Rerun - Raccoons!

 I'm flying out of Boston today to San Diego. The following is a piece from August. Enjoy ...

As you know by now, three weeks ago I came back from a conference and a family visit with a bad leg cramp which turned out to be sciatica. Here’s what I left out:

My housemate Paul informed me we’d had two raccoon visitors. We live way out in the country, 3,500 feet up in the mountains. We get our fair share of four-legged visitors around here. Sometimes visitors with no legs.

It seems the raccoons had squeezed through the cat flap and had helped themselves to Bullwinkle’s cat food. Bullwinkle’s feeding station can best be described as a gravity-operated kibble silo. It seems that the raccoons had gotten in the habit of tipping over the plastic silo and helping themselves to several weeks of cat food.

I recalled just before my trip seeing evidence of their handiwork. I had attributed the effort to Bullwinkle, whose motive would have been my own negligence in failing to fill up the container.

But I was wrong! It was raccoons!

Can man outwit nature? We could close off the cat flap, but that would effectively make Bullwinkle a prisoner in her own home. Moreover, we would be conceding dominion to the interlopers.

Leave it to me, I assured Paul. I may only be a city boy, but I was up to the challenge.

I placed a metal coffee can which happened to have batteries in it on top of the feeder. Then I set an aluminum baseball bat atop the coffee can, with the top end leaning against the wall.

We know Bullwinkle won’t tip over the feeder, I explained to Paul. As for the raccoons ... I dropped the bat onto the entranceway concrete floor for effect.

The perfect booby trap. The noise would frighten away the raccoons.

In scientific terms, the amygdala, which mediates fear and arousal in the limbic system of the brain, would kick off the raccoons’ fight or flight response. The raccoons know they are encroaching on our territory, I explained to Paul, so their amygdalae will be on hair-trigger alert, Then we would just keep resetting the trap till the no-good bastards wised up.

A few days later, I drove forty miles out to the desert for my weekend water volleyball. My leg was still acting up, but I figured the pool exercise would be good for it, along with some good long soaks in the hot tub. Later that evening, I stopped in at my favorite eating spot, just a mile from the Mexican border. It was Sunday. The July Fourth weekend was wrapping up, business was dead, and it was just me and one other customer in the place.

Plenty of time to chat with Michelle, my favorite waitress of all time. Michelle is a genuine mountain girl, who grew up 10 or 12 miles from where I now live. Maybe she had some insights into raccoons.

In the place where she used to live, she related, she heard an unworldly banging noise in the middle of the night. The racket was far too loud to come from a mere animal, she figured. It had to be a human intruder.

“So I grabbed my shotgun,” she said in the same casual voice a city girl would use to describe choosing a Versace handbag. “And I was holding the barrel in the same hand as my flashlight.”

She entered the garage-basement ...

A giant raccoon was splayed on the top of a garbage can, trying to undo the clasps holding down the lid. With each effort, the raccoon would literally lift the container off the ground and crash it to the hard concrete.

Never rule out the resourcefulness of a mountain girl. Michelle found a high vantage point over the raccoon, loaded, and ...

Emptied a container of her own freshly-minted piss on the critter.

“Never saw the raccoon again,” she told me with a smile.

Michelle also advised me that she employs the piss option to keep the coyotes away. Literally, she flings the stuff into the bushes and the trees. That way, her cats stay safe.

It’s all about the cats.

I returned home and set my canvas bag on the table, and decided to call it a night.

CRASH!

One in the morning. I opened the door to investigate. The cat feeder was down. No raccoons in sight.

Man vs nature. Score Round One to man. With great satisfaction, I reset my booby trap and went back to bed. Bring it on, heh-heh-heh ...

At four in the morning, I heard a scratching sound from outside the bedroom door. Bullwinkle was asleep with me. It had to be the raccoons making a return visit. I braced myself, awaiting the inevitable crash ...

No crash.

Scatch-scratch-scratch ... Something was wrong. The raccoons were mocking me, holding a raccoon party, here, in my own territory. The nerve! Calmly, cooly, I reached in the dark for my nearest Gutenberg Bible and threw it against the bedroom door. Instantly, from outside, came the sound of a flapping cat door and the skittering of mother nature’s furry psychopaths in full retreat.

I reassured Bullwinkle, and psychically instructed her to stay put. Then I went out to investigate. The cat feeder was untouched. But my canvas bag was off the table and on the floor, half-way to the cat flap. Inside was the prize, one microsecond from being unprized - half a leftover tuna sandwich.

The raccoons had wised up alright. Score Round Two to nature.

