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Pest-control professional’s ‘soul and spirit were sweet to the end’

Kevin Davie was a soft-spoken musician, a voracious reader — and bad news for rats
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Kevin Davie on the job: "It made perfect sense that he went into pest control, because he enjoyed helping people," his sister Karin says.

To most people who knew him or used his services, Kevin Davie was the shy, philosophical pest-control guy.

Until he died suddenly last month at age 53, the owner-operator of Pest Tech was also about to become the Times Colonist’s newest blogger.

Tails from the Crawl Space would have recounted colourful stories gleaned from his 32 years exterminating pests, including carpenter ants, silverfish, mice and rats.

There was much more to this bright, soft-spoken fellow nicknamed “the rat-catcher” than meets the eye, however.

“His soul and spirit were sweet to the end,” recalled Gary Preston, the Victoria blues musician who befriended Davie in the 1990s when he came to see Gary Preston and the Harpoons at the George and Dragon.

“He’d show up with a microphone concealed in his baseball hat and then confess to what he was up to.”

Davie, who often made “bootleg” recordings of the countless concerts he saw, always did it ethically, Preston said. He did it so he could relive the experience, often giving the tapes to the musicians themselves.

“At the end of every jam, he’d give me a tape,” said Preston, adding they were invaluable because they helped the band put finishing touches on arrangements.

“He was a very nice player and singer, and he’d get up and perform, but he was shy about his songwriting. He once performed a song I wrote and asked permission first. I was flattered.”

Preston, 66, said Davie also turned him on to some great music, and shared pop-culture nuggets, such as footage of Jeff Daniels’ “America isn’t great anymore” rant from The Newsroom.

“I felt that we were in tune politically,” said Preston, whose old friend more recently aired his displeasure with the antics of rabid right-wingers in the U.S.

Davie also proudly spoke about his younger sister Karin Davie, the acclaimed Seattle-based contemporary artist who lived and works in New York.

She said it didn’t surprise her that her brother, who graduated in 1986 from Sir Sandford Fleming College’s pest-control program in Peterborough, Ont., pursued a profession many regard as undesireable. “When he was younger, he had an innate natural intelligence about nature,” she said, recalling their childhood in Ontario.

Born in Toronto on Feb. 17, 1963, Davie grew up with his sister in the suburbs of Willowdale before the family moved to Meaford, Ont., living in a summer cottage before building a home there. Her earliest memories were of her brother picking up tadpoles and frogs; skiing and spending hours swimming, snorkeling and boating on Georgian Bay.

She said he was a voracious reader from a young age, and enthusiastically went on family outings to theatre, art galleries and museums, where “he would get lost in the dinosaurs section.”

Both Karin and Kevin, whose birth mother was a First Nations woman, were adopted as infants from different birth parents.

Four years ago, they lost their adoptive father, Robert, who worked in the financial industry. Their adoptive mother, Mary, a retired librarian, is in her 80s.

Kevin, who learned he also had a half-sister, was excited to able to meet and learn more about his biological family, said his longtime friend Dave Hiltz, a Waterloo-based musician.

The friends shared lots of laughs, similar political views and a mutual quest for “fairness over injustice, intelligence over ignorance and compassion over cruelty,” recalled Hiltz, who once sold Davie a powder-blue Fender Stratocaster replica. Davie’s other prized possession was a Martin acoustic guitar once owned by Joni Mitchell.

Hiltz, who often jammed via Skype with Davie, taught him his first three guitar chords. He said Davie practised diligently without using a pick, and had a “distinct, soulful voice.”

Davie shared his sister’s interest in U.S. politics, she recalled:

“Kevin wanted things to be just and fair,” said Karin. “He was very compassionate.”

She said her brother, whose great-grandfather was one of Canada’s first native actors, was also a movie buff and an avid fisherman who had a boat moored in Port Renfrew — a passion that inspired his move west.

Because he was such a natural and skilled fisherman, Karin thought he’d go into fisheries.

“But it’s more isolated, so it made perfect sense that he went into pest control, because he enjoyed helping people,” she said. “You have to be methodical to outsmart them. It’s like a chess game.”

She said her brother wanted to make “a personal connection” with clients while doing a job he performed with pride.

Davie, who used a long telescopic mirror to find rat entryways under a home’s exterior walls and eyed dusty shelves and pipes for tiny rodent footprints and droppings, seemed Sherlock Holmes-like on the job..

He often attempted to assuage customers’ fears of the nocturnal creatures by explaining their behaviour. “I have a healthy respect for [rats] because they’re highly intelligent,” Davie once said.

“Basically, they’re just another animal trying to survive.”

His signature strategy was to regard a house as a military operation, rodent-proof its exterior, and trap and remove rats before sealing the building.

He would use peanut butter for live and spring-loaded traps, rigid mesh and steel wool to plug holes, and do it in an environmentally friendly way, only using hardcore toxins as a last resort.

One of many stories he loved to tell was about a homeowner who tried to remove wasp nests outside his house by himself, at night when it was presumably safer.

The do-it-yourselfer put a paper bag over his head with holes cut for his eyes and was stopped at gunpoint by police, who were called by a neighbour who assumed he was a burglar.

During his last few months, Davie posted weekly Facebook entries about his pest-control adventures.

His sister compared his storytelling enthusiasm to his passion for music. “His music [performances] was another side of him we had never seen until he just started doing it. When he felt comfortable, he was not shy,” said Karin, who will never forget the first time he came to visit her in New York in the early 1990s. One of the first places he wanted to visit, she said, was the legendary Manny’s music store.

“He wanted to experience both its history, knowing that probably every single famous rock musician had gone there at some time, and to look at all the amazing guitars.”

mreid@timescolonist.com