On a Deer-Strike

　

　



　

　

1.

She was an alcoholic and drug addict. She lived in a house on the shore of Lake Minnetonka. She had friends and a long, white boat with a powerful engine. She kept the boat moored at a dock where her lawn became lake. She had one daughter and was married three times. She married the father of her daughter when she was 17 or 18. She divorced and, then, married again when she was about 30. She divorced and lived alone or with various boyfriends for a decade or so. She married a man who may have been some kind of Assyrian or Persian gangster. He was very controlling but, also, protective. She suffered from kidney and liver failure. She endured dialysis but it didn’t really help her. She died for a very long time, sometimes, comatose, other times, partially awake and murmuring things that didn’t entirely make sense. She was moved from one hospital to another at the insistence of her husband. She was the subject of litigation because the final hospital thought that she was doomed and half-rotten in their intensive care and that someone should pull the plug and this was something that her husband would not authorize. It was all a battle for control except the situation was one that on one could control. She died before the lawsuit could be fully played-out. She was embalmed and put in a box. She was taken in a rented Suburban to a rural cemetery somewhere between the Indian reservation at Red Lake and Thief River Falls. She was buried beside her mother and father. She had two mourners at her funeral: her older brother, Jeff, and her husband who was reputed to be a Persian or Assyrian gangster. She was buried many hundreds of miles from where she lived on the shore of Lake Minnetonka, laid to rest on a patch of dry land like an island between bogs and tamarack swamps fifty miles south of the Canadian border. She was Julie’s cousin. When she was a little girl, she was raised with her cousins in Albert Lea and she spent summers on Grandma Sena’s farm near Albert Lea. Her daughter, Robin, arranged a memorial celebration at Lord Fletcher’s, a bar and grill on Lake Minnetonka that her mother had frequented. Her older brother, Jeff, didn’t attend the celebration and told Robin that no one respected her dead mother because she was the "town drunk."

I don’t think the dead woman had much choice about being a drunk and heroin addict. God made her that way.

　

2.

When I was little, people amused themselves by taking a ride. Everyone would load up in the car and, then, Daddy would drive out into the country and, after an hour or so, might stop for an ice-cream sundae at Bridgeman’s, an ice cream parlor that was very popular when I was a boy, but, then, apparently, became unpopular and vanished. (Maybe, Bridgeman’s vanished because gas became expensive and people couldn’t afford to go for a ride in their motor-cars to amuse themselves and, only someone very fat or very self-indulgent, would make Bridgeman’s a destination, preferring instead to sort of happen onto the ice cream parlor as opposed to making it the object of the trip.) Sometimes, although this was very rare, we would go as far as Lake Minnetonka, the big body of water about 20 miles to the west of Minneapolis.

In those days, open, unpopulated land still remained between Minneapolis and its suburbs and the big lake. Hopkins was where the city ended and the Main Street in that town was still seven or eight miles from the nearest Minnetonka bay and shoreline. This meant that you drove for fifteen or twenty minutes through a wilderness of old, partially abandoned gravel quarries, decaying dairy farms, steep hills staked with raspberry plants, and narrow, cold lakes in forgotten valleys before coming upon an intricate landscape of marinas and villages inserted into isthmuses between great expanses of water, sometimes vibrant with white-caps, arched bridges tall enough to allow yachts to pass between adjacent bays in the lake, shorelines congested with ice-houses pulled off the water and standing on the beach like beehives, great grey mansions turning their rumps to the road so as to open picture windows upon the sunsets over Lake Minnetonka, water-side golf courses for the very wealthy and little sordid-looking resorts and trailer courts between brown cattail-studded marshes where redwing blackbirds swooped and chattered in the air. It was a place completely different from the suburbs where we lived and seemed strangely familiar to me – the little rustic gas stations with stucco walls and red tile roofs and the lake-side taverns and grills extending piers into the water so that people could visit in their fishing boats and skiffs and yachts, the little towns with their streets opening onto the lake and their old resort architecture, fanciful towers and Ye olde shops selling ice cream and salt-water taffey along the main streets, and the sheer complexity of the lake itself with its hundred involuted bays and slender necks of land and its auxiliary platoons of swamps and the big amusement park at Excelsior with the creaking wooden roller-coaster that was so big and so terrifying: all of this reminded me of the seaside in New Jersey, also complicated with saltwater marshes and streams and tidal flats and big dunes on which boardwalks had been built. Minnetonka had hundreds of miles of shoreline and, although I have lived in Minnesota, all my life I have never seen the lake’s western-most bays and harbors, the remote villages in West Tonka where, I suppose, the great prairies extending toward the sunset and the Dakotas and Montana began. I have never taken a ferry to the Big Island where there was once a huge amusement park, vanished even before World War One. I have walked on the lake in a city of ice fishers once a long time ago, but I can’t recall ever being out on the waters of Minnetonka when the ice had gone out and left the bays and harbors open for the fleets of sailboats that fluttered back and forth, tacking against the wind, like butterflies.