Speaking of nature, nature called. Now it was my turn to wise up. I found a plastic cup and aimed. Then I went outside and scattered the contents outside the door and immediate environs. Then I reloaded and marked my territory further afield.

That was more than two weeks ago. The raccoons haven’t been back since. This, despite the fact that my worsening sciatica rendered me virtually defenseless to future furry onslaughts. As I triumphantly explained to Michelle, mountain girl extraordinaire, it’s a good thing I’m an alpha male - otherwise the raccoons would have laughed at my piss.

Let that appear on my gravestone: “Raccoons respected his piss.”

Skunk!

Let it be known throughout the land: Raccoons respect my piss.

In a recent blog piece, I reported on my “solution” to unwelcome raccoon visitors entering the house through the cat flap.

A couple of nights ago, I heard a mysterious scratching outside my bedroom door. A neighborhood cat? Return of the raccoons? I made a noise, then heard the flap of the cat door, signaling the sound of the animal in full retreat.

At two in the morning, I woke up, put on my glasses, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. I spotted something furry out of the corner of my eye.

 A skunk!

It’s a good thing I had my glasses on, or I might have mistaken the critter for my long-haired calico cat Bullwinkle. I have a bad habit of scooping Bullwinkle off the floor and nuzzling my face into her fur. Close call.

So here was the skunk, promenading in my direction across the living room floor as if he (let’s assume the skunk was a he) owned the place. Not a trace of fear.

“I laugh at your peeess!” the skunk sneered in what I swear was a French accent. “I hold your entire species in contempt! You are unworthy of the dis-stink-shun of odious! You want smell? Allow me to demonstrate smell!”

No!

“Peeess, ha!”

Slowly, very carefully, I backed into my bedroom and closed the door. The battle of the amygdalae was on.

Being fellow mammals in confrontation mode, our respective brains were now operating very similarly. Our limbic systems were both alerting us to danger and governing our immediate reactions. In particular, the amygdala - which mediates fear and arousal - was kickstarting our “fight or flight” response. Already, I was in a heightened state of awareness bordering on panic.

Think of the amygdala as a 911 call and the limbic system and autonomic nervous system as rapid responders. In nothing flat, my entire being was mobilized to face the threat. Adrenaline flowing, heart pounding, neurons zapping, breathing accelerating, digestive sugars pumping raw energy into the muscles.

In one microsecond, I was primed to fight like a kung-fu master on steroids or run faster than Michael Phelps can swim. But millions of years of evolution never anticipated the exigencies of modern living gone bad, namely me trapped in my bedroom with a skunk just outside.

I needed to think things through.

But our brains don’t work that way. Survival depends on instant reaction. Only later does actual thinking enter into the picture. Which explains why in the modern world we do stupid things such as panic and fly off the handle and start fights and fall in love and otherwise act against our own best interests.

Moreover, the cortical areas don’t automatically take over, even when they do come back online. In theory, the thinking parts of the brain are supposed to modulate the reactive parts of the brain, but too often it works the other way around.

“Bang on the door! Make noise!” That was what my limbic-influenced cortical regions were telling me. Bad thinking.

Pepe Le Pew was working off an amygdala almost the same as mine, only the “end” result of an alarmed reaction, from my point of view, would be far more consequential and dramatic.

So here was trick: Under no conditions could my amygdala set off his amygdala, and the only thing to prevent that from happening was for my cortex to take charge.

Scratch-scratch-scratch. Pepe was now on the hardwood floor just outside my room.

Scratch-scratch. Now he was on the concrete. The only thing separating me from a living weapon of mass destruction was the bedroom door - a door with cat flap.

Bang on the door! Make some noise!

No! Cortex to the rescue. “Just wait!” said the voice of reason with not a second to spare. “He’s headed out the other door. All you have to do is breathe.”

A sound. The cat flap, but not in fully-committed mode. Slowly, carefully, I opened the bedroom door a crack and peered out. The skunk was stalled three-quarters of the way through the cat door, tail inside, fully upright.

“Hurry him up!” said the panic-influenced part of my brain. “Bang on something! Now!”

“Wait, you idiot!” my voice of reason cut in. “In case you haven’t noticed, the operating end of this walking violation to the Geneva Convention has not yet left the building! Don’t - I repeat - don’t! Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t ...”

One Mississippi, two Mississippi ...

An eternity, another one, and another. Then - the welcome sight of an unfurling tail disappearing through the door followed by the definitive sound of the final flap. Deliverance!

My elation at having prevented a “situation” from escalating into nuclear destruction was dampened by the realization that skunks think my piss is a joke. Clearly, this is going to require years of intensive therapy to get over.

In the meantime, Pepe, I implore you - not a word to the raccoons. Please?