The Raccoon Tale

After reading Schnoodle’s post on the tail-less raccoon that visited her home, I thought it might be time to tell the story of my longago encounter. It’s the kind of adventure that can only happen when you’re young, childless, a new enough homeowner to think the 10-year-plan is going to come to fruition in ten years, and you still have a few stars from the honeymoon in your eyes.

We have a little cat door in the cellar; these days we lock Iki the cat in at night, but when she was young she came and went at will. She *owned* that door and it was her right to use it day and night.

At one point I noticed that she was eating an awful lot without gaining weight – oh, no, could it be worms? Was she sick? She is a grazer so there is always kibble in her bowl, and every morning the bowl was empty. The husband suggested that maybe a stray cat was getting in the house and eating the food every night. So I slept lightly. One night, I heard noises downstairs, so I did the classic wake-up-the-husband-and-make-him-investigate thing. It was a raccoon! It ran right by him when he approached the kitchen, ran down the cellar steps and out the cat door into the night.

Thus the battle began. Every night I’d elbow the husband, and every night he’d sneak downstairs and then charge after the animal as it fled, hoping to scare it enough so it wouldn’t return. No luck, naturally; free food is irresistible to any raccoon.

The husband began sleeping with the cricket bat next to the bed. He developed a routine of tearing downstairs in the night and heaving the bat end-over-end down the cellar stairs after the retreating raccoon. I was always torn between crying and laughing – here was this naked man heaving a cricket bat and bellowing “GET OUTTA MY HOUSE!”

This went on for weeks.

It turned ugly: we’d leave the Hav-A-Heart trap in the kitchen loaded with sweet corn, then with peanut butter on apples (supposedly the guaranteed critter-catcher), the works. We’d empty the cat bowl (which meant the cat yowled when she was hungry during the night) and put some raccoonish delicacy in the trap and go to bed and wait. A few times we even heard the *SNAP!* of the trap; we’d run downstairs, the husband still naked and armed to the teeth with his cricket bat, only to find the trap empty – completely empty. The raccoon knew enough to spring the trap, THEN remove the treats from the side!


By now it was a vendetta; the next stage was to place the trap elsewhere. First we put the trap outside the cat door, blocking his entry, but he was far too smart to be taken in by such an amateur approach. We then put it immediately *inside* the cat door: surely he’d want his nightly appetizer and come bounding through the door, only to find himself locked in our Trap of Doom, ha ha ha! Nope – he skipped entry altogether on those nights. This was a Battle of Wits – the Humans Versus The Rodent! (I know, I know.)
Finally, we came up with the Grand Master Plan. I’m serious now, this is what we did:

1. Find one of the spare doors we’d scavenged and bring it upstairs; set it upright, next to the kitchen doorway (it’s an old house, no one has ever opened the walls so in theory every room can still be closed off).
2. Find a bunch of bungee cords

3. Set the picnic table bench up right beside the cat door, with the trap bungeed down nice and solid.

4. Polish the cricket bat.
That night, we put fresh kibble in the cat’s bowl before going to bed. Finally I heard scritching noises downstairs; I elbowed the husband and tenderly whispered in his ear, “Honey, it’s time. Let’s go get that [expletive deleted].” We snuck downstairs, tippy-toeing all the way. The husband crept outside to set the bench against the cat door and set the Hav-a-Heart, thus making sure that the raccoon’s only escape was a guaranteed trap. While he was doing this I grabbed the extra door and blocked off the kitchen. Hah, weren’t we smart!

You know what they say about never cornering a wild animal? Well, they’re right. The effect was immediate. Silence. I swung the door a bit so I could peek inside: there was that critter, sitting ON MY COUNTER, glaring and baring his teeth at me. Psycho raccoon!

I got mad: I started yelling incoherent things about getting off my appliances and threatening his future offspring – get out of my SINK!!! - as he skittered around the kitchen, GROWLING at me! The husband came tearing back up the stairs (still naked, mind you) to see what had happened. He laughed at me but we still had a serious problem: we’d effectively trapped him IN THE HOUSE. He told me to go outside and scare the raccoon from outside the windows; he would creep behind the door and be ready with the cricket bat to aid its passage down the stairs and to its doom.

I went outside. It was about 3:00am. I was wearing a light cotton nightgown. It was completely silent. No peepers even. It’s a rural neighborhood, and it’s QUIET. I had intended to go out there, stand outside the kitchen window and make a loud, racoon-startling cry. What came out of my mouth was a kind of strangled “woo!” instead. Completely ineffective; I think the raccoon even sneered at me. I tried again – “eeeh.” All those years of Good Girl training completely cowed me – what on Earth would I say if the neighbors asked why I was shrieking like a banshee in my nightie outside the house at 3 am?!? Not yet forgiven, Mom.

