(Host) Veteran Vermont journalist and commentator Andrew Nemethy
doesn’t normally pay attention to the seconds on the clock. But
recently, that changed in the blink of an eye on Interstate 89.
(Nemethy) As someone who’s usually a
bit late, I’m always counting minutes, or watching the hours, since
there never seem to be enough in my day. But I rarely noticed passing
seconds – until I found myself eyeball to eyeball at night with a
whitetail at 70 miles per hour.
When the deer appeared in my
headlights just south of Bolton Flats, my life didn’t flash before my
eyes, but I can tell you that my heart went right from zero to 70 as if
I’d just chugged a whole quart of five-hour-energy drink. That was
followed by a litany of exclamations I can’t repeat here.
As the
adrenalin rush deflated, I had a pointed awareness of how one second
can crash into your consciousness and life as powerfully as a whole
month of humdrum. Suddenly, I was reminded of a bit of Robert Frost, and
VERY GRATEFUL for the step not taken. A mere second later and the deer
could have moved directly into the travel lane in front of my car,
instead of frozen on the white line as I whizzed by. It was so close I
could look right into its eyes. It seemed as startled as I was.
The
near miss left me with an odd thought: Where did I steal that second
from, averting a disastrous convergence of our fates. Buckling in the
seat belt in one try? Not fiddling with the radio, since it was already
turned to a Red Sox game?
Later, I also began to wonder: Why does
the deer cross the road? That’s not a joke, of course, though when I
asked Chief Game Warden David LeCours a few days later, he chuckled and
said, "Who really knows?"
In 2010, there were almost 2600
collisions between deer and vehicles in Vermont – which is a lot when
you think about it. And that doesn’t include close calls like mine.
I
have, unfortunately, kind of a history with deer. In my 41 years in
Vermont, I’ve had at least six collisions, enough to make me wonder if
there’s some kind of Karmic thing going on here. You know, like, was I a
wolf in a past life? But maybe it’s just bad luck and newspaper work
schedules that had me traveling home at 2 a.m., when deer seem to think
roads are fine for a little nocturnal perambulation. Still, after three
collisions in just two years around my home in Calais, I began wondering
if they were targeting my Subaru for "deericide." Clearly, a century or
so has not been long enough for deer to evolve to the point where they
learn how to avoid cars.
As for me, that high-speed close call
has lent a new appreciation of an often underestimated risk of country
life – not to mention that, sometimes, seconds really do count.