　

3.

Once I went to the Old Log Theater located somewhere on Lake Minnetonka. This was a summer-stock theater built for the amusement of rich people, like the Dayton’s and the Pillsbury’s, who had elaborate mansions on the hills overlooking the water. It was modeled on the summer-stock theaters on Cape Cod and had a rustic look, built, as the name implies from logs, with a hunter-green shingled roof. The Old Log Theater was the first repertory company in the Twin Cities area, pre-dating Tyrone Guthrie’s famous regional theater downtown by a decade or so. Some famous Hollywood and TV actors and actresses began their careers at the Old Log Theater but I can’t recall their names – the place specialized in London East End farces such as "No Sex please, we’re British" and "Don’t Drink the Water."

In High School, I played trombone and sat next to a boy a year older than me named Peter Emblom. Peter Emblom was a very good musician and he played the trombone in a way that made the instrument sound sweet and articulate. By contrast, I could never make my horn do anything but utter rude blatting sounds. Emblom played in a brass rock ‘n roll group modeled at the band Chicago. Once they played a concert at the Old Log Theater, a celebration for the release of their record, and I recall attending in a school bus chartered by my High School. It was a fine concert and I still remember how impressed I was. I often wonder what happened to Peter Emblom and, certainly, I hope that he remains a professional musician playing with some world famous orchestra. But I don’t know.

4.

Lord Fletchers in Spring Lake Park has seen better days. The building is constructed of dark wooden panels and exists mainly to provide toilets and a bar and a kitchen for a big blonde patio that extends long piers out into the small and shallow bay. In good weather, the mooring places on the piers are all occupied and, in fact, sailboats and cruisers queue in the deeper water waiting for a place to tie-up. Big parasol-shaped awnings protect the people dining and drinking at the tables on the patio and, at night, cascades of Christmas tree lights are supposed to make the place a fairyland and, in fact, create a sort of tawdry and romantic atmosphere.

The bar and grill are gloomy places, also with dark-paneled walls, although on the upper level there are some windows opening out upon the water. In the lower level, a couple of party rooms with small wooden bars equipped with beer taps open out onto the patio and the docks extending into the bright water.

The dead woman’s daughter had set up slide-show with many hundreds of pictures of her mother. The dead woman had been very photogenic, with remarkably expressive eyes. Plastic surgery had kept her cheeks and chin and throat taut until pretty much the end of her life. There were no pictures of her taken during the last five years – the most recent image was dated 2013. In the slide show there was a very good picture of all the cousins taken at the dead woman’s second wedding – I recall that the banquet and dance was held at the Lafayette Yacht Club, a great ornate temple to wealth located on a low bluff between two huge bays on the lake. My wife wore a sequin blue dress to the wedding and she was the most beautiful woman in the picture.

