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It may sound strange, but every significant turn in my life has involved a raccoon. I don’t know why that is, but there you have it. It may have started with Ranger Rick the Raccoon when I was six. I played the 45 until the grooves were so scratched that the record itself snarled over Rick’s words. Or perhaps I knew it when I was seven and picked a Davy Crockett coonskin hat as a Disneyland souvenir much to the consternation of my mother who clearly expressed confusion and regret at giving me the choice of a single souvenir. “You want . . . that?”
The recent scaling of a 25-story building in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota by one Jonathan Livingston Raccoon captivated a breathless Twitter following. By the time I tuned in to the story, I recognized me in that lone, adventuring raccoon. It was, at its essence, me.
“They don’t plan things out,” said York University psychologist Suzanne MacDonald, who studies raccoons. “They don’t say, ‘If I climb this building, I will be stuck.’ They just do the thing and regret it later. It makes them very successful in the city because they grab onto things and do things and fiddle around with things.”
Yep. Welcome to my world.
♦◊♦
I was in my youth when the 1980 Winter Olympics played out in Lake Placid, NY. I appreciated an entirely new perspective on athletics during those days of competition, having never fully appreciated what the mind was capable of overcoming. More captivating than the events for me was reading the athlete profiles. Many faced solid walls in their life that would stop most anyone else in their tracks from even considering competition, much less becoming victors. Choosing to scale those walls—with no guarantee what waited at the top—set them apart from all the rest. Being told I could never do a certain thing made it precisely the thing to do. Starting from behind giave me “underdog power.”
Being told I could never do a certain thing made it precisely the thing to do. Starting from behind gave me “underdog power.”
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There was figure skater Scott Hamilton who at barely 110 pounds survived a congenital brain tumor, only to quit training due to financial constraints four years before realizing his dream of competing in the 1980 games. With help, however, he returned to the ice, and his performance at Lake Placid set the stage for gold in 1984. There was Phil Mahre who fractured his left tibia at the pre-Olympic giant slalom, yet returned to take silver in the slalom at Lake Placid.
And, of course, there was the “Miracle on Ice,” the improbable upset victory of the US hockey team over the vastly superior Soviet team. “Do you believe in miracles?” exasperated sportscaster Al Michaels asked. Yes. Yes, I did. I walked away from those Olympics fundamentally changed in how I approached everything. Being told I could not do a certain thing made it precisely the thing to do. Starting from behind gave me “underdog power.” And there was nothing more potent. And it all started when I embraced the spirit of the 1980 games. I even had the official keychain—a plastic talisman I carried with me everywhere—graced with the image of Roni, the US Olympic mascot. A raccoon.
It was during this period that I left my sheltered life in the rural Great Lakes suburbs of upstate New York and ventured out to find my personal El Dorado in Los Angeles, California. I started by working a straight-up commission sales job that relocated to Long Beach a few months after I joined the team, a 30-mile journey from my Glendale apartment. My car was in no shape to do the commute, but I was committed to the job and was often able to get rides from coworkers if I met them in Hollywood, about six miles away. Hitching rides—which I sometimes had to do—was always risky, but especially then. Bodies of young male hitchhikers my age were being found strangled and dumped all over the city, so the days I had to hitch carried a particularly disquieting pall above and beyond what any commute should be about. The fear took its toll, which showed itself clearly on one particular night.
At the next light, I managed to unlock the door and bolted out with a quick, “Thanks for the ride, but this is perfect. Bye!”
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It was after a long work day. My crew dropped me off at our Hollywood and Vine office after dark, and I was left to my own devices to get home from there. So began one of the strangest evenings of my life. I thumbed for a ride, and a bearded man in a gray sedan pulled over for me. When I got in and closed the door, the lock automatically clicked. That did little to make me feel comfortable. did I just get in the wrong car? I studied the door carefully to see what control I had to unlock it if the need arose. As he drove down the road, I noticed something that looked like a bullet hanging by a string from his rearview mirror. I asked him what it was. He replied, “Ammo.” Great. Who was he planning to shoot? And why would he keep his ammunition on a string? Whatever. I was far too busy indulging my irrational fears to be bothered with such details. He had ammo and that’s all I needed to know. When he reached over and grabbed it, the car suddenly filled with toxic fumes. I had never before smelled what I later learned was amyl nitrate, but it completely appropriated my senses and I was convinced I was being gassed. The fact that the driver would be gassing himself as well, making such a scenario an absurdity, failed to bust through my wall of unreasoned fear. At the next light, I managed to unlock the door and bolted out with a quick, “Thanks for the ride, but this is perfect. Bye!”
