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Roadkill
I’m driving down the road in my car, analyzing every thump and bump of the suspension system. Every once in a while, it feels as though the wheels are going to fall off. Sometimes there’s a strange rattling over the right front fender. Sometimes there’s another noise like the sound of a large rusty spring being carefully jostled. I can never tell if it’s the road surface or my car doing this.
I do a lot of driving. You’d think driving over the same pavement, day in, day out, I would finally detect a pattern. But I never remember until it’s too late to stop and compare notes. I’m just frozen by the rattle, not quite as loud and thumping as a flat tire being driven over again and again, a tire which will turn into rubber ribbons in a few more seconds. I’ve heard that noise before, too. This is not quite that bad. It’s more subtle, more sneaky. And the noises are inconsistent. So the dread feels new every time. I can’t afford a breakdown. The odometer reads 143,800.9 miles right now.
I can’t believe the amount of roadkill on this highway. I think that’s the third dead animal I’ve gone past in the last half hour. Of course, I have to admit that I’ve been driving 74 miles an hour, therefore covering more territory. But even so.
Roadkill seems to be something I’m getting more sensitive to, not less. You’d think that the frequency of it would be monotonous and desensitizing, but for some reason that hasn’t been my experience. Roadkill is particularly disturbing when it’s wearing a collar, like the black cat with the red collar just back there. And then also hideous, but in a different sort of way, are those brownish-red smears in the road that go for maybe twenty or thirty feet at various trajectories and then just stop abruptly. Obviously, something really big met its end there, right at that locus. But I’m going too fast to take it all in.
I come over the rise of the hill to see flickering lights in the distance--the familiar red, blue, and amber lights. What could that be? I adjust my speed to a more conventional velocity, now quite appropriately, even staidly, within the limit. Then I decide to go slower, and approach warily. As I get closer, I can see it’s the northbound lane. I’m in the clear--I can keep going. But something’s blocking the northbound lane.
Now I’m closer. It’s a huge semi, flat on its side, straight across the road, nearly perpendicular to the highway, completely blocking the northbound lanes. Tipped semis always make me think of dying dinosaurs, I don't know why. The end of something massive, maybe. And gazing at the underside of something I shouldn't see. Cars are backed up behind it, perhaps for miles, in a sort of demonstrative parade of all the vehicles traveling up and down this road. And they are various: pick-up trucks (most of them new and full-size), cute, shiny, tiny cars that get better gas mileage than mine, various sizes of trucks for hauling, farm vehicles, old-model cars caked with dirt-road dust, gleaming turbo-powered imports, commercial vans, mini-vans, and, yes, there’s even a stretch limousine on its return trip from the Mayo Clinic. No exit in sight, and the ditch too deep to drive through. The highway patrol is on the scene, one officer standing outside his vehicle, talking and gesturing to someone in the long line of cars. Was anybody hurt, I wonder, and what could possibly have caused this to happen?
I’m driving much more slowly now, maybe forty, forty-five miles an hour, because I’m looking, and I’m trying to be careful. Not quite a mile down the line, there’s something else. A secondary. Another trailer knocked over, but this one much smaller. It’s a cattle car. It must have just happened, because I can see the people have just gotten out of their cars, doors wide open, batteries draining. One man is running to the scene.
At this point I stop, too. I know I must have passed it up by a good five hundred feet. I get out of my car, but I’m careful, detail-oriented, and I remember to shut the car door after me. I do a shuffling running-walk back up the side of the highway, suede pumps clomping along the shoulder, purse flapping behind me, the autumn air moist in evaporating frost. Huffing and puffing, I arrive at the scene.
The trailer is full of cows. I am relieved that they are not horses. I love horses. I have a horse. But then I silently berate myself for wishing this on a cow. They are mooing in a confused agony, piled on top of each other, trying to stick their noses out. Are they all alive? Are any of them uninjured? The trailer has bent asymmetrically, and part of the metal torn and jutting out. The driver is sitting on the ground next to his truck, moaning about having lost his glasses. He can’t see anything. I suspect he’s hit his head. People are standing around him, trying to calm him down.
“Shouldn’t we get the cows out and take care of them?” I ask another bystander. I don’t feel authoritative enough to act on my own, but have plenty of ideas and want someone else to be responsible. He looks at me with incredulity, “If we let them out, we’ll have cows all over the road. We can’t do that.”
