Journeys with Autism

I skinned a raccoon in the eighth grade.

Yup. Most of you thought I knew what a meme was, didn’t you? But I really did have to look it up. I can still tell you the meanings of the obscure SAT words I studied out of the big Barron’s book in the summer of 1975, but yes, I have to look up four-letter words.

Well, actually, not all of them. Some I’ve become familiar with through repeated use. Hell, yeah.

But back to the raccoon, ’cause it’s a cool story. (Really. It doesn’t get disgusting till much later in this post.) When I was in the eighth grade (1971-1972), I had an amazing science teacher named Miss Dorothy Green. Miss Green came from Colorada (that’s how she pronounced it), and she was a hunter. In the rural backwater in which I now live, she would not stand out, but back in my conservative, suburban Massachusetts grammar school, in which the girls were still required to wear skirts, I can’t believe she even got a job.

She was wonderful. One day, she brought in the pelt of a coyote that she had hunted and skinned. I thought it was cool. It still had the face on it, with teeth even, and I remember it clearly, because she let us get up close and personal with the pelt, and I got to touch the teeth.

After showing us the pelt, she said that anyone who wanted to could bring in an animal to skin. She wasn’t expecting that we’d hunt it up. She was talking roadkill. Most of the girls went “Ewwwww!” (as perhaps some of you are now), but in those days, I was still determined to prove that I was not a squeamish girl, so I took her up on the challenge. I think she’d been thinking small mammals, but I was into something much grander.

Now, there is no f***ing way that my parents were going to pick up roadkill for me to skin, but my best friend Danny Wyner had New Age parents before there were New Age parents, and one day, the perfect piece of roadkill turned up. Danny and his parents were out for a drive when they spotted a dead raccoon by the side of the road and, bless their hearts, his parents helped him bring the dead raccoon into their suburban car, suburban home, and suburban refrigerator until the next morning, when Danny lugged it into school.

(If you’re eating right now, or have anything in your stomach, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.)

It was a big f***ing raccoon, let me tell you, and Miss Green got right to work showing us what to do. For an entire week of science classes and free periods, we used razor blades to cut the sinews that held the skin to the rest of the body. When we were done, Miss Green told us that we could attach the head to a tree in a wire mesh. Why, you ask? So that insects could eat out its brain, that’s why. Then we’d have a handy-dandy raccoon skull.

The rest of the story involves a fair amount of squeamishness on everyone’s part. You see, we did separate the raccoon’s head and attach it to a tree in the woods behind our school. Problem was, it fell down. Where, I don’t know, but for the rest of the year, I was terrified to walk into the woods because all I could think about was the possibility of stepping on a raccoon skull and hearing it go crunch.

As for the pelt? Well, my grandfather was a furrier, and I just knew that he’d be the perfect person to tan it for us. Unfortunately, he did not think so. When I called him up to ask him, here’s what he said:

“What? Where’s the pelt now? In Danny’s refrigerator??? Are you crazy??? You’ve got the skin of a dead animal in Danny’s refrigerator??? Throw that thing away before you get a disease. You’re going to get a disease. I can’t believe your mother let you do this.”

So that’s the story and, as it turned out, it became the final chapter in my life as a tomboy. Nowadays, I can hardly even look at a dead mouse. When we lived on the farm and I had to trap mice, I’d use one of those electronic traps, take it outside, open it up, avert my eyes, hold it at arm’s length, and shake it out in the woods.

Ewwwww.

Thank you all for playing, and congratulations to bbsmum for guessing correctly!

© 2011 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg