field notes:

11.17.2003

olume of accumulated dead is what’s most disturbing. Day after day they fall.

You hear people say that there are two types of deer: those that stay stock still as you drive by, and Mapache

I didn’t expect the raccoon to be so heavy. I imagined briefly that I’d slip my hands underneath and easily pull her to the side of the road. I expected her weight to spill over the sides of my hands, but instead the body was stiff, unresponsive. At first she seemed immovable, I had to pull on her tail to move her weight onto my right hand, and then slip the left underneath as well. I stood, then, her dead body held in my outstretched arms, an offering to the cars speeding past.

Her fur was coarse and full, her body unmarred and beautiful--only some blood at her head revealed the cause of her death. Remarkable that a blow so deadly would leave so little visible damage. I couldn’t look directly at her face as I lifted her and carried her away from the road, then laid her down in some new green grass, far enough onto the shoulder that she couldn’t be struck again.

I’d seen the dead raccoon on my way into town, body lying completely in the other lane of the road, a fresh kill. The mornings always brings newly dead corpses to the roadways: deer, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and ocassionally foxes and coyotes. A local artist has taken to throwing bought bouquets of pink roses over the bodies of slain deer on the roadsides. I didn’t know who was doing it, until I saw an advertisement for an art show featuring photographs of the enshrined carcasses. The volume of accumulated dead is what’s most disturbing. Day after day they fall.

You hear people say that there are two types of deer: those that stay stock still as you drive by, and those that remain unmoving until the very last moment, when they panic and run out in front of your car. You never know which type you’re dealing with, until it happens. You might only encounter the former, for months on end, and forget that any one deer might dart out, in a burst of unearthly speed, in a mad race that it can’t win.

The rule is that you’re not supposed to stop suddenly or to swerve. You’re supposed to keep driving straight ahead, to protect other cars, other drivers, and yourself. But, of course, you don't really do that. Instinctively, I’ll do anything to avoid a deer or a raccoon, or a squirrel, or any animal big enough to register a sickening bump under the wheel of my truck. One friend of mine killed a deer and was haunted by it for a year. She cried often, and slept little.

Years ago, I worked in a restaurant down the coast in Stinson Beach. For a couple of weeks, I drove my friend Mario home to Point Reyes Station, and he taught me the names in Spanish of the animals we saw during our drive. Sorillo, skunk. Soro, fox. Venado, deer. Mapache, racoon. In the years that followed, I’d say those names out loud each night in wonder that I was lucky enough to live where animals still lived, and in the joy of naming familiar objects with unfamiliar words, and in warm remembrance of the friend who taught me to say them.

One night, driving around the twists and turns of Highway One as it follows the Bolinas Lagoon, I struck a raccoon. I don’t remember how it happened, I don’t think I knew even then. I stopped the car on the empty highway and looked back in my rear view mirror. The racoon was injured, but not dead. As I watched, he tried to drag himself out of the road. He wasn’t making any progress, and I knew he wouldn’t live. I thought that if I had any decency in me, I should turn my car around and hit him again, to end his pain. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Finally, in an act of self-preservation, I put my foot to the gas and left him to his fate.

I’ve thought about that racoon many times in the intervening years whenever I’ve thought about the will to survive. I don’t really know what happened to him, whether he lived a successful life with a partially healed leg, or whether he died alone in the road that night, but I'm tortured by the image of his struggle.

Barry Lopez directs us to honor all animals that we find by taking them out of the road. It seems like the right thing to do. I’ve never done it, but I’ve thought about it many times. I’ve wondered how heavy the animals would be, and if I’d have the nerve for it. I’ve tried to imagine myself pulling my car to the side of the road, then going back, against the oncoming cars. Would I have the nerve to touch a dead animal, and if I did, would I have the strength to move it out of the road? I had great affinity for the idea, but the physicality of the act repelled me.

Today, I didn’t think about it. I saw the raccoon in the road, and saw how close the tires of the speeding cars were to her head; knew that I couldn’t let her become smashed into the road, obliterated and unrecognizable, a darkening stain of fur and blood. I pulled over and walked back against traffic, looking ahead but not into the windows of the cars that passed me. I stood over her for a time, letting some cars go by, none of them slowing for us.

Finally, I reached down and grabbed her. I didn’t want to pull on her tail—it seemed disrespectful, but so did any touch at all. Once I’d grabbed her, though, I got the hang of it, the ease of moving her out of harm’s way.

Afterwards, I felt the weight and the wildness of her; in the car I let my dog smell my hands, which were full of her.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:57 AM link | comments []