Remember the marmot I wrote about earlier this month? The one that turned up in San Francisco after drinking radiator fluid, the one rescuers were treating while trying to trace where it stowed away from? There's been an update, and it comes with a detail about marmot behavior I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I read it.

The animal was found in a San Francisco backyard, which is already strange, because marmots don't live in San Francisco. They live in the Sierra Nevada, in the high country, hours away by car. And that, apparently, is the key phrase: by car. As Yahoo reports, rescuers suspect the marmot climbed into a vehicle's undercarriage somewhere in the mountains, drank radiator fluid, passed out, and woke up in a completely different part of California.

Sit with that sequence for a second. A rodent gnaws its way into the warm machinery under your car, finds liquid that smells faintly sweet, drinks enough of it to lose consciousness, and then rides, unconscious, inside your vehicle for a hundred-plus miles while you listen to a podcast and wonder why the car smells like vanilla. It wakes up in a city it has no evolutionary framework for. No talus slopes. No alpine meadows. Just a backyard, and a very confused homeowner.

And this isn't a one-off fluke, which is the part that got me. The Yahoo piece notes marmots are famous for this. Famous. There is apparently an established body of knowledge about marmots as vehicular stowaways, a whole genre of incident where people park in the mountains and inadvertently acquire a passenger. Wildlife officials in marmot country have to tell people to check their undercarriages the way coastal towns tell you to check your shoes for spiders. It's just a thing that happens at the overlap between rodent curiosity and internal combustion.

Radiator fluid, for the record, is ethylene glycol, and it's genuinely dangerous. It tastes sweet, which is exactly why animals drink it, and it causes kidney failure as it metabolizes. That's the unfunny part of this story. The San Francisco marmot needed treatment precisely because the mechanism of its travel was also poisoning it. The sweet-tasting thing that knocked it out and carried it across the state was also working on its kidneys the whole ride. You can read this as a cute animal story if you want. The other read is that a small mammal unknowingly traded an organ for a road trip.

Per my standing rule, the boring explanation is the correct one here. No mystery island, no cryptid, no anomalous migration. A rodent did a rodent thing, a car did a car thing, and physics handled the rest. But the boring explanation still contains something that keeps snagging on me: an animal can end up hundreds of miles from home while asleep, and the first thing it experiences on waking is a world it has no map for. We talk about animal displacement like it's rare. For marmots in parking lots at elevation, it's practically a commute.

Rescuers were working on flushing the toxin out and planning to release the animal somewhere appropriate, meaning back in marmot country, with actual rocks. Whether it makes it home cleanly depends on how much damage the coolant did, and I haven't found an update on that yet. I'll keep watching for one.

If you park in the high Sierra, apparently, pop your head under the car before you drive off. Not because anything supernatural is down there. Because something furry and doomed might be, and it thinks your radiator is a water fountain.