I apologize, dear

The day after Barry Lopez died, we hit a deer. It was a miserable ending to our year of collective losses layered unrelentingly one on top of another. After we hit her, on a drive home after dropping off some gifts to nearby friends, she ran back to the woods from where she had come, my husband yelling to me inside the car, “she’s up, she’s up—look, she’s running! We didn’t kill her!” This was in response to my moans of, “No, no, oh no!” as I saw her leap into the road almost as we hit her on a hilly country road in the Northern Catskills. I thought of her for days, and even think of her now, the image of her body suspended vertically in the air before us—as if from an unseen gallows—after making impact with the right fender and headlight of our Subaru, and before coming down and hitting her opposite flank on the car as we veered toward the center of the road.

She was no longer visible running among the trees by the time we pulled over and got out of the car, on a bitterly cold day with the sun slumping in the western sky. Wisps of her white undercoat caught in the cracked headlight plastic drifted to the ground as we inspected the damage, a heartrending contrast to the swift collision of body and vehicle just moments earlier. I pleaded to the open sky and the darkening forest for her survival. She was surely hurt, by the size of her, only a yearling. I couldn’t stop thinking of her throughout that cold, cold night and where she might have bedded down to keep warm for either the final hours of her life, or to rest before a sore, stiff recovery. For weeks, whenever I drove in that direction I looked for her, but have yet to see any deer again at that stretch.

In the twelve years that I’ve driven these country roads, I’ve slowed down considerably, and in so doing avoided hitting many, many deer as they attempted to cross. But it’s not just deer. There’s so much wildlife out and about; it’s one of the reasons I love being here. It gets complicated on the roads. I hit a raccoon late at night a few years ago, instantly killing it as it darted in front of my car while quarreling with another raccoon at the road’s edge. Last summer, I slowed as a chipmunk first hesitated, then dashed across both lanes, leaping to the guard rail, only to slip and fall back onto the road as my wheels passed. I cursed the poor sprite for slipping before I burst into tears. Both times I carried remorse for days about the unintentional harm I caused.

I notice dead animals on the roadsides, though I don’t routinely pull over to move them to safer, more respectful ground the way Lopez describes in his 1989 essay, “Apologia.” However, I have moved animals killed on the road near our home to safer ground. I found myself doing it, first, with a large raccoon near our driveway one morning two winters ago, or, last summer, with the large porcupine who I recognized from sightings on our land earlier in the year, later, the eastern hare splayed across the road in pieces, or the dark-furred groundhog I recognized from its den at the barns laying twisted by the berm. I couldn’t bear thinking that they would be hit by vehicles yet again after their deaths, so I moved them. Those acts did not start off in deliberate reverence, though each time I awkwardly transported one, surprised by how substantial they felt as I moved their small bodies, I found myself telling them, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

In the weeks following our collision with the deer, it bothered me that the event itself—as an experience with a living animal—became so secondary to the material damage to our car and the inconvenience of temporarily not being able to drive at night, for example, or having to spend $250, our insurance deductible, to get the car repaired. Yes, those things sucked and were inconvenient, but compared to what? Accidentally and violently hitting an animal that likely died after suffering pain and shock? Carrying the images and memory of the consequences of moving around the countryside inside a large, blunt force instrument? Friends I spoke with, who’ve hit deer themselves and who I guarantee have felt that anguish and empathy for the animal, registered barely a tic of feeling. A few said the thing I’ve heard over and over: “it’s the circle of life.” Meaning, a deer killed in winter becomes food for hungry animals like coyotes, vultures, bobcats, foxes, fishers. I noticed the young man who assessed the damage to our car at the auto body repair place look away as I started to describe what road we were on when we hit the deer and that I hoped she had survived.

We treat the attrition of lives on the road like the attrition of lives in war: horrifying, unavoidable, justified. Accepting the slaughter leaves people momentarily fractious, embarrassed.

When I found the essay this month, Lopez’ words were a salve to how raw it still felt.

I appreciate how disengagement happens. First, hitting an animal with your car is intense. It is sudden and unanticipated. It’s emotionally upsetting. And if you drive a lot, it’s likely to happen more than once. Easier to call a deer or fox or raccoon stupid for crossing the road, remind yourself how many deer and other animals there are and even that some are “nuisances” causing damage to trees, croplands and gardens. Easier to shrug it off and tell yourself one less deer in the world won’t change anything for the worse. I’ve heard all of these responses, and even performed some of them. And yet…

You never know…the ones you give some semblance of a burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness.

I can’t seem to quiet my sadness about this deer that ran away after our collision, and whatever she went through in those following hours —or days? weeks? Maybe it’s a basic sense of decency, as Lopez suggested. Or worry.

Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?

It’s that sense of recognizing the disruption in their lives, the fact that the animals weren’t simply crossing the road at the wrong time, but that they were also actively living—seeking shelter, food, warmth, safety, their herd, their mate, their young, their mothers or parents, depending on the animal and the season. Roads and cars have carved up those pursuits, and made living their lives more treacherous.

Around the same time we hit the deer and I read Lopez’ “Apologia” essay, I discovered Amanda Stronza on Instagram. A professor of environmental anthropology at Texas A&M, Stronza frequently posts photographic memorials of animals she discovers on her daily walks that have been hit by vehicles on nearby roads. I find her images beautiful and simultaneously, almost too painful to look at. Her tributes embody something that Lopez was expressing in his essay. Stronza says:

My intention and hope in creating the memorials is to give attention and respect to the animals I find, as individuals, as whole beings who had lives of their own…I want to notice them, see them, really see them, not just as “dead animals.” Not as objects. They share the world with us. They once had beating hearts and memories, fears and follies. They had families. By creating beauty from their deaths, I hope to help us all see them. All of them. I share the photos and stories not to sensationalize, but rather, in a way, to do the opposite, to normalize.

To normalize, not their deaths by vehicles, but rather their lives, their existence as beings with stories and histories.

I’ll never know what became of the deer we hit the day after Barry Lopez died. I hope she survived, Either way, as Lopez said:

I wish to make amends.

You can find “Apologia” here, in Lopez’ 1998 memoir.