It may not rate a terror-alert elevation, but ask sweet corn growers what they fear most, and raccoons, not al-Qaeda sleeper cells, will top the list. Dexterously gifted and expert climbers, these sneaky nocturnal raiders can decimate a corn patch in short order, prompting bedeviled gardeners to take extreme measures to deter them.

I speak from harried experience. The corn-loving Dalbeys were faced with such a crisis some years ago. We were meat-and-potatoes people, but corn people also – except for my oldest brother, John, who refused to eat it because it was always cooked with slimy butter that made his tongue curl back to his adenoids. We were also finicky people.

We had corn all the time. Not just once a week even, but close to every day of my life until I finally escaped the daily regimen by moving away for college. We had corn at dinner (noon on the farm), again at supper and would have had it at breakfast if we’d been adventurous enough cooks to stir it into a frittata or soufflé. Most of us really liked corn, but my brother Jim was flat-out obsessive about it. He chose it as his vegetable, as some kids would a hobby or sport. Though Mom encouraged diversity by rotating green beans, peas, carrots and lima beans in and out of the second vegetable dish, Jim remained true to corn. If corn had been a person, he’d have been head over heels in love with it.

So, you can clearly see why the raccoons that were destroying a patch big enough to keep us in corn for a year had to be stopped. An electric fence, the best defense against the marauding bandits, was impractical. Some years later, blaring rock music was used to help force former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega out of his refuge in the Vatican Embassy, but it didn’t faze the raccoons. Then Dad announced a battle plan that had my younger sister, Linda, and I, as the “little kids,” walking barefooted up and down the corn rows each evening, the idea being that the human scent we left behind would repel the raccoons.

It didn’t work, of course.

“Did you shuffle along like I told you?” Dad would ask.

We’d nod in agreement, moving our feet sideways in the powdery garden dirt to show how we had, in effect, marked our territory.

“Are you sure you’re not running just to get it done in a hurry?” he’d press.

We’d exchange glances that asked in secret sister language: Was he bluffing, or had he been watching from the window? We stuck to our story, that we’d shuffled to the point of nearly crawling, and promised to leave more of our smell behind in the future.

Years later, I figured out that no one else had ever heard of this method of raccoon control. It’s pure folklore. It may not have been a deliberate ruse, but something

Dad had heard at the grain elevator or that the old gravel-voiced weatherman Frank Field, who was never wrong about anything, had said on KMA radio. Dad probably figured it might work, and even if it didn’t, with us out of the house, he could get his bath in early before all the hot water ran out, for possibly the first time since becoming a parent. At least, that’s what he’d share with friends as his main, yet largely unrealized, goal in a house with so many children.

Some mysteries of the corn walk remain unsolved. I never did figure out why it was the responsibility of the “little kids,” and how Jim, one of the “little kids” himself and our family’s chief consumer of corn, escaped the duty. Perhaps he had been sent along with the “big kids” on another critical mission that involved chasing down some errant snipes that were messing with the squash.