Feeling that we
had “mastered” the art of taxidermy, my brothers and I were constantly on the
lookout for prime critters to stuff. We
found and stuffed gophers, squirrels, pigeons, ducks, pheasant, owls, rabbits
and any other poor deceased little creature we could get our hands on. But what we really wanted to stuff was a
raccoon.
Finally, one summer
morning, we found our first raccoon.
It was
summertime in the valley, and whether it was June, July, or August really
doesn’t matter. We mostly had the same
routine whichever month it was. Morning
started for us at 5 am. Pulling in
stacks of newspapers, dropping them on the floor in my bedroom as it was right
in the front part of the house; we would talk and joke while we each rolled our
hundred plus papers and packed our paper bags for the delivery routes. Then off on our bikes to ride our section of
town tossing papers in the general direction of a front door, doing our best to
miss the plants, windows, and other fragile things.
Back to the
house for the breakfast that Mom would typically have prepared for us before
she and Dad headed out the door to work. While eating, we would pass around the
list of chores that Dad had made up for the day; we’d decide which ones needed
all three of us, and which ones we could tackle individually for speed.
The three of us
could do chores faster than was considered humanly possible. Try as he might (and try he did) Dad simply
couldn’t make up a list of chores long enough to keep us boys working all
day. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for the
list to cover the entire front and part of the back of a lined legal pad of
paper. In truth, he really didn’t need
all that much done around the house.
But, he knew how
much trouble the three of us could get into if left to our own devices for any
length of time.
And while we
learned a lot from those chores; division of labor, task identification, skill set
matching, etc., those chores certainly never kept us out of trouble. Maybe they would have been enough for your
“run of the mill” boys, I wouldn’t know, having never been one. But my brothers and I were far too creative
for anything as static as a list of chores to keep us under control.
After wolfing
down breakfast and cleaning up, we would race through the divided up chores to
get them checked off the list (I said faster than humanly possible, don’t
recall saying anything about better…).
Once they were all done, we would then set out to take advantage of the
glorious days of summer in the Livermore Valley.
Summertime in
the Livermore Valley is comfortably warm for us natives. Foreigners usually say it’s downright
unpleasantly hot.
Most days flirt
in the lower triple digits with a couple weeks each year pushing up to 110-115
degrees in the shade. Mornings start out
in the mid to upper 60’s and jump into the upper 70’s as soon as the sun pokes
above the horizon. It is seldom, if ever,
cloudy with still mornings and warm breezy afternoons.
The morning we
found our first raccoon was typical. We
had powered through our paper routes, breakfast, and all but a couple chores in
record time because the night before we had decided that instead of hanging
around town and hitting the swimming pool, on that day, we were going to bike
out to the lake outside of town and swing from the rope tied to the bridge
railing.
So along about
9:30 or so, the three of us were spinning wheels a good 7 miles outside of town
headed south on Mines Road in the direction of Del Valle Lake. It was fairly cool still (right around 80
degrees) and the sun was just beginning to turning full on, but we were doing
fine. We were on track and on time to be
Tarzan’ing from the bridge well before 10:30 am.
Yep, life was
good. We’d have 4 plus hours to swing
and swim, then a quick sprint back into town and we’d be home working on the
last couple chores when Mom and Dad got home from work.
It was important
to us to let Dad feel like he had it under control.
Rounding a
corner on Mines Road, we spotted a dead raccoon lying by the side of the
road. And was it ever a big one. Nice, big, raccoon. Must have been all of 28 pounds. And in amazing shape for an animal that had
likely been killed by a car. No torn up
fur or skin at all. No crushed head; no
fur matted with dried blood; heck, the ants hadn’t even found the thing yet.
Find of a
lifetime or not, it presented a problem.
We had our
hearts set on that bridge; that rope; that drop into the cold waters of the
river. Yet here lay the coon we had been
dreaming about getting under our skinning knives. If we gathered it up and headed home, we’d
miss our day of adventure. If we pedaled
on, we just knew someone else would steal our raccoon while we were
swimming.
King Solomon
would have been stymied.
Fortunately, no
one ever accused my brother’s or I of having the wisdom of Solomon.
So, after a
couple minutes of consideration and discussion, we figured out the best
solution. Gathering up the dead raccoon,
we carried it over to the edge of the road, and stuffed it into the small metal
corrugated culvert that stuck out from the raised road bed.
And so, confident in its safety, we remounted
our bikes and headed on to the lake.
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© 2013 - Marty Vandermolen - All Rights Reserved
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