"The Raccoon in a Quandary" - Jimmy Blackmon

When I was just a small boy, no more than twelve years old, I learned to trap raccoons. My father had bought me two Plott hounds as a present for my twelfth birthday. I wanted to train my dogs to hunt, so I needed a live raccoon to teach the dogs to smell, track and ultimately tree raccoons. So, I went to the fount of knowledge in my world. I asked the old men who spent their days sitting on benches in front of my mother’s store how to go about trapping a live raccoon. These were sage, old men who almost always had an answer to life’s questions, and when they didn’t they made one up.

One such old man in bib overalls told me how to catch a raccoon. I tried it, and it worked. I found a hollow log and drilled a hole in it. The hole was large enough for a raccoon to stick his hand into, but smaller than the cap of a coke bottle. I then took a coke top and placed it inside the log, so that a raccoon could reach down into the log with his hand and grasp the shiny coke top, but could not pull his hand out with the coke top in his grasp.

I placed the log by a stream; a spot where I had seen raccoon tracks. I took a few large fishing minnows and scattered them around the log and left. When I returned the next morning, to my excitement, there was a raccoon. The raccoon had found the minnows and ate them, but while searching for more minnows he’d seen the shining coke top in the log. He reached through the small hole I’d drilled and grasped the top, but when he tried to pull it out he found that his hand would not fit through the hole. Still, he would not let go of the shiny object.

As I approached, he saw me. He panicked. He jumped back and forth across the log. He growled in frustration and anger. He pulled and pulled, but to no avail. His hand would not fit out of the hole. He feared that I would capture or worse, kill him. Still, he would not let go. All he had to do was release his grasp upon the thing that held him prisoner – something that was really of no significance, but he could not bring himself to let go. I simply walked up to the freighted, frustrated, captive raccoon and put a burlap bag over him. Then I took a stick and pried the top out of his hand. As easy as that, his hand slipped right out of the hole.

All the coon had to do to go free was let go of that which held him captive, and he would have been free and safe to go. Sometimes that is how it is with us. We can’t let go of the things that bind us, that hold us captive. Yet, all we have to do to free ourselves is to let go.

Jimmy Blackmon, Colonel, US Army Retired, https://www.jimmyfblackmon.com/