I never saw the deer coming.
One second my lane was clear. The next, there was a deer spinning across it.
At first I couldn’t decipher what I was looking at. I was piloting the Element through the wilds of eastern Ohio on Route 50. There there the road is a divided highway with a wide, grassy median. At this particular point, the eastbound lanes sit considerably higher than the westbound.The median is rolling terrain, essentially the foothills leading up to the high slope along the shoulder to my right.
I was keeping vague pace with a maroon SUV in the left lane, about 50 feet ahead. Suddenly, a deer was describing a sort of pirouette across my lane—but it was faster and more incomprehensible than that. It had the effect of freeze-frame photography, a series of shots showing off the deer from different sides.
Click.
First the left side of the deer.
Click.
Instantly the right side.
Click.
And then the deer was on the shoulder, in a pose that at first looked almost relaxed: rear legs folder under its hindquarters, front legs extended.
The posture of a sitting dog. at rest. All was frozen for a split second, in which it was possible to believe the deer might just be pausing to collect itself before bounding off into the woods to the north.
But of course deer don’t sit.
Then I registered that the deer was scrabbling with its front legs, struggling to rise, and I understood that this deer would never stand again.
The maroon SUV was pulling off onto the left shoulder and then I was zooming past, all of this registering and understanding over in seconds, and as I zoomed past I was understanding more, the meaning of the dents and cracked plastic on the SUV’s front right corner, that fact that its side mirror was dangling against the side of the car from a bundle of wires, surely not the way it had left the factory or even the driver’s garage this morning.
And then the whole scene was in my rearview mirror, a quarter mile distant, a half, and I was rationalizing why it wasn’t necessary for me to exit, turn around, and go back to see if the driver needed help. Not that much damage, the car was stopping in control, everyone has a phone, what kind of help could they really need anyway.
Other than maybe mercy-killing that deer.
I thought of all the times I had been distracted on this drive—trying to update my meal-tracking app with the bag of cashews I’d bought at a gas station, researching whether anyone else had already registered the URL I’d dreamed up for the podcast I was planning, answering a text message—hands-free, of course, but that’s only pretend non-distracting. Finding the little microphone button, leaning closer to shout clearly and distinctly at the phone’s little microphones over the road noise, glancing at the screen to see how mangled the dictation was… God.
Driving is the kind of activity where, by any reasonable measure, we should constantly be thinking about how imminently we could die. In seconds the car could go from comfortable chariot into jagged, piercing torture instrument, bouncing and rolling down a steep hillside, suitcases and floor mats and the Maglite ricocheting around, pin balling against our soft, weak flesh and bones.
So easy, so relatively likely—and yet I only ever realistically consider that I might be about to die on planes, where the odds of the slightest thing going wrong, much less actually dying, are something like that of being struck by lightning while standing on one’s left foot singing Yankee Doodle. I look out the window, consider the nice things people might say about me at my funeral, steel myself to stay calm as the downward plunge begins, eye the person next to me and get ready to offer a comforting arm.
I shook my head to clear it, looked at the clock. Two hours until home.
I kept a careful eye for deer. For at least the next ten minutes.