THE CHIPMUNKS WERE making Peter the Cat crawl out of his fur. He'd stare out the sliding glass door at the back of David Olson's house all day, tortured by a steady stream of critters carrying nuts through cracks in the cement steps that led to the back porch.
The steps were crumbling and had to go, anyway. So in early July, Olson used an off day from his job as a machinist in Norton Shores, Michigan, to grab a sledgehammer and start the demo job himself. There were four cement steps, angled toward the left, and he planned to tear them out in one day.