Brevities

This morning my wife headed down into town. She had only been gone about fifteen minutes, and I had just poured myself another cup of coffee and wedged myself between the spotted twins on the couch when my phone rang. It was Mrs. Orr, and I immediately knew something was wrong.

I heard her address me by the term of affection the grandchildren use, PeePaw, and I heard something in her voice and said, “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

And I listened as she told me that she had just gotten down to the bottom of the mountain and was near our little post office when two deer streaked out of the foliage off to the left and veered directly in front of her. As they say, it all happened so fast.

The first deer made it past, but Mrs. Orr’s front bumper met the large doe at 35mph and scooped her up onto the hood and over the car, flinging her to the asphalt behind her. My wife stopped as quickly as she could, mindful of the car behind her and worried that she might get rear-ended if she slammed on the brakes too hard. Two men stopped to render aid, one of them a young firefighter who called the sheriff’s office. He and the other gentleman dragged the dead doe off the road and onto the grassy shoulder of the road next to the little hometown bank where the temperature display on the electronic sign is always two or three degrees off.

I made it down the mountain in record time, and when I reached the scene, my wife had pulled the car up into the bank parking lot and the young deputy was writing his report. A large, friendly fellow with icy blue eyes, the deputy was going over the report with Mrs. Orr when I walked up. After I made sure my wife was unhurt, I chatted with the deputy. With some difficulty, he raised the ruined hood and showed me the engine compartment. The steel frame surrounding the compartment had crumpled in like an aluminum beer can and the radiator and everything else was shoved up against the engine, which was pushed back against the firewall.

“Good thing she was here in this 35 mile an hour zone, instead of back there,” he said, nodding towards the mountain road down which my wife had just driven. “If she’da hit that deer going 55, well….”

I looked again at the crumpled metal and knew the numbness that comes in when disaster misses its mark.

The deputy called our mechanic for us (his shop is halfway up our mountain) and Jeff was there in about five minutes with his rollback tow truck. He walked around the wrecked car, whistling low. “I’d say she’s totaled,” he said. “Towed one to my shop not long ago, wrecked just about this bad. Thing is, they can’t get parts to fix anything these days. So the insurance company ended up just totaling the whole thing, because it would have been six months or more before they could have even gotten the parts, much less gotten it fixed right. I bet they’ll total this one.”

So he hooked her to the rollback and loaded her on, and we followed him back up the mountain and watched him take her into his parking lot as we continued on up the mountain. He said the insurance folks would send an adjuster to his shop to look the car over and then they would contact us.

When we got home, I had a crushing headache and my hands were shaking; I am ashamed to admit that I had to rest for a bit before I could proceed. And that tough little Texas girl? She was on the phone with the insurance company filing a claim and then researching rental cars while the big badass former Marine was useless. At one point, she reminded me that we had one payment left before the car would have been paid off. One payment. And she smiled that luminous smile and went back to her phone and her legal pad and her documents.

And all I’ve been able to think of is how narrow the miss was, how differently things could have turned out if the deer had appeared just a little farther back up the road, and if Mrs. Orr had been traveling at fifty-five, and if she’d hit both of the deer at the same time, if one of them had come through the windshield instead of tumbling over the car. How life can change so quickly, and how remorseless those changes can be.

I think my hands are still shaking just a bit. I am thinking of how precious this little lady is to me. And I am thinking of the sad death of a beautiful little creature who was, like all of us, just trying to get home. She and her companion were trying to get home when a ton and a half of gleaming doom came out of the morning mist and stopped her there on the fog-slippery,  hoof-hostile asphalt and ended her existence forever. The brevity of life, the brevity of realization, the brevity of the time we have to see and to understand.

Try as we might not to, we take so much for granted. This is the nature of breathing men and women.

~ S.K. Orr