Raccoon Pizza
Back in the days when I used to drink there was not quite anything like that last cold bottle of beer at the end of the night. It was a drink that you would savor every drop as you replayed the events of the day in your mind. It would lull you into moments of gratification as you determined that it was not a bad world after all and that life is everything that it is cracked up to be.
On one such occasion we were at the cottage and it had been one of those wondrous August evenings where you could sit outside and not be driven mad by the insect horde. They had pretty well burnt off for the season and the rest of the summer was yours to be master of your domain I was there with my brother and his wife. The evening had been good, filled with lots of reminiscing and anecdotes and dreams of things to come. But eventually after the clock swung past its midpoint for the night my brother and sister-in-law determined that they had their fill for the day and it was time for bed.
I was not quite ready to turn in. I still had about half a bottle of beer left and I nursed it slowly as I looked out onto the moonlit lake and heard a pair of loons chortling to each other in the distance. The evening was magical and I was caught up in its web. My mind meandered between the events of the day and the stirrings of the night amidst the trees that surrounded our cottage deck.
Eventually that bottle of beer had disappeared, its drops transformed into my pleased consciousness. I still did not want to go to bed. I wanted the night to last forever. With this in mind I wandered to our outdoor fridge that sat on the deck. This fridge was built back in 1945 and it was unsurpassed by any modern refrigerator in its ability to keep things ice cold. It had been sitting outside through summers and winters for nigh on a pair of decades and it would not give in to the elements. It would not be conquered and it was king of making things frigid.
The only thing broke down on it was its door latch. It had seized and could no longer be relied upon to give you entry to the inside. But this did not earn the fridge a one-way ticket to the dump for the bungee cord had been invented and through its hyper-powerful elastics the fridge door would stay shut allowing the coldness to stay inside and create the perfect conditions for an icy bottle of beer – the very one that I was yearning to savor at that moment.
Through the miracle of the bungee cord all you had to do to get inside of the fridge was to pull on the door and the play in the cord would permit you entry. As I did so, I had to squint in the faint illumination where that last bottle of beer was hiding amid all the other food that sat in the fridge along with it. For a brief moment I believed that I saw another pair of eyes staring back at me. I paid it no never mind as I was on a mission to get my beer and there it was resting on its side on the top level beside some bottles of pop. I took hold of my prize, felt the cold sweat that had formed around it and twisted off its cap as I went back to the deck table to continue my meditations about how things were so beautiful here in the Kawarthas.
But as I sat down something was troubling me. Even though I had many beer that day I truly felt that I did not imagine those pair of eyes inside the fridge. I had to go investigate. I returned to the fridge and this time opened the door as wide as I could to allow more light to enter that dark frozen cavity.
There, inside the fridge sitting upon a store-bought pizza was a raccoon. It looked up at me with a smug expression that said that it was not going any place until it finished its pizza. I returned its expression and shut the door and went back to my beer. First things first. But eventually after several slow hauls from the bottle I realized that I had better do something about it.
I went inside the cottage and knocked at my brother’s bedroom door and said to him that there was a raccoon inside the fridge. He was not in any hurry either and the news to him was not that startling. But after a few moments where he drove the sleep from his mind he came out to the deck and had a look for himself and saw the raccoon munching away at the pizza. He also saw another bottle of beer in there and this he took and sat with me at the table while leaving the fridge door open so that the raccoon could make good its escape.
Our beers were pretty well empty and still the raccoon was sitting in the fridge. It was time to do something about it. We closed the fridge door and using boat paddles we began swatting as hard as we could against the side of the fridge making a noise that we were sure would wake up people all the way across the lake. This we did for what seemed to be several minutes. Anything inside of that fridge would have ringing ears for months to come after all that ruckus that we created.
We opened the door once more and this time the biggest raccoon that either of us had seen slowly waddled out of the fridge still smacking its lips from the pizza that it ate. It was in no hurry to leave and took its time to mosey across the deck and then eventually disappear in the bush.
After that occasion we never left food in that fridge again. It had become exclusively a beer fridge and it still is at work almost twenty years later serving up the coldest beers on the lake. However we have gone to a smaller bungee cord. We and raccoons can no longer pull on the door to have it open for us. We have to remove the cord to gain entry. But the little extra work is still worth it. I no longer drink alcohol but I do have the coldest Mountain Dew in the Kawarthas.
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