PET DEER

As a child in Northeast Ohio, spotting a deer in the wild was an awesome event. We’d pull over on the shoulder of the country road and everyone would cry “Look! Look!” Our astonishment grew with each member of the “Wild Kingdom” family that might come into sight.

The animals were skittish, ceasing their grazing to eye our vehicle from a hundred or more yards away. Usually, they took to the woods in a matter of seconds.

Now, for many around here, deer are plain old vermin. Common complaints include the danger they pose to motorists, the routing of garbage cans, the hoof prints in the manicured lawns and, most of all, their ravenous appetite (forsooth!) for the leaves of plants that are an integral part of precious landscaping.

At least six acquaintances have had close encounters of the worst kind with deer. One, whose inebriate state legally disqualified him from being behind any wheel, was thundering down the unlit turnpike, guiding a large SUV. When a large buck didn’t quite have enough steam to reach the adjacent lane, the unfortunate animal was hammered by the vehicle’s grill and catapulted, antlers first, into the windshield. Al literally did not know what hit him. At first, he imagined he had been jumped by an incredibly large pedestrian who had somehow stumbled onto the superhighway, perhaps cursing his luck at having broken out of prison only to be torpedoed by a drunk.

My friend reacted, as quasi-conscious lushes do, by passing out cold. I never quite understood why a patrolling trooper didn’t happen by to shake him back to the world of the living, but dawn broke before the incident registered on Al. The blood on his right shin bone had already dried to a crust as he feebly forced his way out of the rightward-leaning Isuzu with a smashed windshield. The absence of cops and a carcass puzzled him, but as he made his way to the bashed-in grill, choked with chestnut colored hide, he quickly solved the mystery. In a time before cell phones, Al, with his very expensive ride transformed into a carcass in its own right, was powerless to do much but flag down a passerby and get to the nearest garage.

No surprise that Al considered himself lucky to be alive. (One must now ask: Had he had his wits about him in the moments before and during impact, would he have tensed up at the wheel as most normal humans would and incurred serious injury or death? Did his blobbiness at the time save his life? Or, conversely, could he have maneuvered himself out of harm’s way in a state of sobriety?) Not even a week had passed when Al forgot feeling lucky about any of it. Despite major mechanical procedures, including installing a new engine, the costly Isuzu never regained its jaunty, devil-may-care confidence.

Quick digression. I also knew a guy who, sober as a judge and driving a VW Bug in blazing sunlight, broadsided a bison out West. The bison keeled over on his side, snorted gruffly into the pavement, stood erect and meandered away. The Bug’s meandering days were over.

Then there was Tim, one of the nicest inner-city cops you’d ever hope to meet. His breezy, ever-present humor was a perfect match to the slight body and silken sandy hair that was ever being brushed back from his forehead by a hand that seemed always in motion. It was hard to believe he was a mere two years from retirement.

One summer dusk, Tim breezed along the highway on his Harley. He was within a mile or two of his farmhouse haven. It was a solo outing until a buck suddenly appeared galloping at his side. The mind reels. Speed up? Slow down? Come to a halt? Verge to the left? Nudge him to the right? Tim’s questions were irrelevant. The only ones that mattered were being dimly formed beneath a very large rack of antlers which were moving at a remarkably rapid clip. His answer? Outrun the bike and veer left. That, at least, was the last image that penetrated Tim’s brain until he woke up in his hospital bed. When the ambulance arrived, Tim’s pulped body was a good ninety feet away from what was left of his bike.

I saw Tim about three weeks later, now looking much closer to retirement age. You could tell, despite the awkwardly positioned casts and black cane that he was going to be fine. But walking completely upright was probably going to be a fond memory from this point forward.

So, yes, motorized encounters can be a major drag. But the humans almost always survive them. I once saw a faun get clipped just down the road. The front bumper just caught the tip of the animal’s right hind leg. It skittered across the street, lay down in a neighbor’s yard and sat there as though posing for an artist until the cops finished the job and hauled away the young carcass. A little piece of bumper and turning signal plastic were efficiently swept away, too.

