one winter afternoon i came home from work and let the dogs out into the back yard. it's a small yard, a brooklyn yard, and the far side of it is only ten or fifteen feet from the near side. the far side is bordered by the fence that separates humanity from the subway cut beyond. on this day, perched on the fence was a fat raccoon. in my mind, all daytime raccoons have rabies so the dogs and i hurried back inside.
several months earlier, may or june, our school's front yard was host to a family of opossums, so when several students asked me today if i'd seen the raccoon on the roof i should not have been all that surprised. i looked out the window and there he was perched at the edge of a steeply pitched roof, four stories from the ground. from the elementary school's playground, to be exact. rabies, i said. stupid raccoon. but how does a raccoon get up there? plenty of people offered up brilliant ideas about how a raccoon gets four stories high. city folks just assumed the thing had walked up the side of the wall. my favorite was that he came in the building unnoticed and walked up four flights of stairs, somehow managed to get past several locked doors and leaped out onto the roof, only to find that it wasn't quite where he wanted to be. raccoons do, after all, have thumbs.
the police came. some fire guys came. they aren't really trained to rescue an animal that will probably manage to throw them off the roof if approached. animal control has been too busy and the raccoon is on a wait list.
i want him to come down. although i do not care for raccoons (up close, they are like giant, wide-hipped rats wearing bandit masks) i do not want to watch any animal slowly roast on a roof in plain sight of several hundred children. he looks sad and scared and although i know that this is because he is clearly the stupidest raccoon in the world and his death would strengthen the raccoon gene pool, it is in my job description an in my heart to champion the cause of those who sometimes make poor decisions. the city folks say that when it gets cooler tonight he will get back down the way he got up. i hope the maintenance guys left the door to the stairs unlocked.
2 comments:
Hah! Just take Guthrie up there. That would show the racoon! Or not.
we would have to to take the raccoon down onto level ground first, then let guthrie teach him a lesson. guthrie falls off the back of the couch from time to time.
a good note: the raccoon was nowhere to be seen at 6:30 this morning when i first dragged myself up to the fourth floor. i now think he lives in the attic and am hoping we'll have an adventure where he breaks into the fourth floor hallway and runs amok.
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