I now found myself at the start of a long stretch of dark road wending through a wilderness of security condos. I might as well have been walking through the woods at night. I started my long, lonely trek to the Promised Land—and apartment in Glendale I called home. About a mile down the road, a lone car slowed down behind me, then stopped. The driver got out, holding something, and approached me. Okay. Now I was going to die. So I ran like a madman down the middle of the road, saw an open garage, ran through it, and opened a door that led me to a quiet courtyard. The only sound was my own panting. I stayed there for what seemed a good fifteen minutes, then dared to venture back and finish my journey. Home was only four more miles down the dark road, and a fast walk would get me there in an hour. Mustering what little courage I had, I stepped back into the cool, quiet night. But ten minutes down the road, the same car reappeared, slowly crawling behind me and training me in its headlamps. I was terrified – what could they possibly want with me? Fortunately, at that moment, a LAPD patrol car also drove down the road and I ran out to flag it down. I told the officers I was being followed and asked them—no, begged them—to get me safely to Glendale.
I was always told that if a raccoon felt cornered, it could tear you apart with its long, razor-sharp claws. Just in case you survived that vicious shredding, it would bite you for good measure to be sure you died of rabies later.
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Sitting in the back of that patrol car, I traded danger for humiliation. One officer asked sarcastically, “What’s the matter – you have a fight with your boyfriend?” Really? Whatever. For some reason, it was easier to suffer insults than the certain dangers that awaited me on the street, so I ignored the snide remarks of my saviors and they dropped me off at my apartment building. Home. I felt like kissing the ground and gleefully followed the sidewalk alley to the stairs that led to the running balcony. I started up the steps, singing softly to myself. Halfway up, I looked to my right, eye-level with the floor of the balcony, and a furry face was looking right back at me. A foot away. It wasn’t a dog. Or a cat. The registers of my mind started a quickly rolling data analysis as I tried to determine just what I was looking at. It wasn’t a dog. Nor was it a cat. Big body. Little face. Pointy fox-like nose. Super-long claws. Black mask . . .
I’m sure my neighbors carry their own memory of the blood-curdling shriek “Raccoon!” that shattered the 2 AM tranquility. I was always told that if a raccoon felt cornered, it could tear you apart with its long, razor-sharp claws. And just in case you survived that vicious shredding, it would bite you for good measure to be sure you died of rabies later. Never mind that I wasn’t cornering it, because, you see, he was putting himself in a position to be cornered so he would have an excuse to kill me. I stumbled over my own feet in my rush down the stairs, ran out the alley and across the street. Pant. Pant. Pant (a familiar breathing pattern that night). Another fifteen-minute wait. Then, a tentative venture back to my door that once seemed so close yet now so far. I silently tiptoed up the stairs. No raccoon. I got to the top and turned to walk to my door which was halfway down the length of the running balcony. It was then that I saw it. The raccoon. It was at the other end of the balcony. And as I walked towards my door and thus toward the raccoon, it walked towards me. I fumbled quickly for my keys—there would not be a second to spare to get that door open. Fumble. Walk. Sweat. Fumble. Walk. Sweat. Fumble. I opened the screen door and jabbed the key several times until it hit home and sank into the tumbler. With a sharp twist, I opened the door with the raccoon an arm’s length away. I slipped in and quickly shut the screen door. Safe.
And peering at me through the screen was the raccoon. When my heart stopped racing, it started to melt. Was the poor thing, now no longer a threat, hungry? Thirsty? I asked myself a question I never asked before: what do raccoons eat? I got a bowl of water, summoned the courage that eluded me all night, gingerly opened the door, and placed it in front of the raccoon. The creature looked at the offering, stuck a paw in the water, pulled it out, and just stared at me. So I sat there at the door, unloaded my thoughts to the animal, told it all about my day. The raccoon locked its eyes with mine and listened intently. I looked at this little creature and finally saw the folly of my fears. I was running all night from men with ammo, mystery cruisers on dark streets, and vicious raccoons looking for any excuse to kill. There was enough in the world for me to truly fear without inventing new fears. And it was only when I looked into the face of something I did not know that I realized that was precisely what fear was.
The next day, when I asked around, I was told that this was a domesticated raccoon kept on the premises by the landlord.
♦◊♦
A month later, the killings along the L.A. freeways came to an end with the arrest of the man who would eventually be executed for the murders of 14 boys and young men my age, with the actual count being as high as 36 victims. By then, I had made a commitment to leave a job that couldn’t even support my commuting needs, and I eventually went back to school. My life pivoted at a screen door in Glendale, California, talking with a raccoon.
The greatest measure of my growth as a man has been to learn that fear is often a filler emotion. It oozes into the spaces we do not understand, fills the cracks of doubt and wedges our lives apart in bits and pieces. Sometimes that fear is real and warranted. But whether or not that is true, the opposite of fear – if we dare to climb from its abyss – is knowledge. Like a lone raccoon scaling an improbable wall in St. Paul, Minnesota, life’s greatest moments are often little more than just facing our fears and learning what is up there.
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Photo credit: Pixabay
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