There is No Raccoon in This Picture.

There is No Raccoon in This Picture., originally uploaded by michaelcollinsdunn.

There is no raccoon in this picture, which Sarah insisted I take, but there was one on our deck tonight (actually May 31, I'm blogging past midnight as I must often do).

We know we have raccoons around. A couple of years ago I heard a noise and looked out the window onto our deck to see three of them, helping each other to climb up onto our hammock. Stupidly I went to wake Tam instead of grabbing a camera; they were gone by the time I got back. A guy cleaning our gutters told us he found raccoon scat on our roof. Something -- either raccoons or squirrels -- ate a good part of our hammock which we stupidly left up this winter. Great, give 'em a high fiber snack through the wintertime.

Tonight Sarah saw it first. We'd changed the lights on the deck, had the lights down in the family room because she'd been watching Cars again, and so she spotted it through a crack in the curtains. She started shouting, "Raccoon, Raccoon, Raccoon!" and he ran off. Later he came back again, and this time I scared him off; realizing the camera was still in the car, I went out the front door, promptly tripped over the bottle recycling bin (making a loud noise) and so on. Earlier today we'd had a major storm -- we were in the movies watching the second Narnia movie, and missed it, but there was a major thunderstorm that dropped an inch of rain in a short time and apparently even put a funnel down in rural Maryland. We came home to find our electronics had all rebooted, apparently from a brief power failure, and lots of water and some wind evidence. A tray on the back porch was full of water and we didn't bother to empty it, and the raccoon was trying to drink water from the tray.

Sarah was very excited. She thought she could see part of him hiding behind some furniture on the deck, and made me take the above picture, which has nothing in it.

I told her they're very shy creatures and I was glad she'd seen him; the fact that he ran away was good news, not bad, since they can be rabid and you don't want them acting boldly.

I made a crack about how you can tell they're little thieves because they have a bandit's mask on. She asked what I meant by that. A robber's mask, the black mask around their eyes. Why is that a robber's mask? It's like a Zorro mask, says I. "But Zorro's a good guy," she responds. Obviously the idea of robbers wearing black masks over their eyes has dropped from the culture. Has she never heard of the Beagle Boys?

But there were good moments. She wanted to name him, then decided to name the (family?) of three I had seen a while back (one looked younger than the others). She named the biggest "Ranger Rick," the second "Rocky," -- thus evoking obvious environmentalist and Beatles references -- and then decided to name the young one "racket." I noted that this was remarkably close to "Rackety Coon Chile," the young raccoon in Pogo. Within weeks of her discovery of the Marx Brothers, can her discovery of Pogo be far behind? Pogo was, of course the greatest comic strip. ever. written. ever. at all. There is no argument here. I have spoken.

We've discussed going out in the woods to look for critters tomorrow. Good.