Most of the people at the Lord Fletcher’s celebration were pictured in one or a dozen of the slides showing on the screen and so the guests watched carefully and commented on how lovely the dead woman had looked and then made cooing and happy sounds when they glimpsed themselves on the screen, not themselves as they now looked, older and fatter and sadder, but themselves as they had been in the past, taking their pleasure on the great lake or toasting with glasses of wine in taverns or on the Lord Fletcher’s patio jutting out into the sunset or skiing near Lake Tahoe (where the dead woman’s family owned a house) or feasting in Acapulco or Los Angeles.

The party room was packed with people and it wasn’t a sad event and, sometimes, some of the older party-goers went out onto the deck to smoke cigarettes and blink in the bright sunlight at the little bay still grey with ice except around the very edges of the water. Some of the windows were a little dingy and the toilets were grimy and the old bar and grill with its archaic steak-rooms with dark cherry wood walls and ruby-red carpets, stained here and there, seemed not exactly as clean as they could be and the whole place, except for the brand new decks outside, exuded a mood that was Sinatra-era, a little depraved yet still stodgy and conservative and, upstairs, the old decadent marina rats, all of them intensely alcoholic, were getting juiced at the bar, wearing yachting caps and blazers with brass buttons and teasing weary old waitresses who they had known for half their lives.

5.

Of course, dead woman’s parents had been alcoholics and there was a good deal of violence in the family and the deceased told my wife once, when she was herself very drunk and had just beaten her boyfriend bloody, that her father used to beat her mother and that this went on and on and that she had always wished that her mother would take a knife and cut out her father’s heart although this never happened. Her parents stopped drinking and her father channeled all of his considerable energy into his excavating company and he went from being a hungover man bearing down on a shovel in a cloud of mosquitos in the swamps of a northern Minnesota Indian reservation to the owner of a multi-million dollar company, a firm that once bored a tunnel two-hundred and fifty miles through the Sierra Nevada from the snow pack high in the mountains to downtown Los Angeles. The company did the tunneling and excavation at the Denver Airport and had other high prestige projects, including many in Mexico City, and their motto was always to get the bid, be the low-bidder, and, then, use your battalion of lawyers to sue for extras and change orders. In the end, the empire imploded and the company was banned from doing business in California due to its "organized crime connections" – allegedly, the firm used the mob to deal with thorny zoning issues and labor concerns. But, by that time, the dead woman was set up in her house in Spring Lake Park, pretty close to her watering place at Lord Fletchers, and she had her 30 foot yacht and her snowmobiles and dogs and, if she hadn’t been both an alcoholic and drug addict, probably would have done all right for herself.

Although the dead woman always had platinum blonde hair when I knew her, she was born brunette. A picture of her taken in High School shows a waif with enormous, compelling, and tragic eyes. They are the round, wet eyes of a prey animal, doe-eyes. The little girl was 16 and, then, pregnant. She looks beautiful and unutterably lost and haunted, a tiny fugitive who has just emerged from some terrible, wolf-haunted woods.

　

6.

