This summer, my husband and I had a spirited debate as to whether or not our relationship could survive a road trip. Because, you know, the airlines are a mess. We needed to get away after our daughter came home for fall break, before I started crying my eyes out again. I’ve spent most of the autumn crying, I miss her so. We decided to go to Destin.
We’ve never been to Destin.
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We were four hours deep into the drive after a full day of work when a deer leaped from the trees on the side of the road near West Plains, Missouri. We both saw it. We cursed, and we watched it leap … land … and leap again … straight into the grill of my husband’s new pick-up truck, the one he’d wanted his whole life and didn’t let himself buy until after his 47th birthday. Neither of us had ever hit a deer before.
We hit the deer with the grill of the truck. The deer destroyed the grill and the engine, and I’m fairly certain the truck destroyed the the same in the deer.
This is the worst part: The deer rolled horizontally, like a child down a hill, three times. I can still see that roll, hooves akimbo, the shock of its young and too-short life meeting metal and rubber on the road where it grew up. Nature, red in tooth and claw.
It met my eyes for a moment through the windshield, just as shocked as we were, and hauled itself up, hobbling on three legs into the woods. I didn’t see it after that - I was too fixated on my husband, who was trying to beach the hull of the destroyed Ford Maverick on the shore of the highway.
“Oh, shit. I don’t have a gun.”
That’s the first thing he said. Because we grew up rural, you must understand, and if you hit a deer, you must shoot it so it doesn’t suffer. I’ve often wished this rule of thumb could apply to any living being, including humans. But also, we don’t carry guns. We’ve separated from the places we came from in geography and politics.
The deer is on its own, as are my reproductive rights.
The deer ran off, and we limped the truck to the side of the road and called the police. The officer who arrived couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. He told us about the other folks who had hit a deer recently, and one family who hit a bear. And an elk. You never know, apparently, what will haul its ass out of the Missouri woods these days.
The next morning, we worked the process. One thing at a time. Police report, tow truck, rental car. What can you rent in West Plains, Missouri, on a random Thursday morning? It’s a minivan. A minivan that smells distinctly of cat piss. Yes, friends. And we took it, because beggars cannot be choosers. We took that minivan, and we watched the Maverick get loaded onto a tow truck, and we drove to Destin, where hundreds of poisonous Pink Meanie jellyfish rode the waves like cowgirls and haunted my dreams like a Skeleton Crew short story.
While I sat on that pristine sugar sand beach sipping my drink and staring out at the hundreds of jellyfish cresting the clear waves, I thought how this is the first vacation we’ve taken without my girl in nine years. How alike it felt to the vacations my husband and I took … before. How, now, my life is … after. I thought on how I can make after not separate. How I can find a place for my daughter and I to be both adults but not apart.
I never understood older people who refused to drive after dark. Now that I’ve seen that deer do the triple somersault … now I do.
Do you love?
