Everybody Has a Story: Cornfield camping deters raccoons

While taking my daily walk (or, on occasion, my daily trudge) through the neighborhood this past summer, I spotted a mother raccoon and four babies. A block farther along I came across a house with three large raised beds filled with corn. The plants, healthy, dark green and crowded with ears, brought vivid memories of my father and his summer battles to save his crop from four-legged masked bandits.

Corn was different 60 years ago in the Catskill Mountains. If it wasn’t cooked quickly, the kernels lost their sweetness. They became dry, tough and tasteless. Even massive amounts of butter didn’t help much. The approved Catskill method for cooking corn was to bring a large pot of water to a boil, rush to the garden, pick several ears, husk them as you ran to the house, and dump them in the pot.

But first the corn had to be nurtured to a perfect state of ripeness. If you’re from the Midwest or rural areas in Clark County, put aside your idea of what a cornfield looks like. Dad’s consisted of eight or 10 rows about 20 feet long. And they didn’t grow in rich, deep topsoil. Imagine scrawny plants thrusting themselves from soil so rocky we often joked that carrots had to be twisted from the ground with a wrench. Compost had to be worked into the soil each spring, the corn had to be fertilized and weeded, and fingers had to be crossed to bring rain at the right times and warm nights for the ears to mature. But, most of all, the crop had to be protected from marauders.

Over the years, my father tried every raccoon-discouraging method proposed by other corn lovers. He painted the growing ears with cayenne pepper mixed with salad oil. The raccoons weren’t put off. He hung aluminum pie pans so they’d clatter in a breeze. The raccoons quickly realized this was no threat. He ran a series of extension cords and mounted a bright light on a tall stool in the middle of the corn. Apparently this did little more than allow the raccoons a better look at the buffet.

Once I woke in the night and spotted raccoon shadows on my bedroom wall as they climbed the stalks between the light and the house. I woke my father. Using language usually reserved for bashing his thumb with a hammer, he loaded a rifle, dashed out on the front steps in his boxer shorts, and fired at the field. The raccoons scattered. But they returned the next night. And the night after that.

It was August in the Catskills, a time of humid heat and afternoon storms. Thunder echoed from the mountains and the booming made me think of the legend of Rip Van Winkle and imagine Henry Hudson’s crew bowling up there somewhere. My father’s thoughts, however, were focused on the corn and how he could thwart raccoons that came nightly to feast and pillage. When he determined that only a human presence could deter the marauders, he hatched a cunning plan. He decided to combine kids, cash, snacks and rock ‘n’ roll music for what a friend calls “Showdown in Malcolm’s Field of Schemes.”

Negotiations were held, deals were made, and my brother and I agreed to sleep out in the field on alternate nights. Tents were forbidden. No canvas would be allowed to mask the sounds of sleeping teens or the odors of their sweaty skins. So we laid down tarps, spread out sleeping bags, and covered those with old shower curtains to shield them from the dew. On my nights I was often joined by a friend or my cousin Renee. Sleeping out was an adventure and, like many adventures, had moments of fun, moments of excitement and moments of terror.

The fun involved gorging ourselves on the snacks our pay bought — Cokes, candy bars, potato chips and cheesy snacks. It also involved singing along with the tunes we managed to pick up on the transistor radio my father built from a kit. On a clear night, in a clear spot, we could bring in stations from New York City and listen to the top 40 hits. Buddy Holly was gone, but there were others and, although we couldn’t harmonize like the Everly Brothers (heck, I couldn’t harmonize with a smoke alarm), we did our best to make out the lyrics through blasts of static and chimed in. The singing, broken by occasional cries of “stay away, raccoons” went on far into the night.

Finally, sleepiness prevailed over sugar intake and we turned off our flashlights and tuned in to fears created by our imaginations from sounds that seemed louder and more menacing in the dark. The leaves of the corn rustled against a background wall of noise created by crickets and katydids. Owls hooted, twigs snapped and we shivered and shuddered. There weren’t many bears in the mountains back then, but there were plenty of skunks, snakes, and possibly wildcats. We knew they were all around us. We knew that at any moment they could —

And then my mother was calling for us to wake up, the sun was bright in our eyes, and our mission was complete. We may have fallen asleep as cowards, but we arose as heroes. We’d saved the corn. We were one day closer to feasting on it. And we were one day closer to arguing about whether it was better to gnaw off the kernels in rings around the ear, or in rows from end to end.

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