I have always thought that some enterprising publisher in the Twin Cities should prepare a guide book and history of Lake Minnetonka, a sort of Lone Planet gazetteer for the place. The history section would recount how Minneapolis hotels expanded to open resorts on the shores of the big lake and how there were street car lines that started downtown, on Hennepin Avenue, the main street in Minneapolis, and ran express service to Excelsior and the amusement park and, then, connected with steamers that plied the lake, taking holiday-goers to the various hotels, either grandiose or humble, in the bays and inlets of the lake. There was the huge amusement park briefly adorning Big Island and other islands that were off-limits to anyone but the very wealthy. There was the time that Frank Lloyd Wright was arrested in a motel on a Minnetonka beach and charged with a Mann Act violation. And there were gangster stories, tales of mobsters from Chicago hiding out at fishing resorts on the lake, rumors of the heirs and heiresses of the grain milling companies gone mad or crazy and committing suicide by drowning, boats with corpses in them drifting in the morning mists and the big lake serpent, Lou, probably the last of the prehistoric sturgeons inhabiting the depths of the lake (30 feet to 121 feet), seen for the final time around 1980 and, then, presumably lost forever. There was the time in the summer of 1964 when the Rolling Stones played at Excelsior Amusement Park, entertaining a crowd of about 300. The next day, Mick Jagger, who had an infection, when to the pharmacy in Spring Lake Park and, while waiting in line, met Jimmy Hutmaker. Jimmy was a mentally retarded man who lived in town, very friendly and gregarious, and, as is the case in a small village, he was regarded with warmth by his neighbors and thought of, generally, as the town’s good will ambassador to the world. (There was a fellow like this in Austin, where I now live, who always appeared when anything dramatic was underway so that he could participate by floridly directing traffic – he would be seen at accidents and where trees were knocked down in a storm, standing in the middle of the street and directing traffic with a big grin and expansive hand gestures, something that the police tolerated so long as he didn’t get too close to the calamity requiring their attention. Once, a huge house was put on rollers and dragged down one of our principal thoroughfares and the retarded man took the lead, marching up the street in front of the house that was creeping forward behind him, the mentally retarded man like a drum major, holding off the traffic on side streets and leading the procession down the road – an acceptable thing except that his enthusiasm far outpaced the house which was being towed with all due deliberation down the street so that he was busily closing intersecting side streets eight or nine blocks in front of the house-on-wheels, much to the chagrin of local motorists.) Mr. Jimmy, as people called the retarded man, was a little irate because the pharmacy clerk had run out of cherry syrup and so he couldn’t get a spritz of cherry in his coca-cola. "No cherry coke today, Mr. Jimmy," the pharmacist announced. Whereupon, Mr. Jimmy is supposed to have turned to Mick Jagger and said: "You can’t always get what you want." It’s a wonderful story and most compelling with only one disadvantage, namely that it isn’t true.

　

7.

I grew up in Eden Prairie, about ten miles southwest of Lake Minnetonka, but it was rare that we traveled that short distance to the lake. Nearer lakes beckoned us, particularly deep fjord-like Bryant Lake and hot, shallow Round Lake, both places where we swam in the summer. The huge open expanses of Lake Minnetonka and the lakeside lanes shadowed with old trees hiding mansions were foreign to us.

After the celebration at Lord Fletcher’s, Julie and I drove to my mother’s house in Eden Prairie. We spent an hour or so visiting with her before driving into downtown Hopkins to a Brazilian restaurant in that town.

Every Saturday when I was a kid, my family drove to Hopkins and shopped at a Red Owl on the corner of Shady Oak Lake road and old Highway 7. (This Saturday afternoon, when I finish writing, I’ll go to the Walmart grocery store in Austin and see the large Mexican families all gathered together to buy their groceries for the week and I will reflect that this custom is not so different from the way my family bought groceries in the sixties and early seventies.) A half-mile away, Red Owl groceries had its headquarters, some big warehouses in an industrial park north of Hopkins’ main street marked with the huge icon of an owl’s head, bright red and white, like something you might expect to see emblazoned on a soda pop can. The Red Owl grocery store at Shady Oak Lake Road is long-gone and the warehouses have been purchased by some other chain of food stores, but the roads into Hopkins remain the same, unchanged from my vivid youthful memories – the hill by 494 to steep for building, the swamps, the old neighborhoods built up in the late forties and fifties hidden by tall trees and, even, the inexplicable zones where nothing has been built, waste lots that are, I suppose, too swampy to be developed.

Downtown Hopkins is also, more or less, like it was forty-five years ago. The old movie theater with its vertical stucco tower pointing like an index finger into the sky is gone, a victim of the era of multi-plexes, but the bars dating back to World War Two and the Legion post and the bowling alley have all survived. There are now storefronts with Spanish writing on them and Asian groceries on the corners but the general physiognomy, as it were, of the town remains, more or less, the same as before.