You know I’m a Stephen King fan; I decided to psych the little [expletive deleted] out. I started talking to him in a harsh whisper: “COON! Join the Daaahk Side!” [heavy breathing between cupped hands for emphasis]. “In this house, no one will hear you scream.” Nothing. I sang – badly – to it. I threatened Republican rule. Totally unfazed. He moved to my fridge. He was ON TOP of my FRIDGE!

I crept back inside. We had a brief whispered conference, then we both hid behind the spare door, turned out the lights, and hushed. Finally the critter came out of the kitchen. The husband triumphantly chucked the cricket bat down the stairs and the raccoon tore off – straight into the trap.

So there we were – it was 3:30 or 4 by now – the sun thinking about rising and us in various stages of dishabille scowling at the caged raccoon, who was scowling right back. I shrieked at the husband, “SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT NOW!” Understand, please, that I have held a gun, I have disassembled and reassembled a gun, but I have never fired a gun and I do not intend to ever fire a gun. I understand their physical characteristics, I am not abnormally fearful of them, but they offend me at a deep commie-pinko-pacifist level. Understand also that I’d lain awake grinning evilly while picturing his little rodent face pleading for mercy as we put him in a crate and shipped him to Timbuktu. All of a sudden I wanted that rodent dead, and dead NOW. The husband turned to me and, in one of the most shocking statements of our marriage, said:

“I can’t. It wouldn’t be sportsmanlike.”

I blew up. “Was it sportsmanlike when he was sitting on my appliances?!? Do you know how much disinfectant we’re going to go through this week?!? [expletive deleted] your Boy Scout training anyway! Shoot the [expletive deleted]!!”

He wouldn’t do it.

So we went upstairs and got dressed, put on the heaviest gloves we could find, and loaded the trap into the back of the car. We took him for a drive.

We debated where to bring him, and finally decided to go across the River. We figured he probably couldn’t swim across, he would never get across the bridge without being squashed (there is no pedestrian walkway on the bridge) and he certainly didn’t have a pocket in which to carry money for the ferry. So we drove over the bridge, went an addition 10 miles for luck, and let him go near a state park.

When we released the trap door he leapt out, teeth bared, fur askew. He stopped about 15 feet away and turned to give me the most disdainful look I have ever received in my life from man or animal. And he never returned.

p.s. I tried to find a photo that would do our visit justice so I Googled up “psycho raccoon” and came up with this post, which I thought was pretty darned funny and very surprising!

Ahhhh ... Better.

The cellar floor is drying, the Easter boxes in the attic have been found so we can dye eggs with friends this evening, and the Squirrel Threat has been removed.

It would take a heckuva rodent to make that leap now!  We cut down one of three clustered maples, so there are two left to help us shade the south side in the summer.  The boychild was really put out with me - all my crunchy-granola rants about responsible land use and good stewardship apparently sunk in and now he thinks it's a sin to cut down any tree!

The tree guy was most informative; we had an extended discussion on some of the other trees in the yard and the Grand Plan.  You have to take a 50-year view in your tree planning - right up my alley.  I love the thought that my little holly trees (one of which is known by my husband as "the stick") will be full-grown beauties only when I'm very old - and that I dug them up from the verge of a parking lot where they were being ignored and allowed to grow all crooked-nasty and moved them to a spot where they will be actively aprpeciated.

This is my little pulmonaria - the blossoms start out pink, then turn lavender.  Ain't it cute?  it's one of my favorite early blooms.

You've seen photos of the old bedstead in my southside garden before.  A friend gifted it to me (we are terrible scavengers) and as soon as I took it off her truck I knew right away where it "wanted" to be.  Hopefully with that tree gone there will be a little more light, allowing my plants to thrive!

Sewing for the Home, Grendelskin Style!

Yup, those are handmade sand bags you see!  (They are a bit like 9-foot long draft stoppers.)  We got about 10 inches of rain in the last wo days, and after 16 years in the house it had its first water failure.





I bet Martha has never made her own sandbags!







