It doesn’t matter what town you live in or vacation near in the Northwoods, when the sun goes down you never know what kind of animals will visit your house or cabin. Some of those critters can be dangerous, while others are just a nuisance. In the late 1960s when my family rented a cottage for the week on Martha Lake near Mercer, we encountered one of those night visitors. If your old enough, do you remember those galvanized steel trash cans? That was the type of garbage can was placed just outside the kitchen door of our cottage and the lid was secured to the point my father needed two hands to open it, but it was impossible for myself to do  so at that age. It might have been the location of this cottage (tucked in the woods away from the other cabins) because the second morning of our awesome Northwoods vacation, we woke to find the garbage can on its side, lid off and garbage scattered everywhere. Needless to say, after this happened again the following morning, my dad was determined to find out what animal was causing this carnage.

That night after my mother and sister went to bed, I sat anxiously (but kind of scared) at the kitchen table with dad. With only the flickering of a small candle for light, we sat quietly waiting to hear any commotion outside. Because of the difficulty of opening this container, I couldn’t tell you what kind of animal my dad thought it was, but the first thing that came to my mind was, it could very well be a bear. Well, it didn’t take too long before we heard the garbage can being knocked over and the sounds of lid being ripped off. As I stood behind dad anticipating a huge bear being only a few feet away, he quietly opened the door. In the beam of his flashlight, sat one of the biggest raccoons I have ever seen. Obviously, it didn’t feel threatened, because it looked up at us then continued to dine on our food scrapes.

At this point, dad closed the door, turned on the kitchen light and retrieved his camera. To me, this is the best part of this little story. Again, if you’re old enough, you might remember those old 35-millimeter cameras some of our parents had where you inserted a new bulb in front of a huge aluminum reflector each time you took a low light picture. Well, this was the type of camera my farther was about to use to capture the wild animal outside our door. With the huge camara in hand and a new bulb installed, I was instructed to slowly open the door and with Mr. Coon looking up at the two of us, dad snapped the picture. When we finally got our vision back from that monster flash, the raccoon was gone and did not return for the remainder of our vacation. I guess the moral of this story is, to get rid of wild animals around your house or cabin, find one of those old cameras with the aluminum reflector flash. I’m sure we all have things we remember from our childhood that makes us smile, and this was just one of those great memories I have as a child vacationing in the Northwoods. One topic I will cover soon that might surprise you is, how these masked bandits can kill you. Trust me, you do not want to clean up after this type of night visitor.