Raccoons in the Moonlight

Fall is here and soon the food in the woods will get scarce, the animals will start getting creative in their foraging techniques. Raccoons in particular, those cutsie, little critters. We start off loving them. They’re so cute with their little masked faces and their little articulate hands. But then, slowly, they reveal their vile nature...

The first year you live here, matter of fact, the first week (actually the first day now that I recall it) you learn to put the lid on tight on your garbage cans because the raccoons here can pop a garbage can lid like the flic of a bic. The second week you’re here, you are putting bungee cords over the lids, getting your hands caught under these cords and grinding your knuckles against the lid to free your now crippled little hands. The raccoons are slightly less cute now.

By the end of the first month, you are using bungee cords and cinder blocks on top of the lids. You’re getting a complete bicep workout wrangling these cinder blocks. After you add cinder blocks, you feel comfortable that the problem is solved - how can they lift a cinder block? That confidence lasts till morning when you find the garbage can on its side, cracked cinder block next to it, with the lid - still with the bungee cord - pushed onto the side of the can and the contents all over the yard. And though you don’t verbalize it, because you are an animal lover, you think quietly to yourself, “I’m gonna kill these little bastards.”

At this juncture, you consult with someone who has lived on the Island longer than you, and they tell you to build a little shed for your garbage cans and so you do. At the three month mark, your garbage cans have their own little house, there’s a wooden latch, surely your garbage is safe now. But noooo. Why? Because you underestimated the fine dexterity of those cute little hands. They can and have worked out how to open a flip latch or slide latch, and they pass the information onto their young to insure food supplies for the future. You become convinced that raccoons are the spawn of Satan. An infestation of raccoons must be a sign of the Apocolypse. One of the four horseman is probably riding a big raccoon.

By the sixth month you’re here, you are determined to win this battle. You buy big cat poop from the pet store. Zoos sell lion and tiger poop to pet stores and it is alleged to be very effective at driving off animals like deer and raccoons. One whiff of predator poop and poof! They’re gone. Now you padlock the latch. Surely they can’t open a combination lock or pick a key lock. You surround the shed with predator poop and your neighbors complain about some awful smell coming from your property...

Now you learn that raccoons are very strong and can tear corners off of plywood and wiggle into your shed. By month eight you’re sitting on the porch guarding your garbage with a BB gun.

Ultimately, we accept defeat and put our garbage in big town bags and keep it in the trunks of our cars. On Star is developing a special scanner just for Shelter Island that alerts the car owner of trunk invasion and turns on an electric grid to fry the intruder. Cook ‘em, Dano.