On Colliding With a Deer

And Learning to Live with the Random Nature of Things

Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field With Crows”

I left the house at 5:15 p.m., and it was already dark. Our 9-year-old Leo sat in the back seat chatting away about Lionel Messi or the current recess games at school or interesting facts about the ten largest cities in the world. Just Leo being Leo. Before leaving, Maile and I had a quick conversation about which car I should take—I ended up taking Little Red, our 20-year-old Chevy Aveo with the dented door, instead of our brand-new (to us) Subaru.

The place I normally pull out of the neighborhood was backed up, so I drove down an extra street and somehow found a gap in the traffic, pulling out onto the road uninterrupted, celebrating my luck. We took off. There were no other cars around, which was odd, as traffic had been heavy moments before, when I had considered taking the normal route.

Less than a half mile down the road, a deer jumped down the bank that lines the road, out of nowhere, and smashed into the front side of the car.

Another dent. The door of Little Red had been smashed by a high school student backing out of their space when they weren’t looking. Our minivan, six months prior, had nearly been totaled when an uninsured driver pulled out in front of me. I’m so tired of car expenses.

Leo and I were okay, but poor Little Red lost a front headlight and the front quarter panel was smashed in. Still drivable, barely, at least when lights aren’t required. Maybe. For now. We’ll see.

Later, Leo would reenact the moment of impact: “Dad just shouted, ‘Oh, geez,’ and then there was a loud thump, and the deer bounced off the side of our car.”

I didn’t see the dead deer even though I looked for it all week, every time I drove past, not until Saturday, when I saw where it lay up against the bank, its coat blending in with the brown leaves.

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I’ve wondered a few things in the week since the collision.

First, I wondered if the deer’s herd has missed her, if they wonder where she’s at, if they grieve at her absence. Maybe this is because I’m a softie, or maybe it’s because of all the funerals we’ve attended this year, and I know how that feels, that missing, that empty space.

There’s a debate among scientist as to whether or not animals grieve the passing of those in their circle. A mother orca was once seen carrying her dead infant through icy waters for 17 days, struggling to keep the baby afloat, before finally letting it sink. Elephants take great interest in the bones of their dead relatives, often returning to the places of their death, smelling, touching, and repeatedly passing by the corpse. Chimpanzees groom their family members long after they have died.¹

Were the deer waiting for this young female to return? Did they sense the gap left by her absence? What does that awareness of absence cause in animals, if anything? Confusion? Discontentedness? Grief?

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The second thing I’ve wondered about is why I can’t remember more details about the moment of impact. I was paying attention. I was driving the car. I sort of saw the deer hit me from the corner of my eye.

But it all happened so fast, and within a few days, many of the details vanished from my mind. In fact, one of the reasons I couldn’t locate the dead deer in the following days, as I drove by, was because I had completely misremembered where the accident had happened, by at least 50 yards or so.

Is it the speed at which these things happen? Does it have something to do with our brain eliminating details from traumatic or upsetting events, an attempt to remove ourselves from what happened?

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But, honestly, those two things were very small in my mind compared to the final thought that’s been nagging me ever since: the seemingly random nature of so many of the bad things that happen in our lives. If you’ve been reading along this year, you’ll know we’ve lost a few good friends. And whether it was through cancer or someone young experiencing heart failure, there’s something about bad things happening that feels uncontrollable, inexplicable, and random.

The simple act of a deer hitting my car seemed to bring this concept to the forefront, which in some ways feels silly because there were no serious outcomes (apart from the death of the deer)—Leo and I were fine, the car was a 20-year-old junker, and while it will be a bit of a stretch for us financially to replace it, life goes on.

And yet I can’t stop thinking about it. The randomness of it. How if I would have left a minute later it never would have happened. Or waited at the pullout where I usually leave the neighborhood. Or decided not to take Leo to practice that night. Or drove a little faster. Or a little slower.

Maybe my brain works this way because I’m a rule-follower. I think at the heart of every rule-follower is the belief that if we follow the rules, everything will work out. If we do things the right way, we’ll get the right result. And probably nothing bad will happen.

Then I collided with the deer. And it wasn’t the act of hitting the deer that filled me with anxiety—it was this idea that who knows what seemingly random horrible thing is right around the corner?

What pandemic will take our loved ones and upend our lives?

What accident will bring chaos?

What choice by one of my children will bring unintended consequences for them and for us?

So many things, and I was left holding the question.

What to do with the random nature of the pain in this world?

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Then I read this piece by my friend Seth Haines, In the Bleak Midwinter and the Workmanship of Risk, which I highly recommend. In it he describes going out “looking for a photograph.” These are his words, from the post:

There, at the bottom of the hill, just before the ascent into Fayetteville proper, I pulled over at the tiny horse farm. I dialed in the camera settings meant to capture a minimalist moment. I stood. I waited and waited and waited like a creeper lunatic waiting for a victim. And then, like magic, a horse materialized in the breezeway. A crow circled. The fog parted just enough. I pressed the shutter button, and there it was, a photograph that was a bit too raw, too grainy, too low in resolution, too much a victim to the workmanship of risk. And yet, I love it.

Photo by Seth Haines. Used with permission.

The “workmanship of risk.” How I love that phrase.

That’s when I realized this:

Beauty can seem to happen randomly, too.

Beauty can be inexplicable, unexpected. Like when my youngest daughter comes in and hands me a card she made. You are the best daddy. Or when we’re walking along the river and a broad-winged heron sweeps down along the placid surface, then rises over the treetops. Or when I come to the end of an Alice Hoffman short story and find a beautiful heaviness in my heart and my mind.

Pain often comes to us unexpected, inexplicable, out of nowhere. But so, too, does beauty.

Can we have one without the other?

As Seth shares, only machines can offer certainty.

Life, on the other hand, has so much more to offer us than that.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-animals-experience-grief-180970124/