“We could hold them,” I say. “Look, there are enough people here to hold them.” I gesture towards the people clustered around the driver. There are also plenty of people still in their cars, people who will be waiting here a long time because the road is completely blocked with no way to turn around. I bring my gaze back to the bent and broken trailer. There must be six or seven cows in there, though I haven’t given myself the luxury of looking closely enough to count the pairs of eyes.
“Hold ‘em with what?” replies the bystander.
I look. No halters. I know nothing about how to deal with this. No halters. They’ve just been loaded in, and no one ever dreamed anything like this would happen. Nothing unusual should have happened. On a normal trip, the halter would be the liability, getting caught on something, maybe strangling its wearer. Well, now the cows have other things to worry about. We stand there helplessly, listening to the animals’ cries, now more like whimpers, now a few more desperate sounds, then the whimpers again. Some have scrambled upright, but others are still down. I can see blood. An ambulance pulls up, accompanied by the highway patrol vehicle. The EMTs go to the driver of the cattle trailer, spend a few moments talking with him, then command him to lie on a stretcher, and put him in the back of the ambulance.
I ask the highway patrol officer, “What should we do about the cows?”
“Call someone in to trailer them away, haul them away. Maybe get a vet to tranquilize or euthanize them. But you know,” he grins wryly, “anything wrecked on this road’s bound to end up as hamburger or bacon.” He looks at his watch. “Put the call in a few minutes ago. Someone should be coming in--maybe--a half hour?” He looks at me.
The smile is gone, all business now. What am I doing here? I’m just in the way. I’m useless.
“Thanks,” I stutter, “Just wanted to know if there was anything I could do.”
He nods. I depart, back down the road, tortured sounds of mooing behind me. I walk back to my car, which seems closer now, and get in. My shoes are covered with grass stems, slightly muddy in the heels. I sigh and close the car door and drive onward, accelerating.
What am I doing here? I’ll get to work. I’ll be a little late for my appointment with a student, who will be waiting in a dim, mostly windowless hallway. Apologizing for my lateness, I will unlock my office door and invite her in. I will sit down heavily in my chair and try to listen to what the student is saying. I will hear only half of it. “Is this a thesis statement?” she’ll say, “Or is this a thesis statement?” My reply: “Well, sort of, but. . .” I’ll be listless, unable to shake myself out of it.
Later, I will teach two classes, scrapping the plan of a brilliant lecture for both and putting people in small discussion groups instead so I can sit, brooding, at the front of the room, listening to everyone and no one at the same time. I will collect reports from all the students. I won’t have the energy to read them. I’ll take them home with me.
What am I doing here, now, at this moment, in this space? Suddenly time becomes a real dimension to me, palpable in its location. Before it was only theoretical, but now it feels like an invisible box, with hard sides I can press my palms against. At this point in time, I am doing nothing, I now realize. I am merely moving my body along, shielded from the earth by a ribbon of asphalt: above that, rubber tires, above that, a car, mostly metal. I’m suspended, almost in the dimension but not quite, not fully. In my mind, I can gaze at the landscape and feel a part of it, but when I stop and get out of my car I’m still on the surface of a bubble.
I’m driving down the road at 74 miles an hour again. I think I know what I should have done. I should have said, to hell with halters, and started using belts, purse straps, rope from the trunk of the car, anything to get the cows out of their crushed tin can. So what if they were destined to become hamburger. They didn’t have to suffer in confusion while the rest of us stood around and tried to pretend they weren’t there. Why didn’t I think of that before? But now it’s too late. I can never get back to that point again.
I’m looking at the trees along the highway. Someone has planted a row of them here, and all the leaves are gone now; they’re bare. Their branches make fascinating shapes, a little ghoulish, a little breathtaking, as they reach into the air, presumably for more light. I can’t tell what kind of trees they are. Maple? Elm? Oak? No, oaks are even more contorted than this. These are more like dried flowers in a vase, arching. They must be elm or sugarmaple, yet there is the beauty of contortion here, too. The trees are grasping into space in search of sun. They are anchored in the ground, still pushing themselves taller, skyward. I know they must be moving, even now.
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