This is what the dooryard looked like on Monday, before it got bad:

And this has been my part-time workspace for the past two days:

That's my truly-cool and very huge utility sink next to the washer and dryer; the sump hose is run out through the cat door (poor Iki has has a rough couple of days too).  I am cautiously optimistic that the worst is over and so very thankful for many things, including the following:

• We maxed out at about two inches of water in the front part of the basement; the back had even less.
• My husband, whose scavenging makes me crazy except when it comes in handy, actually had a bilge pump in his workshop which we were able to rig to act as a low-volume sump pump.
• When this proved to be too low-volume for the task at hand our dentist came through with a surface sump pump for us to borrow; every hardware store in a 50-mile radius was sold out.  (I know this: I called every one and politely endured their laughter at my requests.)
• We learned something new about the construction of the house. 
• Sally's House Rule #347:  If you're going to build walls to make separate "rooms" in the basement, put the framing atop the concrete; don't pour afterwards or the wood will get saturated in a major storm and introduce water into the home. 
• My kids were both willing and able to help with using the wet vac and were cheerful about our absence, hastily-cobbled-together suppers and chronically wet shoes.
• I had several yards of what-the-heck-is-THAT-and-why-did-I-buy-it?!? fabric lying around, and a hefty new needle for the sewing machine.  And I had several buckets of just-collected road-sand with which to fill the bags (I recycle it for use under the inflatable pool every summer).
• And finally - you know how folks are always talking about how they really should clean up the basement?  Well, since we have to water-seal all those funky spots, we'll have to go through all that "stuff" as a matter of course!  And the floor is really clean.

You’ll Take My Equity Away....

... when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. If you’ve got a delicate constitution, turn away now please.

This is my house. It’s old enough to be crumbly but not old enough to be historic; architecturally insignificant; a fire-trap at the best of times (balloon framing, anyone?); and the paint took a nasty hit with this last Nor’Easter. But it’s mine. I refinanced (several years back) and got a killer interest rate and cut a year off the term. We’ve insulated bit-by-bit (ask me about the time I fell through the attic floor), have hung sheetrock and put in decent lighting and scraped and painted and dreamed about an Actual Kitchen; and although the original 10 Year Plan is starting to look a lot like a 50 Year Plan, it’s my deal.  Push my Irish, whydoncha, and find out how defensive I am about my land and home.

Some of you may remember that we had critter trouble  awhile ago. It came back with a vengeance recently and we Made War. I have noticed one particular squirrel that seemed too bold, and then I spotted it on the roof. Then – horrors! – I spotted it going from the roof to the hole made previously! Ack, we didn’t trim those maple limbs far enough! He was going to the end of a 1-inch diameter limb, leaping to the roof, and thence into the hole! So, hubby covered the hole with a piece of sheet metal. We had hoped this would end the battle but it didn’t. The booger started EATING.MY.HOUSE.

Can you see the damage to the window frame? I can tell you I have had lots of choice words for this critter. Actually, not lots – mostly just the “F” word, followed by “er.” Sorry Mom. Now I have to buy a new window, gargh! I don’t mind the old single-panes up there, it’s easy to replace glass. But whole frames are pricy and naturally ours are “custom” sized.  You would have laughed to see me hanging out the window on Sunday smearing the top of the window frame with petroleum jelly, hoping the little booger would leap onto it and slip off onto the ground some 35 feet below, breaking its little neck in the process.  Alas, squirrels are apparently Vaseline-proof.

I told Hubby I wanted the tree cut down right away - screw the limbing, it isn’t enough. I know the tree provides valuable shade in the summertime but there are two more right there and they are all too big now anyhow – the leach field will be at risk from their roots very soon if it isn't already. Hubby decided to go the Testosterone Route instead. I caught him wandering the house with a BB gun yesterday; he later said it was my fault he couldn’t kill the critter when he had the chance because I had insisted that he keep the safety on. Thank goodness the kids were in school:  the boychild would probably immediately and gleefully start emulating Dad, who is beyond Cool in any case. Anyhow – Hubby waited until the rodent was inside, then blocked its egress. Spare shingles blocking the windowpanes, deer netting inside – he even fashioned some sort of snare (I didn’t want to look) and was quite disappointed when it didn’t work. (Ask me about trapping animals inside the house, aka The Raccoon Fiasco, or about hubby’s unsuccessful attempt to snare a rattlesnake once – ah, country livin’!!)

Eventually the critter tried to wander out of its hole- *inside the attic* at this point – and Hubby successfully killed it. A clean kill too, a single shot through the heart. All my usual commie-pinko-liberal-ness aside, I will admit I was impressed.

The new “trophy” that hangs from the attic rafter. I don’t care if it’s barbaric; it’s not much worse than the hatchling-chick skeletons we found up there when we moved in, and it’s Proof that we Defeated the Enemy. Go ahead and threaten my equity, I’ll have your butt up there too.