Samba is a Brazilian restaurant, family operated – the owner is a dignified Brazilian gentleman with fluffy white brows who may be about sixty. His two sons, one of them fat and the other skinny, serve as waiters. They are very friendly people and they will often touch you when they speak, tapping your shoulder or casting a friendly arm around your neck or patting you on the back of the hand. They like to tease their customers – when my mother asked for a big spoon to put her leftover meal in styrofoam carton, the waiter brought a tiny tea spoon (although he had hidden behind his back a big serving spoon.) Similarly, when my mother asked if her dish could be prepared without much spice, the waiter, then, relayed to his partner that the dish should be made as spicy as possible – this causing my mother to redden and wave her hands in the air to signify: "No, no, this was not what I meant." The old proprietor likes it when you say that he looks like his waiters, one of three brothers. He feigns dismay when someone calls him grandpa. It’s all pleasant enough and schtick to promote a larger gratuity and, in that respect, by and large successful.

My mother is from a small-town in Nebraska and, like most people from places of that kind, she’s very voluble and has no anxiety about talking to strangers. She asked the proprietor about how he came to open his business in Hopkins and he told her that he had operated a restaurant in Rio de Janeiro, but the economy was poor and the business failed. So he emigrated to the United States where he worked as a traveling salesman for granite – apparently, Brazil produces lots of granite. When he had earned enough money, he invested in the restaurant and brought his boys on board as helpers. The proprietor explained this to my mother sitting beside her at a chair that he pulled away from another table.

"The restaurant business is very difficult," he said. "This winter, when it kept snowing every weekend, business went down to nothing and, then, they sometimes have road work and close the main street." He sighed. "Some of it you can’t control."

My mother frowned: "But you had the initiative to start the restaurant."

The Brazilian gentleman mimicked wiping sweat off his brow. "Hard work," he said.

　

8.

At Lord Fletcher’s, the men and women’s toilets are adjacent to an open room where there are pool tables and a door that opens onto the back deck and the docks. I went outside. The sun was warm but the big lake’s breath was cold against my lips and cheek – the ice melts on a lake from the shore inward and the bay was still crowned with a cap of ice like a cataract in an eye.

Near the door leading to the docks, a calendar was marked with notations as to when the ice had cleared from the big lake. The earliest dates were at the middle of March. The last dates were in the first week of May. Curiously, ice lingered in Lake Minnetonka as late as May 6, 7, and 8 in the years 1856, 1857, and 1858. I wondered whether these cold years were correlated with a volcanic eruption somewhere, great clouds of ash and cinder caught in the jet stream and diluting the sunlight that reached the earth. But research showed me that the famous, and deadly, year without a summer was 1816, a cold time when ash from the eruption of Mount Tambora blotted the warmth out of the sky and caused widespread famines in the northern hemisphere. I didn’t find any eruptions clearly correlating to the cold years in Minnesota between 1856 and 1858. Volcanoes are always erupting somewhere, often with conspicuous loss of life. Aetna erupted in 1853 and ash in the atmosphere caused famines in northern Europe but I didn’t find anything suggesting that these effects were translated to the American Midwest.

"Civilization," Will Durant wrote, "exists only by geological consent."

　

9.

A touchstone for me is William Carlos Williams, "To Elsie", the famous poem that begins with the phrase: "The pure products of America go crazy..." Williams’ subject is a slatternly maid, illiterate and probably semi-retarded. The poem might be read as patronizing, but it’s not really about the ignorant servant girl – rather, Williams detects a strain of recklessness and uncontrolled violence in the American psyche.

While the "imagination strains / after deer / going by in fields of golden rod / in the stifling heat of September," there is something threatening in the atmosphere: "somehow it seems/ to destroy us..." Williams doesn’t exactly identify what "it" is. But he ends ominously: "No one to witness / And adjust / no one to drive the car."

10.

