The sad, sad saga of Cooney and Earl

To say that my late friend and neighbor Earl was an extraordinarily unique individual could never do him justice. He was, indeed, quite the character. Shortly after my wife and I settled down into our cedar-sided hillside home along the Broad Run Creek in 1979, Earl and his young family moved into his home on the other side of the road. While our new house was constructed at the base of a hillside, Earl’s was built at the tippy-top of the mountainous hill opposite from ours, and it featured one of the steepest, most treacherous driveways you could ever imagine, carved out of the hillside with precipitous banks on either side.

More than anything else, Earl was a dedicated outdoorsman, a sportsman who loved to hunt and fish... and oh yes, he also loved to party and mostly party like it was 1999 (which it wasn’t, quite yet). Political correctness and traffic safety were of no concern to this man, nor was sobriety a significant strand of his DNA.

I remember one evening sometime back in 1980 something when he returned home from a night of bacchanalian revelry and paused his Jeep Cherokee at the mouth of his driveway. I happened to be watching from our front deck as he gunned the engine and charged up the driveway’s sharp incline.

He hadn’t gone more than 100 feet or so when a steering miscalculation ran the Jeep up onto the bank and flipped it over onto its roof. From there gravity took over and the Cherokee, now riding on its roof rack, slid back down the driveway. The angle where the driveway met the road was so acute that when the upside down Jeep hit the road it flipped headlong back over onto its wheels. I remember how the tumbling tail lights traced the somersault route the unlucky vehicle traveled that night. The righted Jeep now rested in the middle of the road. It was a minute or two before Earl, no doubt somewhat disoriented from the episode, gathered himself, again gunned the engine, turned the Cherokee around, and rushed back up the driveway, this time successfully reaching his hilltop homestead.

The next day fragments of red plastic that had been the car’s taillights littered the mouth of the driveway and bore testimony to Earl’s topsy-turvy tumble of the night before. When we met that morning he recounted the event, noting that when the Jeep flipped upside down and back over again he was pummeled by an avalanche of discarded beer bottles and sticks of firewood that had accumulated for months in the Jeep’s cargo area. Beaten and battered, he somehow survived the ordeal none the worse for wear, a lesson not really learned. That

was pure Earl.

But the first thing you noticed when you entered his home’s trophy room was the opossum suspended from the ceiling rafters hanging by its prehensile tail... or maybe the full-sized porcupine climbing the wall. Then, when your eyes adjusted to the dim, shadowy room, they might focus on the woodchuck peering from the corner or the fox cowering near the doorway. This taxidermy assembly was complemented with numerous mounted deer heads, bears, antelope, turkey, partridge, woodcock, doves, quail, skunk, bass, trout, grouse, squirrel, geese, ducks, and the tail feathers from over 300 cockbirds. But the piece de resistance of Earl’s mounted menagerie was the five foot water snake complete with a hapless rodent trapped within its open jaws. The Museum of Natural History had nothing on this guy.

Live animals were also part of Earl’s entourage. These included two Labrador retrievers and a pet raccoon he called Cooney. Raccoons really don’t make good pets (in fact, these days it’s against the law in Pennsylvania to keep them in captivity) and once they reach a certain age, they’re likely to turn on you. So it was that the captive Cooney longed for his freedom and one fateful day escaped from his cage. But he didn’t go far, and would often show up for the handouts Earl left for him in his backyard. While this arrangement may have worked out fine for Earl and Cooney, it didn’t sit well with Reuben, Earl’s next door neighbor.

That’s because Reuben and his wife had a poodle which spent most of its time in their screenedin porch that summer. Cooney, perhaps drawn by the aroma of dog food, began showing up outside Reuben’s porch every night. The protective poodle, looking for a fight, would attack Cooney through the screen. The two furry combatants would then scrap and claw at each other from their respective

sides of the screen as their confrontational efforts carried them from one end of the porch to the other. Reuben and his wife immediately grew tired of these nightly skirmishes, fearing for the safety of their pooch and the integrity of their porch screen. They pleaded with Earl to do something about it, pleas that initially fell on deaf ears.

