We were driving to Marquette, my sweetie and I, this morning (I was doing the steering), Marquette being not quite 100 miles away, through the woods. It is those woods that anyone new to the Upper Peninsula notes, as when our sour friend from NYC visited and sourly asked, on day 2, if there were any new trees to see. One of my nephews visited a few years back, making it as far as Milwaukee on the Greyhound. We drove down south to get him and when, after driving back north, we got to our house he asked if we really had just spent 5 hours in woods and nothing else. (He had forgotten our stop in Crystal Falls, where the little St. Vinnie's supplied him with his first non-black clothing in several years, to replace the clothes that Greyhound had lost, but that is a story for another day and beer or two. Crystal Falls is one of the occasional little towns through which one passes between here and Green Bay, little towns surrounded -- engulfed -- by woods.)
This morning Dennis and I were driving happily, talking, through those woods. It was a beautiful morning: when we drove south along the Keweenaw Bay the water was glittering in early light and the recent rains have made for lush green thickness and verges all purple lupine and daisies. A few miles west of Michigamme, a mile or two out of Two Lakes (unless your map is for snowmobiling through the UP, you will not find these names on it) I was telling Dennis about one of the workshop participants who had had to drive her sweetie from Houghton to the airport in Ironwood (!) one morning to catch a 7am flight. I had suggested they drive down the evening before because it would still be light, and they could more easily see the deer and avoid getting lost -- and besides if they waited until morning they'd have to leave Houghton no later than 5:30am (because of the time change going to Ironwood) and it always sucks to have to get up then. They decided to spend the night in Houghton, though, and did end up missing the flight in Ironwood by just a few minutes (which meant that her sweetie had to spend 7 hours waiting for the next flight out, in the Ironwood airport -- which would be the equivalent of waiting 7 hours in a cinderblock shell of an abandoned gas station).
"They were slowed down because they did run into a bunch of fog and deer on the way down," I said, and my sweetie asked, "Did they really run into the deer?" and I said, "No, you know what I mean," and there a deer ran into us.
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When I stopped the car Dennis and I were both fine, and there was no damage to the car that we could see from the inside. When we got out and walked to the front, however, there was damage, considerable damage, everything bent back in and underneath. And the deer was off in the lupine by a little stream.
When we hit the deer -- it ran directly in front of us -- stuff splattered on the windshield and I was thinking the deer would come up onto the hood and then through the windshield (which happened to a woman we know) but instead it had gone under and we had driven over it (or so it seemed) as it slid over to the side. Maybe we caught the deer's legs under the tires, because two of its legs -- one front leg, one rear leg, on opposite sides -- were cracked and bent oppositely to how they should have gone. But it was probably all the parts of our car that came off in the impact that we ran over, because the deer was thrown off to the side a surprising distance. (I had been going 60.)
The deer was pregnant, full, round, and dead. Immediately there were flies on her, her tongue dripping out her teeth.
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There are no garages between there and Marquette where we could stop with the car to ask whether it really was okay to drive it. The hour that it took us to get to Marquette we were tightly alert to any odd smells or noises. Dennis dropped me off at my doctor's appointment, which I had had to made four months before. Then he took the car to the dealership -- where we'd bought the car in the first place -- and was engulfed in the insurance and repair dance.
Me, I got to hang with a doctor in maybe his seventies who both spoke very fast and mumbled while he "frostbit" (his expression) off all my various sun damage spots. It took me several minutes always to parse what he had just said, so that by the time I had formulated a response or question he was already explaining the next bump or thickening on my leg or neck. Transatlantic phone calls used to have that sort of communication lag, so that by the time he had finished with me and had loaded me up with sample tubes of lotions and antibiotics, I was unclocked, the smell of my burnt bits of flesh sloughing into both my inchoate sense of responsibility for the dead deer and memories of my mother telling little southern California me to go out and get a lot of healthy sun to toughen up my skin.
Dennis was supposed to have met a potential grad student during this time, but she, upon being called with an explanation for his absence at the agreed-upon cafe, came and picked me up at the doctor's and then drove us both to the car rental place. Like a lot of people who have ended up living in this here north, she was happy to be help.
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Driving home in the rental, we stopped again at the spot where we'd hit the deer, which we found easily because of the amount of our car pieces on the shoulder. The deer was still in the lupine by the stream, dead still on her side. There were more flies.
Our crumpled car will take a week or more to fix, if the adjustment person sent by the insurance company agrees that the car is indeed unsafe to drive in its present condition, as the dealership person diagnosed.
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Luckily, Johndan was coming to dinner with his good round humors. We told him our day story from several angles, eventually veering off into political discussion and anger and then silly stories of the particularities of living rurally, and now we might be able to sleep. The last time we drove to Marquette, late on a hurried May Sunday night in the rain in order to catch a connection to our Rome flight the next day, we entered an underpass in the shiny black wetness and I had an unbidden vision of the car sliding into the cement wall and it was as creepy and unhinging a sight as any nightmare I'd ever had and it stuck. Today after we killed the deer but were unhurt ourselves we clung a bit to each other through the day as we did our errands. All this is delicate, our life together, because it is life together. The air is fragile around us all.
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