In Williams poem, why is the weather "stifling" in September? We don’t control the weather. And you can’t always get what you want.

This morning on May 6, 2018, eight rifts are leaking lava into a suburban neighborhood on the flank of a Hawaiian volcano. Images on the news show red, spattering lava erupting among green trees, some of which are burning like torches. Roads have cracked open and are being re-paved with viscous magma.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s department announced on Saturday, May 5, 2018, that the ice had official melted out of Lake Minnetonka as of 12:15 pm and the waters were now clear for fishing and boating.

11.

The food at the Brazilian restaurant was good, although a little bland. Brazilian cuisine is carnivorous with big slabs of beef and dense black sausages. Fried yucca plays the role of potatoes. Ground yucca is used for seasoning, but, I must note, a strange form of seasoning because the brown heaps of spice have no discernible taste.

I drove back over the familiar roads to the home where I was raised in Eden Prairie. My mother’s house stands on two acres a little below the crest of a hill. The land was once pitted and cratered with gravel mines, but those were leveled in the sixties before the subdivision was built. Nonetheless, the old stony slopes still persist, steep in some places with cul-de-sacs where there were once, I suppose, big hollow craters from which glacial stone was harvested.

On the steep road ascending to my mother’s house, the sun was aimed into my eyes, glaring through the trees at the top of the ridge, and I couldn’t really see very well. Someone cried out: "Deer!" I slowed to see four or five deer lazily crossing the road only a couple car lengths ahead of me. The deer were big animals with white rumps and, because the neighbor lady fed them, they strolled up the asphalt street with impunity. The animals were tame and stood in my way so that I had to let them pass, watching me over their grey shoulders with complete indifference. Pausing to nuzzle the sod, the deer walked across the lawns toward the setting sun. It was strange, almost surreal, to see the big animals completely unconcerned about my car, ambling slowly among the manicured shrubs and the mown lawns and the ornamental trees dug into people’s front yards.

"I almost hit those deer," I said. My mother said: "Roberta, feeds them. But they eat up my trees." She gestured toward her side-yard and the little crabtree apple orchard there.

　

12.

At the Brazilian restaurant, in the sunny dining room, we talked about my brother, Christopher, who is paralyzed by ALS and, apparently, dying. By my standards, he is a wealthy man and lives on a beautiful estate in the forests on the Puget Sound. Although he is considerably younger that I, he retired a few years ago. His home is beautiful and the deep woods where it is situated are also stunning, tall straight trees surrounding his lawn and flower beds. The injustice of Christopher’s illness filled my mother’s eyes with tears.

Ten years ago, Christopher with Julie and I took my mother to Turkey. This was my way of making restitution to her. I have mentioned this before, but will repeat the story: in her last year of High School, my mother received a scholarship to live for semester in Turkey – it was an exchange program underwritten by a local service club, I think, possibly the Rotary Club in the small Nebraska village where my mother lived. But my mother became pregnant and the trip was out of the question. She was pregnant with me and a marriage had to be hurriedly arranged and, then, my parents moved to a remote village in western Nebraska so that I could be born as far away from their home-town as possible.

We don’t control the manner of our coming into the world. Nor do we control the way that we leave.

13.

The night was dark and windy. When driving home from the Cities, I usually stop at Owatonna to buy a can of pop and some peanuts after pumping gas into the car. But I had bought gas earlier because driving along the curving inlets of the big lake had consumed an extra quarter tank and so I was a little bit low on fuel leaving the suburbs.

I made the cloverleaf where I-35 and I-90 intersect by about 9:30 pm. Earlier the moon hung above the horizon, a yellowish balloon buffeted by scudding clouds, but now the moon was gone, hidden away somewhere in the windy, echoing corridors of the night.

