If I was feeling a little worn out after a day of raking up dead leaves in the front yard, when I ran into Duncan at the bar Sunday night he set me straight. “I have to rake apples,” he said. Duncan lives in the outback, Naples. I guess he has some apple trees on his property.
“Why don’t you rent some pigs and let them eat the apples?” I said.
Duncan ignored my solution. “I have deer that come out to eat the apples,” he said. Duncan has a serious deer issue. He hits about three a year. In fact he’s got a brand-new car after the last one was totaled in a deer collision. I’m not sure if Consumer Reports rates vehicles for deer-collision survivability.
Duncan also has coyote problems. Yeah, they howl. But what’s really creepy, Duncan said, is when they’re hanging around outside his fence. “They communicate with each other in the same vocal range as humans,” he said. “They sound like humans partying.”
I guess Duncan would be fine with allowing the deer to eat all of the apples they want if it weren’t for the bears. They like apples as well. And it’s bear season. Someone shot a 500-pound bear near his house. Someone else got one that weighed 250 pounds.
Think of all of those apples rotting on the ground, fermenting. Now I’m starting to understand the dangers of country living. This is why I live in the city. I’m not interested in taking the dog for the morning walk and running into a 500-pound drunken bear.