Coyote Pee

A few years back, my family would spend the weekend and the summer in our lakefront home on Lake Wallenpaupak in the boonies of Pennsylvania. The house was my father's idea of paradise. He loves fishing and loved nothing more than to ride in his boat. I hated it. For me, it was pure hell spent picking up sticks, pulling weeds, cleaning, and doing laundry for my OCD parents. Since it was his pride and joy, my father wanted the house to be meticulous at all times. That meant that the yard was free of sticks, perfectly manicured, and richly presented to make all of our hillbilly toothless redneck neighbors jealous. Because my father is virtually insane, he obsessed about any little thing that would take away from the beauty of his baby. Since we were deep into the wilderness our yard would often be full of wildlife. And although my father loves animals he became involved in a mighty war against the deer who would eat all the plants in the yard that he forced my brother and I to plant. For awhile, he used a BB gun to try and scare him away. When that didn't work, he decided it was time to take some extreme measures. The next day my father purchased vials of coyote piss and about a dozen reels of a bright white string. For several hours my mother, brother, and I watched in disbelief and embarrassment out the kitchen window as he proceeded to string the vials full of coyote piss throughout the yard. Four hours later our yard looked like the world's most incredible maze. With no exaggeration, our yard looked so ridiculous and stupid that I had a hard time looking at my father without concern for the state of his mental health. For the next several days my father pulled all-nighters waiting to see if his clever contraption was working. The coyote pee was supposed to turn away the deer and my Dad believed he had found his secret weapon. He was wrong. The coyote piss and the string did nothing. The deer fought their way in and ate all my father's plants. My father lost the war. A few days later he gave up when he was once again defeated. For the 4th day in a row the yard was strewn with the string and coyote piss. "Clean up all the string", he told my brother and I. "Clean up all the pee. And when you're done with that, pick up the fucking sticks."