“There is providence in the fall of a sparrow” Hamlet, Act V. By extension, there is providence in the squish of a cockroach, with a human foot serving as God’s agent. When a deer dumbly causes a fatality is that not providence as well?

Speaking of agents, a nearby suburb took it upon itself to cull what had grown into a rampant deer population. Some controversy had to be overcome, but ultimately, hunting platforms were strategically placed in trees throughout the municipality for professional sharpshooters to cull the population. In all, nearly 300 deer were deducted from the city’s wildlife census. In fairness, all carcasses eventually supplied the tables of people normally served by food banks. So the carnage had some mitigating result.

Now, here’s what I have trouble comprehending. As the deer population was equally heavy in all surrounding suburbs and deer, as far as I can tell, are illiterate, what, exactly was the point of this slaughter? It isn’t as though surrounding deer stopped dead in their tracks when eyeing the signs proclaiming “Now Entering the City of Solon.” There are currently, according to naturalists, more deer in Ohio than at any time in the state’s natural history. Was this to be an annual event, like the swallows returning to Capistrano? And how do these sharpshooters make their living when such Draconian measures are presumably a sometime affair? Pied Pipers with high-powered rifles replacing flute and rats, only paid with tax dollars, so the children are safe.

We, after all, are responsible for the exploding deer population. Pilfering habitat. Planting yummy delicacies in our yards. Leaving half-eaten meals in our garbage. Is it not simple Darwinian process that cause these handsome creatures to thrive in the new land we have forced upon them? Should we round them up and send them to the reservations like other unwanted inhabitants that we Americans deem a nuisance?

They’ve certainly lost their basic fear of man, proving, if nothing else, their essential dim-wittedness. No longer do they scatter at a pulled-over station wagon. They stare boldly through saucer-sized eyes as though they had a constitutionally guaranteed right to be just where they are. The nerve!

Alright. I live in a neighborhood where houses are separated by the width of a driveway. Where hot corned beef, banks, gas stations, supermarkets and dry cleaners are a mere five-minute walk away. And we’re rife with deer. When I walked my late Doberman, who felt a kindred spirit to these animals as their sighting brought out uncharacteristic excitement in him, we’d run into deer practically every day. The schoolyard. The backyards. The parking lots. The middle of the street. We had to change our driving habits. No more charging up hills, lest we run down a faun or two or three.

My yard is uncharacteristically deep for this neighborhood and adjoins the back yards of maybe two dozen properties- four, maybe five shielded acres, with no streets to worry about. It’s the ideal stomping ground for our tomcat. (In fact, it turns out he has made friends with a number of our human neighbors, some of whom feed him better than we do. He is not nearly as amicably received by the moles, voles, shrews, mice, chipmunks and rare warblers he tracks down with remarkable alacrity.) The confined land is a nice haven for our family of deer, too. We’ve seen all members in extremely close proximity: Buck, faun, doe.

While she nibbled at the shrubs that surround our patio, I was separated from the doe by no more than ten feet. She assuredly saw me admiring her sheer beauty. I could have counted the downy hair in her oversized ears. Meanwhile, the buck foraged some twenty feet beyond, sampling various dried leaves still hanging from trees on this snowy morning. He, too, appeared carefree despite my proximity and went about his munching as though the area in his brain that guarded against predators had been disabled.

We had been watching the doe and her faun for weeks before the buck ever showed up. We gazed in awe as the spotted baby nursed and the mother serenely licked her spotted coat. The apple tree on the border of our neighbor’s property was once primarily a source of litter. (My son and I occasionally practiced our irons in the lawn, so the apples weren’t a total waste.) Now they were the prime delight of our adopted doe and faun.

Sometimes days would pass without a sign of our threesome and we nearly always assumed they had moved to new environs. Then suddenly, there they are, as much a part of our lives as the uncollected leaves in the yard.