These raccoon versus poodle bouts went on for about a week. I remember how one balmy Friday night I was hosting a friendly poker game in our finished basement with a cadre of players that included my tobacco chewing neighbor, Earl. I recall how he always kept a ready bottle of beer on one side of his seat and a second, empty bottle on the other side that served as a makeshift spittoon. About an hour into the game, Reuben, who did not play poker, showed up at the front door. He was not a happy camper and he was there to see Earl. Cooney was at it again and Reuben and the Mrs. were fed up and refused to endure Cooney’s hijinks any longer. Reuben’s palpable anger and threatening posture convinced Earl it was time to take immediate action, which he promised to do the next day.

Earl knew I owned a Havahart Trap designed to catch raccoonsized critters alive and unharmed, so he asked to borrow it in order to capture Cooney. I knew that Earl also owned a smaller version of the Havahart Trap made for catching squirrel-sized critters. Back then we kept two horses and our turn-out shed had been plagued with rats of late, so the next day Earl and I swapped traps. He would use mine to catch Cooney, and I would use his to evict the rats from our barn. Earl set the trap in his back yard that night and the next morning found it occupied not by Cooney, but by a possum. His two daughters, who were middle school age back then, expressed concerns about the danger such a toothy

creature might pose. Earl assured them that opossums were relatively harmless and attempted to demonstrate this fact by sticking his hand into the trap with the animal. But apparently br’er possum hadn’t gotten the memo and immediately helped himself to a mouthful of Earl’s fingers. Indignant, Earl snatched his bloodied hand from the opossum’s jaws and immediately stormed into the house, grabbed his pistol, and unceremoniously dispatched the poor possum.

He then took the deceased animal to the lab to determine if it might be rabid. Earl thought this might explain why an animal he considered so lethargic and docile might actually bite him. Earl spent the next few days fretting about the prospect of having to endure a painful regimen of rabies shots. His sigh of relief was tangible when he learned the possum had tested negative for rabies and Earl would not have to face those excruciating injections after all.

That night he again laid the trap for Cooney and the next morning, voilà, success! He transferred the raccoon to a tall, wooden box, and grabbed a treat to feed his long lost ring-tailed friend. But when Earl reached down, treat in hand, to welcome Cooney back, the ungrateful creature chomped down not on the offered slice of apple, but on Earl’s vulnerable, possum pre-chewed fingers. Earl cried out in pain, snatched back his bloody hand, and took a closer look. This raccoon sported a much longer tail than Cooney. Why? Because it wasn’t Cooney. It was a different raccoon, angry, wild, and possibly rabid. As soon as he realized his mistake, Earl bolted back into the house to retrieve his pistol. But the moment of déjà vu ended right then and there when Earl, revolver at the ready, discovered that in the few moments it took him to go for his gun, this wily raccoon had toppled over the box

and made clean his escape.

Earl would be forced to endure an agonizing series of rabies shots after all. And, to the everlasting relief of his neighbor Reuben, Reuben’s wife, and especially Reuben’s poodle, Earl finally managed to capture Cooney. Not long after that the boar raccoon grew mean-spirited, turned on Earl and one of his daughters, and subsequently suffered the same fate as the unfortunate opossum.

Meanwhile I managed to catch a large rat in our barn using Earl’s Havahart trap. When that happened, I gave Earl a call to report my success. “I caught a big rat in the barn and I’m going to take it for a swim in the stream,” I told him. “But before I do, I thought you might want to stick your fingers in the cage with him, just for old times’ sake.”

My illustrious friend and neighbor, still undergoing a painful course of rabies shots, was not amused.

IN-SEASON TROUT STOCKING THIS WEEK

The folks of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission continue their trout stocking efforts this week with the following streams in our area slated to get fresh batches of brown, brook, rainbow, and golden/palomino trout: BERKS COUNTY >> Little Swatara Creek (4/20), Ontelaunee Creek (4/22), Tulpehocken Creek (4/22). CHESTER COUNTY >> Buck Run (4/22) East Branch Brandywine Creek (4/20), East Branch White Clay Creek (4/22), Pickering Creek (4/20). DELAWARE COUNTY >> Darby Creek (4/21), Ithan Creek (4/21), Little Darby Creek (4/21). MONTGOMERY COUNTY >> Skippack Creek (4/21).