Another pretty straightforward
narrative poem, complicated only by that line, “I've given up literature &
taken down pills,” which is likely the real point anyway. What I think it means
is that being forced to lay off the hooch equates to laying off the literature,
the two being linked in this persona. I would be open to another
interpretation, but I’m more interested in raccoons today.
Raccoons were getting into the
dog food in my father-in-law’s garage. We heard them out there one night and he
asked me to shoo the varmints out of the dog food. I went out with a flashlight
and found 14 raccoons—I counted them—mom, dad, and 12 half-grown rascals. There
weren’t going to leave until I started yelling, which moved them along in a
furry wave. They all climbed up the same tree together then just sat there
watching, waiting for me to leave.
My son and I were camping under a
rock overhang in Red River Gorge, KY. We heard something in the middle of the
night rummaging through my pack. Thinking it was a mouse, we got the flashlight
ready, illuminated the culprit, and saw a raccoon emerge and tear off, carrying
the smoked sausage we were saving for breakfast.
The coons were wreaking havoc
with the garbage cans, and they were drinking the juice out of the hummingbird
feeder at night—like throwing back a beer before bedtime, it seemed. They
smashed three or four of them, too. Not to mention that they voided their
bowels in the same corner of the deck every night, so we were getting ankle
deep in raccoon shit back there. I declared that if they were on the deck, they
were fair game. I bought a live trap, baited it with peanut butter, and caught
more than a dozen over two summers. If you let them go nearby, they come
straight back home, so I took them over the Ohio River to a secluded park near
the Little Miami River and turned them loose there. I can’t imagine that it’s
anywhere close to legal. It was interesting to watch how they responded to
being trapped—some were shy and terrified, some nervous, some ferocious and
angry, some were sweet and quiet. Their individual personalities were a result
of their intelligence and their personalities.
But they all ran off in good shape, and best of luck to them. I don’t want to
kill raccoons, but they were getting too thick back there.
On quiet summer nights I often
slip silently into back yard just to see what has come out of the woods—deer,
owls, skunks, foxes, opossums, and of course raccoons, all emerge and hang out
there, or sleep, scavenge, or otherwise cause trouble. I like to go to the flowers
and watch for sphinx moths, which are impressive in the moonlight. One night
two young raccoons were on the driveway scavenging sunflower seeds the birds
had kicked out of the feeder. They didn’t see me. I heard their mother coming
up along the hedgerow, and she knew right away I was there. She crept close to
them, barked something in raccoon that I completely understood just from the
tone of her voice: “You kids get back here!” You could see them look up, look
at each other, and go, “Uh oh.” They hurried back to her, and I heard her
giving them an absolute tongue-lashing all the way into the woods, and I’m
quite sure the message went something like this: “There’s an adult human—the most
dangerous creature on earth!—standing
not ten feet away, and you two boneheads are eating sunflower seeds? Are you crazy?”
How do I know this? Here’s how: “it seems, and is, clear to me we are brothers.”
Parents berate their misbehaving children to teach them lessons. Raccoons are
absolutely not furry little people with masks. Their experience of life on
Earth is very different from ours. But as warm-blooded, intelligent mammals we
share much. There is more going on with animals than we know how to give them
credit for.
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