoon, for at least two weeks - and I could not figure out what the heck they were.

I did grow less scared of them, though. A few of their characteristics had convinced me they were most likely harmless, so now when they sneak up on me, my heart skips fewer beats.

Reasons I became convinced of their harmlessness include:

1. They seem to fear me as much as I fear them. If they are munching grass within one or two feet of the path on which I run, they scurry away to a safer locale. Three or four feet from the path, say. Rabid animals, their minds deranged, stop fearing bigger animals, Mama always said. So this fearfulness of me, a larger animal, was reassuring.
2. The sheer number of these furry little dudes boded well in terms of their rabidness. I’d see like three to five of them on a 40-minute run and, statistically speaking, that could mean one of two things:
   1. These animals, whatever they are, are diurnal, so I should not worry that they get the munchies at dawn, noon and dusk. In fact I, being diurnal too, should sympathize with their hunger patterns. They are hungry, not rabidly hungry: Reacting normally to a normal metabolic state. Phew.
   2. Central P.A. is in the grip of a rabies pandemic that would put swine flu to shame, and these critters, whatever they are, are simply biding their time, waiting until the moment is right, at which point they will attack every living creature they can sink their teeth into, starting with the runners and walkers along the Susquehanna, because who do those runners think they are, anyway? Infringing on our territory - those vain exercise enthusiasts with the nerve - the nerve - to tread within the range of our snarling, drooling jowls. We’ll show them. The jerks.Assuming Option 2, a rabies pandemic, we have two further options to consider:
      1. A secret, well-planned insurrection, with the rabid animals waiting, waiting, pooling their forces, growing stronger until just the right moment, and at that moment they will attack en masse, or:
      2. The attack is already underway.

      Option 2.1 is unlikely. I don’t think rabid animals have that much self-control or foresight. Rabies brings about anarchy, not well-orchestrated military-style campaigns. As for Option 2.2, if that were the truth, someone on the evening news would have mentioned it, and someone who watches the evening news would have mentioned it to me. So we’ll rule out Option 2, i.e. rabies epidemic in South-Central P.A.

That leaves us with Option 1: the animals are diurnal.

To review, so far we have concluded that 1) I scare the animals, and 2) they must be diurnal because there are a lot of them out during the day. Although both seemed like fairly strong arguments that the riverfront is not not a place I should fear, the clincher was the realization that:

3. Oh my gosh, those are groundhogs!

   We’ve all witnessed this spectacle:

   What I had never witnessed was a groundhog in the wild. We didn’t have groundhogs in Georgia. Never saw one in Illinois or Massachusetts. Aside from the annual appearance of Punxsutawney Phil, a.k.a. Seer of Seers/Prognosticator of Prognosticators, who, I must mention, is a bit more… rotund than his more outdoorsy peers, I don’t think I had ever seen a groundhog.

   The things by the river? Definitely groundhogs. Cute little furry groundhogs who do nothing worse than nibble roughage and reduce complicated weather patterns down to their simplest form: Will we have lots more winter? Will winter end not too long from now? Meteorologists do not scare me. Neither, then, should groundhogs.

But here’s the problem with conclusions drawn from myths, childhood memories and colloquial knowledge: although they may placate you, you would be unwise to rely on them.

Because here’s the sad part. Upon realizing the animals I was sighting were nothing more than Phil’s distant relatives and, later, upon deciding to write a blog post about them, I did a bit of research. And reliable sources told me:

Not only are groundhogs herbivorous, burrowing hibernators who are closely related to squirrels (I love squirrels!), and not only is groundhog another word for woodchuck, meaning one of my favorite childhood tongue-twisters is about the star of one of my favorite gratuitous holidays, but also

1. Groundhogs are mean little motherf*rs. Or, as groundhog aficionado Doug Schwartz told the New York Times in 2007: “[Their] natural impulse is to kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.” (Eep!)
2. Of the 368 cases of rabid rodents reported between 1985 and 1994, groundhogs accounted for 86 percent of them.

Translation: The abundance and diurnal nature of groundhogs does nothing to counteract the harsh facts about them, no matter how airtight my logic may be. They will attack, without mercy, and they might give me rabies, even though they are cute.

In conclusion, next time I go for a run (and on subsequent runs after that), I will continue to steer clear of groundhogs.