The following is a true story,
one of those moments in time
that took place over several years.
Beady-eyed
Suburban Terrorists
by Darlene A. Palenik
Like clockwork, the high-pitched squeal came from the chimney for the
third night in a row. This time, I knew I wasn’t imagining things. But
I couldn’t convince anyone else that I wasn’t crazy. It was almost as
if my invaders knew when other people were around and deliberately
stayed quiet. Then, the minute I was alone, they started their racket
again. I could live with the noise. The banging and clattering was
another matter. But I wasn’t brave enough to try to figure out what was
inside. The answer came one night at dusk.
From my window, I saw people pointing at my house. I was
reasonably sure the gutters were intact and the chimney wasn’t falling
down. When I walked outside to find out what everyone was staring at, I
had my first encounter with my beady-eyed suburban terrorists.
The family of raccoons sat defiantly on top of my roof, daring any of us
to come up and get them off. Never having seen a live raccoon before, I
simply stared at the mother and four babies. They didn’t respond to my
threats and feeble attempts to intimidate them into leaving. But they
hated my flashlight. One by one, they moved. I hoped they would
scamper down from the roof the same way they’d gotten up; my heart sank
as, one by one, the mother dropped the babies inside my chimney, then
followed them.
I went back inside and barricaded the chimney well with heavy boxes, a
large dictionary and all the other heavy books I could grab. I locked my
bedroom door that night and was grateful for a ground-floor window in
case I needed to make a fast escape. During the day I stayed alert for
any suspicious noises, and kept checking to make sure the
barricades hadn’t moved even a fraction of an inch. After a couple of
nights, I decided my terrorists were not going to force me out of my
home. But the barricades stayed, just in case.
No agency or company was willing to remove the critters; they’d go away
on their own, I was told, when they were ready. But no one could tell
me how long it would take them to decide they were ready to leave.
The weeks dragged on. My terrorists and I made an uneasy truce. They
hated the 5 a.m. TV news, and made a racket that drowned out the
announcer’s voice. I guessed the babies didn’t like
being awakened before dawn, but if they insisted on staying in my chimney, they were going to have to live by my
schedule and my rules. So I banged on the mantle and told them to shut
up. They never listened, and the pattern became a familiar, yet
annoying, game.
Then came the day that they began to move. I frequently heard creaks,
clunks and bangs coming from the bottom of the chimney. After some
particularly intense thuds, I decided I had no choice but to remove a bit
of the barricade to see if one of them had fallen through. Fortunately,
all I found in the well was a lot of rust. By some miracle, the ancient
vent was holding its own against the intruders.
Several months later, the family decided to move on. I only realized
they had left after several days of silence. I finally ventured up to
the roof and checked the chimney. I confirmed, with a mixture of relief
and sadness, that I was alone again. Sometime during their rent-free
tenure, my terrorists had become my family. I’d grown used to their
constant racket and when they'd stopped protesting the morning news, I
had banged on the mantle to wake them up.
I expected the raccoons to return the following year, even though I’d
capped the chimney. When the noise came back the next spring, I feared
the worst. Yet the sound was a bit different. I went back on the roof
and found the chimney cap broken. I don’t know what tore it apart, but
eventually my intruders that year revealed themselves to be chimney
swifts. The birds were just as noisy, but much less dangerous.
The next year the raccoons in my area became animals to be feared
because most of them were rabid. I thought back to my first encounter
with this species. I’d been walking along my backyard path to my door when I saw eyes peering at me through the darkness. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was big, and it was keeping me from getting home. Armed with a broom and a flashlight, the only defensive artillery available from next door, I raced the other way and snuck in through my front entrance after almost breaking the key in the lock in my panic to get in.
Until it chose to move on, this mischievous pest delighted in emptying
all the cans from the recycle bin and trailing them over two backyards.
It woke me in the middle of the night when it knocked over the sump pump
under my bedroom window while trying to drink from the water in its
well. We were in a drought that year, but it didn’t know or care. It
simply left a trail of wet pawprints on my cellar steps every morning.
And when it had finished his nightly jaunts, usually just before dawn, it
would lumber up the driveway and disappear into the sewer.
I was returning from next door on a cold night last January. The
raccoon threat this year had been limited to a dead one that had been
found across the street. Without paying attention to my surroundings, I
cut across my front lawn as I had done a thousand times before until I
caught a glint of something bright in the almost-total darkness.
The eyes were back. Those beady-eyes that had instilled such fear in me
a few years before. But now there were two pairs of eyes. I bolted
back next door and got into the car, firmly believing that if I drove
into my driveway, that would scare my raccoons away.
They didn’t move an inch; I ended up trapped in the car, watching them
watch me. My front door was so near, yet it could have been 100 miles
away. I called 911; they politely informed me that the police don’t do
raccoon calls. With no flashlight available, I began to despair that I
would never get home again. The beasts were having too much fun munching
on my grass.
After what seemed like forever, they moved to the other side of my oak
tree. I tore from the car and raced to my front door, looking over my
shoulder and hoping they wouldn't follow. I would have hurled myself
against the door to get in if I’d seen the slightest movement from them,
but to my chagrin, they ignored me. When I turned on the outside
light, they moved closer. I discovered two things: raccoons are
extremely noisy eaters, and they climb giant oak trees. I watched with
total dismay as they sat up in the branches, realizing that they could
drop down and come after me every time I walked out of my front door.
They could see me before I could spot them.
They disappeared later that night and I never saw them again. But I
never go under my oak tree without looking up and making sure they
aren’t up there hiding up.
Even though we live in the suburbs of a major city, we have a wide range
of animals, including show-off squirrels, cute but devious chipmunks,
cats who keep bringing stray kittens to us, fearsome oppossums, and a
billy goat who roams up and down the neighborhood eating all the bushes
in sight. I’m sure that someday my beady-eyed suburban terrorists will
return and leave their muddy pawprints all over my drainpipes and
gutters again. And, in spite of all my fears and protests, I know I'll
welcome them back.
Copyright 2001
by Darlene A. Palenik