Home on the Range

I was on my way to work when I noticed that the minivan ahead of me had its brake lights on. I assumed it was pulled over temporarily by the side of the road, but as I got closer, I saw two blurry brown shapes dart across the road in front of it.

My first thought, trained by years of driving past office parks, was that perhaps some geese had been crossing the road. But geese are usually more interested in slow waddling, the sort that causes suburban traffic jams as they consider whether they really want to cross the road or just want to contemplate their feet in the face of oncoming traffic instead. Geese, now that I thought about it, did not seem to be darting types at all.

Now I needed another explanation, so I decided that it must involve the man walking on the sidewalk, slightly ahead of my car and slightly behind the minivan. Obviously he had been walking his dogs off leash, and they’d gotten away from him. But wait! The man was strolling very casually along the sidewalk. Shouldn’t a dog owner be more agitated about his dogs nearly getting hit by a car? And why were they off-leash, anyway? This was a busy road! One with double yellow lines!

Luckily, before I got further incensed by this imaginary lack of responsible dog-raising and rolled down my window to holler, “Hey, jerkwad, why dontcha get a stuffed animal instead?”, I saw that the minivan was moving again, albeit very slowly. Clearly, there was something of interest up ahead.

Naturally, I also slowed down as I came to the section of the road where I’d seen the blurry shapes. I hated rubberneckers, but I had found that the way to satisfy my curiosity without stopping all the traffic was by demanding that Chris, my passenger, check out the scene of the accident and report all the details to me once I’d driven safely by. (This, my friends, is what marriage is all about.)

But now I was on a suburban street, with no cars behind me, and if something good was going down, something worthy of making a minivan full of kids late for school, I needed to see it.

So I peeked. And– oh my! Two deer! They were standing completely still, both staring wide-eyed at me. One was slightly larger than the other, and because neither had horns, my anthropomorphizing heart decided I was looking at a mother deer and her child. I’d seen deer in the wild before, but a deer prancing through the rural woods of Ithaca was not exactly the same as two deer standing on a neatly-manicured lawn, surrounded by tidy flower beds, in downtown Natick.

These deer looked scared, as though they were doing their best to pretend that they didn’t know how they’d ended up here or where they were headed. And as I looked at them, surrounded by houses and less than a block away from a construction site where new condominiums are being built on a tiny plot of land, I realized that the deer weren’t pretending at all. They simply had nowhere to go, and none of us knew quite how we’d gotten to this point.

Posted by: Supersonic Jane | September 30, 2005 | 10:34 pm
Posted in: This Life