During high school I went on trip to Puerto Rico that was sponsored by the Spanish class.  The stated purpose of the trip was to expand our horizons.  In my case, the unstated purpose was to ride around in a Toyota Tercel with my host-stepfather who due to a recent, unsurprising car accident, limped around in a thigh-high cast and crutches and drove his car under the influence of a mix of prescription opiates, nine Budweisers, and lines of cocaine at stop lights.  At the time I spoke about eleven words of Spanish and none of them included “I would prefer not to be here, or to eat dried out pork from this roadside stand while you sweat profusely into your tank top” so I got to be a designated passenger instead of hanging around my host family’s house where they had carrier pigeons, a donkey and a mango tree.

For obvious reasons, I was moderately excited to leave my host family and thrilled when our group reunited for a trip to the island of Culebra, where we assisted a man who looked like a fat Jimmy Buffet in his quest to help mother turtles successfully lay their eggs.  In theory, the act of transplanting turtle eggs could be extremely boring, but when it was combined with the chance to sleep on a piece of plastic while getting devoured by mosquitoes it was still boring, but presented a number of distracting challenges.  Unfortunately for our group, Jimmy was a safety nut and in his thick Baltimore accent, spent about 3 hours informing us that meddling with sea mammals, especially those whose decision-making is impaired by endorphin excess, was basically as dangerous as running through traffic, or for example, driving around poor sections of San Juan in a Toyota Tercel with a drunken host-stepfather. 

Despite an unexplained rash on my neck, the night with the turtles was a success but I came away with a new appreciation for the power of wild animals, and the respect one must pretend to have for that power if in the company of a self-important biologist who threatens to report one's insubordination to one’s parents.

For the last twelve years I haven’t spent much time thinking about my respect for wild things until recently, when for some reasons relating to the fact that our house has no insulation and large holes in its eaves, we become parents of an obese raccoon as well as about 300 hundred squirrels who are always in a hurry.

None of the animals has technically made it inside of our living space, however, there have been at least two instances of raccoons staring creepily at me while I was in the shower, and one instance of my wife calling me 70 times while I was skiing in Vermont so that I could promise her that in the event the raccoon was able to chew through the wall and into our bedroom, she would be able to defend herself by staying under the covers.

I raised the issue of the animals with my landlord who pretended he would do something about it and promptly did not mention it for nearly a month so this week I decided to take matters into my own hands.  The squirrels were an easy fix as their hole was conveniently the size of the wine bottle that was sitting on our stairs in a recycle bin.  As long as nobody looks at our house from above, or climbs on a ladder, or squirrels are stronger than I think and figure out how to move a wine bottle, they will no longer be screwing around above our dining room.

The raccoon, however, is a different story. On a recent wintry evening I tried to scare it away but when I screamed expletives and banged a pan against the ceiling it merely glanced in my direction and then disappeared into my gutter to take advantage of heat in our insulation-free crawl space.

Today I tried a different solution that involved politically correct “poultry” wire and a 2x4 that I found lying in the driveway.  After I painstakingly nailed the board over the hole and positioned the wire over the rest of the opening I was disappointed to see that there is a hole of similar size on the underside of the gutter. 

I was running late so didn't have the time or energy to take a thorough approach to the newly identified problem.  I did, however, drape the leftover wire sort of near the other hole.  One part of me believes that this will be enough to solve my problem, but a much larger part of me imagines this will merely require him to set down his BlackBerry before he climbs inside.