The other night, our predatory cat went out late at night. Less than five minutes later, my wife and I were shocked by an alarming high-pitched squawking that struck me as a death throe. There was nothing cat-like in the sound, but my wife immediately imagined our pet’s sudden demise. My first thought was that our cat had quickly pounced on some backyard prey. But (though I kept this to myself) perhaps it was a coyote and we had just been deprived of our affectionate red tabby.

We stared out the back doors to the far end of our property but couldn’t discern any activity. Soon we were beaming a high-powered flashlight toward the site of the blood-curdling sound. We saw no sign of our cat or any predator. What we did see was one of our pet deer, uncharacteristically foraging in the dead of night, the flashlight’s beam clearly delineating her magnificent form.

The beam caught her eye and the fiery eyeshine looked like a special effect from a sci-fi movie. The glowing dot virtually made the rest of her form disappear. Then she turned head on to the light source and two radiating globes made the rest of the world irrelevant.

Our tabby appeared a couple hours later to our deep gratitude. But the spectacle of the deer will stay with us long after the relief of welcoming out pet at the back door. For three magical minutes, we were humans frozen in the arresting phenomenon of a deer’s headlights.

BIRD WATCHERS ANONYMOUS

12-step programs are proliferating like pot holes. AA, the Granddaddy, begat Al Anon (for those unfortunates who must live or work with alcoholics) Cocaine Anonymous, Crystal Meth Anonymous and Marijuana Anonymous. (A slap in the face to the perfectly normal, fun-to-be-around, creative and productive long-term pot heads of my acquaintance.)

Every addiction gets its own Anonymous: Overeaters, smokers. Some groups are so anonymous that no one really knows much about them. (Nail-biters, nose-pickers, navel-contemplators. You know who you are!)

There’s also Emotions Anonymous. Yes. Verily, I say to you. My name is Naomi and I am powerless over my emotions. “Hello, Naomi.”

The participants are earnest. But they also laugh, even at mere attempts, of humor.

There are sponsors and leads and shares everywhere. And rules. And more rules. And burned coffee and generic bags of Oreos and Chips Ahoy.

There’s also an abundance of the word God. Not God per se, just the word God. Also referred to in these ecumenical, non-secular, all-are-welcome, politically ur-correct settings as my/your higher power, a force greater than my/yourself, a cosmic force. It is said a lampshade will do as a substitute. (The Joy of Cooking actually lists three large lampshades as a substitute for God. Check out the appendix.)

12 steps to spirituality. Prayer is mandatory. To whom or what such prayer is directed is of no apparent consequence.

People hunt. All omnivores do. Mammals and reptiles. Birds and fish. Spiders and insects. We devour one another and attach no particular spiritual rules to this pursuit. Falcons and spiders would die if they were prevented from the hunt. Not so us. We hunt because: 1. We like to eat the flesh of certain animals. 2. We like to kill things. The animals we kill presumbably have no 12-step programs or higher powers. They simply exist and frequently die to grace our tables.

Cats chase squirrels. Their skills are just not up to the kill. Do they pray to a higher power to improve their skills or to remove their desire to chase them? It is a serious matter.

Vegans still have nipples, males and females both, because they’re mammals. Omnivores pure and simple. Vegans define their humanity by rising above their mammalness. “I have a choice.” Is this like the higher power?

I can’t stop thinking about eating the flesh of less fortunate animals, some of whom have next to nothing that can be called a life. My name is Bubba and I’m powerless over meat-eating. Hello, Bubba!

P., a colleague of mine was fired for watching birds. He had an office that opened onto a small verandah and a pair of binoculars in his desk. As he sat before his monitor he would glance out onto the wooded lot now and then, hoping an unusual flash of feathers might catch his eye. He’d seen kestrels and mockingbirds, catbirds, red-tailed hawks, peregrine falcons and all manner of warblers.

