How We Have Habits (Or: Why Raccoons are Grubby)

We’ve started to develop habits, routines.

For the past week or so, Mer and I have been camping most nights. Mostly in Oregon state parks, mostly for free. The state parks themselves are all pretty similar: They have sites for cyclists, sites for motorists and sites for motorhomists. They have free showers, a loud trash compactor (usually located somewhere near the cyclists’ tents) and top-of-the-morning-to-you park rangers who tend to adorn their park ranger vests with more badges and pins than you would probably find at the army surplus store.

With the familiar backdrop, our own regular habits have developed quickly.

They involve the swift removal of bike shorts and shoes, fist pumping in celebration of a good day, a beer on the beach (when both are available), a brief yet thoughtful surveying of available tent placement options, stretching, tent-pitching, dinner and after-dinner yogurt.

Did you know that individuals yogurts cost 40 cents at Safeway? Now you do.

We have an additional habit when the parks we visit have yurts (small canvass cabins). In these parks we usually spend several minutes fantasizing about renting one of these gloriously spacious shelters. We bike up to them, peer inside, vocally envy the yurt dwellers, sometimes check for an unlocked yurt. Ultimately though, we never opt to spring the extra twenty dollars to actually sleep in one.

Bedtime is around nine.
A half hour later if dinner was extravagant (like rice) or we made a friend.

And that’s about it. Although there is one part of the camping routine we have been adding recently: high-security raccoon prevention. Protecting our foodstuff against the those cunning little forest grubbers is not exactly a new habit, but ever since an experience at Beverly Beach state park in middle Oregon we have had to up our game.

That night we went through the routine: bike shorts off, check. Yurt-covet, check. Bacon for dinner, check. Yogurt, clean-up, nine o’clock bedtime, check, check, check. On this particular night we knew that the little grubbers were out and around. We could see and hear them. But with no obvious trees to nestle our buckets in, we felt that bungee cords (pulled tightly over snap-on lids) would be plenty secure.

Mer piled her buckets one on top of the other with a single bungee tightly pulled over both.
I left mine firmly attached to my bike, leaned against a tree with two bungees on each bucket.

Before you read on, just imagine, momentarily, the work it would take you or I to remove two tight bungee cords from a sealed plastic bucket in order to access the green pepper, carrots and eggs inside.

Now imagine a raccoon doing the same. It would take some work.

They got Mer’s bucket-tower first. It was probably around ten, it was raining and we’d gone to sleep. Mer woke up to a noise, unzipped the tent door and saw the tower tipped over, the bungee cord off, the contents of a bucket poured out.

No little grubbers in sight.

Since the incident had just taken place, the stuff wasn’t too wet. Mer packed it back up and decided that the park restrooms would be the only safe place for her stuff to spend then night. While she grumpily hiked to the restroom, I fell back asleep, confident in my double bungee fortification.

When we woke up with the sun hours later, Mer again unzipped the tent door which faced the tree where my bike had been leaning. She let out a kind of gasp-chuckle, I think she found what she saw both funny and impressive.

There was my bike, on it’s side, with one bucket wide open. Both bungee cords off and a gallery of my dragged and dropped in various patches of soggy ground. Most of my things were still there, although the little grubbers had carried my FM radio a surprising distance and put some impressive bite marks in my hardcover moleskine notebook. They had made off with a carton of two eggs and a bad of carrots.

The green pepper, surprisingly, they had poked at, but left.
Much like we had the night before.

Since then we’ve added food-hanging, and cussing at unseen raccoons in the dark to our routine. Usually these two practices happen simultaneously or one after the other. Sometimes, to save time, Mer will hang the food while I spit swears into the bushes.

So far, this seems to be keeping the raccoons out of our buckets.
That said, I still feel a bit anxious when we unzip the tent door each morning.

/a