The Weekly Screed (#913)

Heartland carnage

By David Benjamin

“You must never run out on the meadow. There might be danger. Out there, we’re unprotected.”

                                                                    — Bambi’s mother

MADISON, Wis. — If you’re a deer or a driver in Wisconsin, sooner or later, your number’s up. 

Archie, my grandfather was an avid motorist who managed to dodge deer on the highways ’til he was almost 70. Then he clipped one on westbound I-90 in a light snow and ended up steaming on the roadside waiting for a State Trooper. The next spring, his Ford was a total wreck after a rampant buck bounded into his grille from beneath a bridge in Angelo.

That was sixty years ago, when Wisconsin was pret’near the deer-hunting capital of America. For a few weeks after Thanksgiving a vast army of drunken Dan’l Boone wannabes in blaze-orange vests, toting 30.06 and 30.30 critter-killers, invaded the forests, shooting deer, firing at one another, plunking away at farmer’s wives hanging the laundry out back and, incidentally, keeping the population of wild ruminants from turning into an outright stampede.

Nowadays, hunter numbers are down and the deer herd’s natural predators, wolves and cougars, are virtually non-existent hereabouts, despite the Dept. of Natural Resources’ halting efforts to bring back a few wolves. Meanwhile, there are “deer farms” popping up, where entrepreneurs raise diseased deer that can be shot by chickenheart “hunters” — like fish in a barrel — without having to do any actual hunting, in the woods. No climbing over dead trees, tripping over roots, getting scratched by sticker-bushes.

Think of Donald Trump, Jr., on safari.

All this occurred to me while driving last weekend between Madison and Minneapolis. Before I cleared Madison, I started noticing — and then counting — the roadkill deer — bucks, does and fawns — who litter the shoulders and median on Interstates 90 and 94. I didn’t count the occasional stain on the pavement — which looked like some weird terrorist had exploded five gallons of ketchup in the middle of the highway — where a deer had been killed but the body was gone.

Nor did I count the dozens of other critters who had fallen victim to careening Chevies along the way. Raccoons, skunks, woodchucks, possums and rabbits mostly. I spotted one turkey who hadn’t been able to gain enough altitude to  avoid an eighteen-wheeler, ending up as a disheveled heap of black feathers. This death struck me as a sort of environmental victory. When I was a kid traveling these roads, usually in Archie’s Ford, sighting a wild turkey was unthinkable. They were almost extinct before the state’s conservationists launched a program to save — successfully! — this poor man’s peacock.

As I drove, keeping an eye out for battered deer, I began to ponder the nuances and consequences of this carnage on the heartland highway. For instance, I noticed that when we passed by Wisconsin’s relatively “major” cities, Madison, Eau Claire, Menomonie, there were more carcasses than in the wide open wooded spaces in the countryside. The reason for this seeming anomaly, I soon observed, was Jersey barriers — those tapered concrete walls inserted between the westbound and eastbound flow in urban stretches where the green and forested median strip disappears.

I pictured the deer’s dilemma. Somehow, Bambi knows there’s danger on the road. It’s like the open meadow about which his mother warned him. But he expects to reach the woods quickly. It’s just two lanes away. After crossing halfway, still alive, Bambi encounters a baffling concrete wall almost as high as he is tall. Desperately in need of a running start to jump the wall, he retreats. This would be an easy leap if his black-lacquer hooves, perfectly adapted for traction in the leafy loam of the woods, were not slipping and clattering uselessly on the smooth, unpurchasable pavement of I-90, and if there were not a phalanx of gigantic steel monsters with great glowing eyes barreling toward him at a speed not even the swiftest of woodland wraiths could imagine.

Bambi dies there, stymied by this inexplicable wall, confused, terrified and then splattered violently into the barrier, burst like a bag full of surgical waste.

Passing by the bodies, I try to place myself in their hooves, imagining that moment of grotesque, unconceived, ignorant and unjust impact. I try to feel the animal terror as the roar of the sudden, unswerving giant fills my senses, a split-second before it strikes, like a hammer the size of God’s hand, ripping me open still conscious, still capable of pain, still breathing and struggling to flee but legless, dragged and flung like dirty rags, perhaps smashed again by another juggernaut. If I’m a deer, do I know I’m dying? Do I understand mortality? Or is this moment all just pain and horror and a dying light? And how long before the light goes out? Do I linger, gasping, bleeding and shredded on the roadside, as the tires of passing cars tick against my hooves, blowing into my face the smell of my sprawling entrails?

One of the deer I saw was halfway concealed beneath two guardrail stanchions, as though she had struggled to crawl back toward the woods, to perish on grass, among wildflowers, rather than in the oily gravel and discarded beer cans on the shoulder. Of course, she didn’t make it.

Another deer, a buck with a few “points,” probably a yearling, had been torn nearly in two, a few strands of pelt and strings of sundered muscle linking his front to his hindquarters. I thought him one of the lucky ones, hit head-on by a Mack or Peterbilt tractor, killed instantly.

The condition of the carcasses varied. Fresh ones were bloated, their legs thrust upward, outward like zombie hitchhikers cadging a ride. The oldest corpses were barely recognizable as things once alive. They lay like blackened heaps of ash, only vaguely deer-shaped and stuck by a month-old scab to the asphalt. Their flesh had been long consumed by crows and vultures, their bones dragged away furtively in the wee hours, by coyotes.

Among all the dead beasts along the interstate, there was never a sign of crow or coyote. These are the canny ones, who somehow know people better than deer and possum, who rather than dying at the mercy of man’s machines, live off the slaughter of these human-built monsters.

By the time we got back home, passing a fresh-killed doe at the Madison-Sun Prairie exit, I’d counted forty-eight deceased deer on our short journey there and back. This, I know, was an undercount that left out all the deer hit so hard that they were thrown from the highway to die in the ditch, welcomed there by the flies and worms who know well how to turn a gift from the heavens into venison stew.

I also know that the carnage will grow greater as deer maddened by chronic wasting disease wander oblivious onto roadways, and as humans choose to amuse themselves in pastimes less arduous and sanguinary than blasting at Bambi with guns. This is one of the ironies of America’s stubborn and bloodthirsty gun culture. The more guns we have, the less we use them for the single purpose that justifies our buying them, owning them and spoiling for something to shoot at.

Meanwhile, I get into the car, roll onto the highway, watching beyond the roadside, seeking sudden movement there, wondering if — this trip at last— my number’s up.