Backseat - From Where I Sit

November 2004

By: Michelle

The Buck Stopped Here

I had been following the hotel signs for miles. Each one lured me just a few more miles with the promise of a comfortable bed for the lowest price. I had forsaken all the other hotels that couldn’t match the magic dollar amount. It’s not that I am cheap but with the prospect of dropping more money over the next few days visiting my daughter in Chicago, I figured why spend extra bucks now when I was only going to rest a couple of hours. It was 2:00AM. My mother and I had run out of topics for discussion for the evening and the car had drifted into that long silence that always occurs after driving more than 6 hours on the interstate.

I was reaching that critical point where silence slips quietly into drowsiness and inattention when I finally caught sight of the hotel lights beckoning me at the next exit. At the exact moment I saw the hotel, my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of a huge buck sporting a rack any hunter would envy leaping vigorously down the hill and disappearing into the ditch. Surely it must have been my imagination. A small voice inside my head said “just keep driving”. So I never wavered from my course toward the elusive hotel when the buck, which I had assumed to be my mind playing tricks on me, suddenly reappeared out of the ditch and tried to leap over the car. I want to be perfectly clear on this – the deer struck me, not the other way around.

It was all so surreal: Seeing the passenger side mirror fill with the image of the underbelly of a monster-sized deer while reading the caution “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”. Experiencing the jarring sensation as the car was knocked sideways from the impact of the buck who failed in his attempt to clear the car. Hearing the sickening sounds of something splattering (and unfortunately sticking to) the passenger side window along with the sounds of tinkling glass and unknown car-related metal objects pinging against the pavement. Then there was nothingness as the car finally stopped moving.

I left the car engine running and just sat there. An unnatural calmness crept over me as I tried to collect my thoughts over what had just happened. My mother, on the other hand, who had the benefit of the entire show from a front row seat, had an entirely different take on the situation. Her German accent came to the forefront as she began exclaiming in rapid fire fashion: “EEIIIIIUUUUCCCHHHHHHHH” (That defies translation – imagine the sound of rapidly escaping air from an overinflated tire) “Mein Gott!” “It wrecked your car!” “The damn deer wrecked your car!” “It was as big as a cow!” “It stinks in here!” “I am going to throw up!” As she continued to release her fears through a constant stream of exclamations, I calmly replied the only intelligent utterances I had been able to muster: “Don’t you throw up in here.”

We were in the middle of God knows where at 2:00 AM with a passenger window coated with deer crap, mysterious car parts rolling about on the roadside, deer fur where my passenger mirror used to be, and that’s all I could think of to say. Then for some inexplicable reason we both began laughing hysterically. Yeah, this was making more sense by the minute. For all those who know me, please take note – you do not, I repeat DO NOT want me to be the first one to arrive in an emergency situation. Incidentally, that is one of the main reasons I dropped out of nursing school.

Eventually, I got my insurance company on the cell phone and explained the situation. The agent asked if I could still drive the car. I told her that I didn’t know. She asked me to get out and look at the damage. I told her that I had no intention of going out there because the deer might still be there and I didn’t want to see it. At this point mom volunteered to go check it out. Now the insurance agent began laughing as she overheard us hotly debating the best way to exit through a door without coming in contact with the deer pooh. All the while the hotel lights continued to tease us in the distance. We could practically have walked to the warm beds that were now going to be hours away.

After carefully negotiating around the wreckage, mom noted that the damage didn’t appear to be too bad. (Note to Saturn company: Your impact resistant doors are fabulous. Forget your commercials about shopping carts – we had a huge buck slam into ours without leaving a single dent!) As for the deer, we decided that he probably continued leaping on down the road with nothing more than a little bruising. (Yeah, I know but let me have my fantasy. Before then, the worst thing I had ever hit was a suicidal rabbit and that was 25 years ago. The memory still haunts me.)

It seemed very odd that no one had noticed or stopped during this entire ordeal. It was as if the only traffic that had come by during that timeframe was a motorcycle that appeared within minutes after our deer strike - an eerie reminder of how lucky we were to have been inside a car at that particular time instead of on two wheels.

In the end everything worked out – the car was drivable minus a passenger side mirror, a cracked fender and a dysfunctional passenger window. A couple of garbage buckets full of water took care of most of the crap and as far as we knew the deer moved on to greener pastures. I learned a valuable lesson about quitting while you are ahead because trying to “save a buck or two” on hotel costs became very expensive and in the end I wasn’t even able to save a single buck much less two. Bad pun - but great reminder to be careful out there. The deer are everywhere. Please don’t let yourself become the last thing they run into.

Thanks for visiting VirginiaWind.

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