Out Of Rhythm Collisions Between Deer, Cars An Indication We’re Out Of Touch With Our Natural Environment
I saw another dead deer on the road today. I stopped counting their carcasses sometime last spring. It’s easier not to face up to the numbers. I thought after the roads cleared of black ice and snow, the wildlife death-toll would drop. But it didn’t.
Last March, I drove to town with my window cranked open a bit to let the pine-scented air fill my lungs. The fields of Valleyford burst with alfalfa and looked as emerald as any I’ve seen in Ireland. The rain on the wind carried a tune of something ancient. Its notes were long and low and they rose and fell like the Palouse under my wheels, like a goat-skinned currach on an Irish sea.
I thought what I heard were the deer in the woods, a “Deer’s Cry,” like the hymn ascribed to the pen and spirit of St. Patrick. The “Deer’s Cry” was believed to have made St. Patrick resemble a deer to the eyes of those seeking to do him harm, so Thomas Cahill reminds us. But why, I had wondered as I drove round the bend, was I hearing this lyric now?
A mile down the road I knew. Not one, but two deer lay dead on the pavement. It sickened me that these deer lost their lives for the sake of someone’s errand, someone whom Edward Abbey would have described as “born on wheels and suckled on gasoline.”
In February, I had seen two other dead deer in my little corner of Spokane County, and in the snow-filled weeks that ushered in the year 1997, I saw five.
One fatality had occurred in a busy intersection about two miles beyond the edge of the city. A chocolate-colored, cloven-hoofed doe lay sprawled in the middle of the road. Left a hit and run, a ribbon of blood flowed from her neck and stained the snow. Christmas shoppers sped by.
“Oh, but it’s just a deer, ” someone later said to me, “They’re a nuisance.”
“Just a deer?”
How easily this fellow had shrugged off the doe as another “road kill.” Had he felt nothing for her? Had he never seen a deer up close, peered into its eyes, and loved the silent and graceful way it moved? Or, if not struck by its loveliness, then by its generous, utilitarian nature: food from its flesh, clothing from its hide, lamp oil that burns smokeless from its fat, or the awls and buttons that can be whittled from its bones.
Reverence for animals has been with humankind since the dawn of our existence. Evidence of this wonderment is painted on cave walls and on rock faces around the world dating upward of 60,000 years. Inside caves in France, on rocks from Africa to Australia herds of deer, bulls, horses, kangaroos and elands leap across the millennia to remind us of what our ancestors once idolized.
Paint samples from these prehistoric paintings reveal ancient artists sometimes walked miles to sources of red and yellow soils for pigments. Samples also tell us they mixed the bone marrow of hooved animals (most likely of deer or bison) with their pigments to make paints, still another gift from a deer.
In the cave art of the Cro-Magnon period, human figures were rarely, if ever, painted. And where humans were carved, they were reduced to insignificant stick-figures. It appears the artists attributed more importance to the other-than-human natural world than to themselves.
Their artwork is a metaphor of showing respect for their subject.
This ancient art is clearly a statement that their community extended beyond the lives of the human. Their thoughts were with the beasts in their midst as if they were kin. These old rock paintings, no matter which Creation Story we believe or which holidays we celebrate, speak to us about the importance of “life” - something that all religions nurture.
If we could recover a piece of this sensibility, perhaps there would be less “road kill.” If we could rid our language of the phrase “road kill” we would lessen the distance at which we keep ourselves from unpleasant circumstances. Perhaps then it would become more difficult for us to accept dead deer as a by-product of paved country roads.
The deer, the “road kill,” is a symptom of something much larger. It involves urban growth, and the desire to live in bucolic settings away from the pulse of the city. Many of us who have moved to the country, however, have yet to leave the urban mindset at the city line.
Although we live miles from downtown, we drive back and forth to work, for shopping, and church. We attend our children’s soccer games and keep medical appointments. We return videos to stores whose walls are adorned with larger-than-life images of modern-day idols.
Doing this, we travel nose-to-tail at deer-killing speeds, no matter the weather. To the deer on the Palouse, we must look like some menacing species of migrating, metallic mastodons.
The lives we lead crowd out the very thing we moved to the country for.
The manner in which we break our daily bread can make a difference in the impact we have on the “countryside.” Maybe it’s time we seize the stability, silence and humility that poet Kathleen Norris tells us modern society so desperately needs and relentlessly avoids.
We can lessen our trips between country and city, and look into the quiet of our back yards for vitality and abundance.
We could strive to become attuned with the rhythm of the land we move through, and better anticipate where deer and other animals are likely to surprise us on the road.
And even though a gallon of gasoline (mined miles from home) is cheaper than a gallon of milk suckled from our local cows, we could drive slow enough that we consume less fossil fuels.
Slow enough to preserve the natural order.
If we succeed, we will have begun to extend our perception of community beyond the human. We will have given the animals in our midst the respect they deserve. And the silent way deer move will resonate like an ancient tune that rises and falls in our thoughts, in our words, and across the wooded hills of the Palouse for years to come.
MEMO: Meghan Nuttall Sayres is a free-lance writer who lives in Valleyford.