Time Bandit

If I see a dead raccoon lying in the road when I am traveling, if it is not in the middle of a six-lane highway or just over the crest of a blind country hill, I always stop to pull it off the road. It is not for the raccoon. The raccoon could care less at that point. It’s for me. My raccoon’s name was Bandit, and he was mine for about a year before he reverted to his natural instincts and forgot I was his friend. I was eleven then. He had the softest paws of any animal I have ever met, and they rested like a tiny hand inside my palm. After the age of two, they were known more for their razor sharp claws, which could swing at you with blinding speed and accuracy. His other notable characteristic was that he could eat an entire stick of butter in one sitting. One can’t help but be impressed by that.

When I see a raccoon, dead or still deciding which way to run across the road, I am reminded of Bandit, or rather, of the memory of his going back to the wild (if indeed that is really where the animal control officer took him after he loaded him into the back of his truck in the “humane trap” they had used to catch him in his hideout, a decades old barn in central Kentucky). Apparently, it still hurts; enough that I am compelled to stop and drag bloody Procyon carcasses out of sight into the weeds by the road’s shoulder. I know the chance that I will return by that road is great, and I don’t want to experience the same feeling when I see his or her lifeless body again. So I hide it. And I tell myself it is out of respect for the raccoon, who in no case deserves to be killed more than once by careless passers-by. It doesn’t mean I don’t know why I really do it—it’s just something I tell myself to create a better self image. I like to think of it as positive visualization. That sounds much better than hypocrisy.

When I learned my mom would actually allow me to keep the kit we found back in the early 1970’s—something surely that must have required an act of Congress at the time given her sentiment towards vermin of all nature—I was aware that there were two acceptable names for raccoons at that time: Rascal and Bandit. Sterling North, whose book inspired the movie I won a viewing for after reading so many books over one summer vacation, had had Rascal. Rascal could have no imitators, I felt, so Bandit it was. My respect for Mr. North and his friend, Rascal, lingers on this day to the point where, having just discovered that one of the towns in which I was searching for my first home on my own (no husband, no children, no roommates) was the town in which they lived their adventures, I found myself more determined than ever that this would be the town I would permanently adopt as my own. Though I settled in the end for a home in the equally historic town of Columbus, Edgerton has been rendered as sacred in my mind as Pepin, that other Wisconsin town in which Laura Ingalls Wilder spent her childhood. I never did check the tax rates in Pepin…

Website of The Sterling North Society