Those who can’t fathom why there are such things as bird-watchers don’t realize that we are all bird watchers. We watch birds whenever we peer into daylight. They just don’t register in the uncaring mind. Bird-watchers register every winged creature. They dismiss the crow, sparrow or robin in a nano-second, but they do register.

As in all pursuits, short-cuts take hold. The arc of flight. The lack of color. The familiar flap of wings. The mundane calls. All quickly indicate the run-of-the-mill, singly or in combination. But just as quickly, a glimpse of pale green or yellow, a sudden swoop upward, bizarre head movement, a bright orange beak create intrigue.

Eventually, my birding colleague began to focus more on the nestling woods than his monitor. He carelessly put his binoculars at hand’s reach and forgot the security cameras installed throughout the complex. The binoculars were of no use in a drawer anyway for when a potential subject is spotted, the eyes cannot be averted. You must keep them locked on the quarry. A great deal of skill is required to keep the head still while you place binoculars to your eyes and focus them ever so subtly on your objective.

Zeroed in on a bit of feathered exotica, one drinks in all the detail. Size from beak to tail. Color of feathers, beak and feet. Crowns and movement. Shape of head, eyes, tail, breast. Then, having gleaned every possible detail before the bird takes flight, you reach for your field guide. You have a clue, of course, of what you’ve just witnessed, but it doesn’t count unless it matches up with the illustration. (Photographs never cut it in bird guides. They’re always hand-illustrated.)

After being let go, my colleague told me that his biggest regret was that he’d probably never again have such a great office for watching birds. “I really think they’re God’s favorite creatures. I can’t see why he’d care more for us than he does for them. I really can’t.”

I was shocked when I came across P’s obituary some years later. He was in his forties and I found out he died in a car crash – probably watching a goshawk soaring above.

We admitted we were powerless over bird watching and that our lives had become unmanageable.

We came to believe that a power higher than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Hi. I’m P. and I’m powerless over bird watching.

Hello, P.

PUNCHING THROUGH

Bert Parks (remember him singing "Maggie's Farm" in the Brando film, The Freshman? Pure gold.) hosted many a TV game show in the '50s. One was called "Beat the Bank." A daily feature of this primitive show was a muscular man whose task it was to punch himself out of a paper bag. The bag of course was body-bag sized and the contestant slithered into it as it lay on the studio floor. The objective seemed within any human's reach. Punch your way out. In 60 seconds.

No one ever succeeded. The bag would jerk to the side as each blow was thrown like the second-hand of a digital clock, but was too well constructed to be penetrated by the human fist. Paper composition and the laws of physics conspired against the doomed muscleman, who you would guess operated a jack hammer when not making a fool of himself on national TV.

Surprisingly, no simple Houdiniesque aid was ever employed. (A sliver of concealed razor blade would have been sufficient to win the $100 reward, but this was after the $64,000 question scandal and besides who isn't man enough to conquer a brown paper bag?)

Whoever came up with this quasi-Sysyphian labor almost certainly was not out to create a metaphor for human frustration. But after some forty years, the spectacle still lingers. Do we all ooze from the womb into a brown paper bag from which entropy is the only escape? Or is the womb itself a brown paper bag from which we must be forcibly expelled? Both could be true.

How many of us spend our 60 seconds of life punching fruitlessly at a thin membrane that separates us from the light? Can one even train for such an undertaking?

Superheros could do it, but that's precisely the point of superheroes, isn't it? Overcoming reality. The laws of the natural world. Perhaps the laws of the spiritual world as well. Did Superman every pray? Did he ever need to? Maybe he was on speaking terms with the Almighty. Maybe the Almighty is irrelevant in a Superman-graced universe.

Most of us remember Bert Parks as the unctious tuxedo-clad belter of the climactic "Here She Comes. Miss America." Younger folk may know him as the entertainer at the Kimodo Dragon banquet in "The Freshman." For me, he'll always be the guy who consoled the losing bag-puncher with a variation of the line: "I thought you almost had it. You came awfully close."