My wife saw the deer first, a big animal turned sideways to offer the broadest target to onrushing traffic, standing exactly astraddle the white center-line between lanes. The deer’s eyes caught the headlights and kicked the beam back at me as a green flash. Instinctively, I jammed on my brakes. The brakes are anti-lock and they didn’t catch but instead stuttered underfoot, a hollow sensation between the brake shoes gripping and releasing, as if I were darting from ice-floe to ice-floe in a rushing stream or clutching at vines and twigs as I fell into a vast abyss. I felt the car’s distress under my heart, the skid and, then, the release of the skid and the skid again. The deer surged to the side and hit the car, a loud thud, a punch that twisted me a little sideways. It was like a furry white wave suddenly arching up to crash against the side of the vehicle.

I pulled over to the side of the road. I didn’t know what to do. If the animal were wounded and lying in a ditch, I would have to call the highway patrol, I thought, or the sheriff’s department. After a moment sitting stunned behind the wheel, I looked in my rear-view mirror, measured the distance between where I was parked, engine still humming, and the oncoming headlights and, then, got out. The wind filled my eyes and nose and mouth. I walked about 150 yards from the car, the vehicle receding behind me in the enormous darkness, just dull red lights on the side of the highway. I had forgotten to pull on the four-way emergency flashers and so, I thought: "my car is now a target also." A semi-truck hurtled past, dragging a hot, diesel-smelling gale behind it – the gravel on the shoulder shuddered and flakes of leaves and paper spun up and around in the vortex behind the truck. I should have put on the emergency blinkers. There was no sign of the deer – the ditches were full of water from recent rains and snow-melt and cacophonous with frogs and the dark fields stretched out to gloomy shelter belts where the old oak trees were stark and bare, leafless, in the night.

I turned and hustled back to my car and, as I approached, I could hear my wife shouting to me.

"Where did you go?" she asked. "You left me here all alone." There was reproach in her voice. I should have turned on the emergency blinkers. "I had to look for the deer," I said. "But I watched," my wife said, "and you just vanished in the darkness."

"It’s very dark," I told her.

The next day, I examined my car carefully for any signs of damage. There were no dents or gouges on the driver’s side of my car where the deer had lunged into the speeding vehicle. The only trace of the deer-strike was a fan of six or seven stark-white hairs caught up in bottom of the back-seat door frame. I was surprised at how white the hairs were.

　

14.

A few days later, I woke up with a empty, falling feeling in my stomach and my right foot jabbed so hard against the bedstead that I had a charley-horse in my calf.

How much of our lives do we really control? How much is sheer accident? What if I had stopped for gas in Owatonna? Wouldn’t the deer have crossed the freeway there at mile-marker 161 and been long gone, doing what deer do in the stubble of the fallow cornfields to the south of the freeway? What if I had hit the deer on the lane near by mother’s house? What if...

Our sense that we are in control of our lives is pretty much pure fiction.

15.

Once when my children were tiny, I took them to Colorado. With my wife, we were staying in a motel to the southwest of the Continental divide near Granby, about 40 miles from Rocky Mountain National Park. In the evening, we got into my car and drove toward the divide. My idea was to watch the sunset from the crest of the pass.

It was a typical Colorado two-lane curving uphill steeply between green meadows adorned with columbine and overlooking a deep cleft in the mountains where a creek dived and splashed down from snowfields above us. Aspens were shivering in the chill mountain air and the road was completely deserted.

A big deer came up from the steep slope above the white ribbon of the creek. The deer galloped, as if in slow motion, into the side of car, twisted and, then, airborne, flew away.

I stopped my car but had no idea what to do. The road was completely still and I heard the wind whispering in the aspens and the sound of water pouring over boulders and bathing winter-killed trees fallen crosswise into the gorge.

The deer was on its side. Its chest heaved a couple times and, then, it was still. The animal had fallen down the slope a few yards from the traveled-upon asphalt. The light went out of the deer’s eyes. The setting sun poured itself over the mountain tops. There was one peak on each side of the road and, gilded with light, they each looked like the throne of God.

　


May 10, 2018