Last night in the dusk on my way to SFO I drove by some sheep browsing in a field and spent the next ten minutes or so contemplating why I feel so friendly and comfortable approaching animals I don't know, and so anxious and shy with new people. I would love to just walk right up to those sheep and feed them, and scratch behind their ears, and talk to them. I also thought about various dogs I know, and certain raccoons, and all the assorted lizards, rats, and rabbits that hang around our house ... I was just letting my mind drift around the topic of animals.
A few minutes later, as I came around a curve onto an overpass near Corte Madera at 74 miles an hour, I saw the pale shape of what looked like a long-legged naked woman flashing in the headlights of the tan Mitsubishi in front of me, about a hundred feet ahead. There was a sound like someone crushing a paper dixie cup in another room, and then I saw something big fly straight up into the air above the Mitsubishi – it went more than three times as high as the top of the car. In the dim light I lost sight of it for a split second, and then it was falling straight toward me.
The way it had flown up in front of the car, and the color in my headlights as it came down, made me think for a moment that it was nothing but a big piece of brown cardboard after all, a broken box or a giant shopping bag that was being blown around by the passing traffic. But then I saw it hit the ground and spin as it slid across the pavement and slammed into the bottom of the barrier at the edge of the freeway, like an ice skater who's missed her landing, and as I zoomed past I saw its long twisted neck and its legs with their little black hooves splayed out helplessly, and caught just a glimpse of its big dark eyes staring right at me. I hoped it was dead.
The car that had hit it hadn't even swerved. I stayed behind it to see if it was going to pull over, but it didn't – and then it passed an exit. I pulled up next to it then, thinking maybe I'd somehow imagined the whole thing – I was starting to realize I was feeling a little shocked. The driver was alone in the car, a white-haired man with both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead at the road in front of him over the caved-in front end of his car. Looking at the damage it was hard to believe it was still running. I kept thinking, "Is he going to keep on driving forever? Does he not realize he just hit a deer? Why isn't he stopping to look at his car? Is he okay? Is he afraid? Should I follow him and tell him I saw what happened, and offer to sit with him if he's freaking out?"
In the end I decided to keep going. I was already running late for the airport, and I was starting to freak out a little bit myself. It all happened within just one or two seconds, and literally
right in front of me – it could easily have been me who hit it. And the way the deer was thrown, it's a miracle it didn't land on my hood, or under my wheels.
Also, to see an animal the size of a person fly twenty feet into the air like a tissue in a hurricane – that made an impression on me. Driving has always been something I try not to overanalyze ... but especially now that I'm not driving much, it's hard to set aside the awareness that my fragile, soft little human body is actually zooming along at close to one hundred miles an hour, encased in tons of metal, mere inches above a hard asphalt road, and that any false move by me or anybody around me could bring it all to a screeching, tumbling, crushed and bloody halt in a matter of seconds. If I let myself think too much about how dangerous it really is to drive, I would never get anything done.
And that deer. It must have been so scared, up there on that overpass and unable to figure out how to get down. All those cars screaming by. I know deer are not an endangered species, but I still hate to see them dead. This is the first time I've ever seen a car kill such a large animal. When it happened my heart clenched and slammed in my chest as if I were the one who'd been hit. The adrenalin didn't dissipate for several hours. It still kind of hurts even now.
About 20 minutes before the deer, when I was driving along the bay, the air was so thick with mosquitoes that their bodies hitting the windshield sounded like rain. By the time I got to the airport the front of the car was completely plastered with them, like a layer of thin gray fur. It wasn't until today that it occurred to me – the Mitsubishi ended the life of one deer, but I ended hundreds of lives last night – maybe even thousands.
All this brings to mind a passage I like from Gary Snyder, on the topic of (among other things) vegetarianism and the First Precept, in an essay titled
Indra's Net as Our Own1:
Every living thing impinges on every other living thing. Popular Darwinism, with its emphasis on survival of the fittest, has taken this to mean that nature is a cockpit of competitive bloodshed. "Nature red in tooth and claw," as the Europeans are fond of quoting. This view implicitly elevates human beings to a role of moral superiority over the rest of nature. More recently the science of Ecology, with its demonstrations of co-evolution, symbiosis, mutual aid and support, interrelationship, and interdependence throughout natural systems, has taught us modesty in regard to human specialness. It has also taught us that our understanding of what is and is not "harmful" within the realm of wild nature is so rudimentary that we should not bother to take sides between predators and prey, between primary green producers and detritus-side fungi or parasites, or even between "life" and "death."
Between cars and deer, too, I wonder? Or mosquitoes? I suppose the key phrase here is "within the realm of wild nature." Cars are not exactly wild, or natural.
This morning Mr. A called me into his room to look out the window: just a few feet away, under the tallest sycamore where the branches reach all the way to the ground to make an enormous green room, a young deer was standing up to its chest in grass and poppies (we need to mow the lawn again), nibbling on leaves.
"They like it in there because it's shady and protected," he whispered.
I thought of that deer on the road last night, and of all the deer (and lizards, toads, birds, snakes, insects, spiders, rabbits, rodents and all manner of what he refers to as "shy creatures") Mr. A has made safe places for on this property.
Not sure how to end this. It just felt good, after last night, to see that little dear feeling safe and enjoying her breakfast. And to feel myself safe, too, and grateful to be here to enjoy seeing her.
1I couldn't find the whole essay online but you can read it in
this book –
For A Future To Be Possible: Commentaries on the Five Wonderful Precepts, by Thich Nhat Hanh et al. It's the only book I pretty much always carry around with me, the way some people carry a bible. Well worth a look if you're interested in such things, even if all you read is this one piece.
