Roadkill: A Meditation

The first American I ever met was a fellow named Bob. It was 1993; I was twenty-three years old and washing dishes for a living at a somewhat infamous restaurant in Dublin, Ireland, named the Bad Ass Café. As it happens the Bad Ass Café is also where I met my second American—a Louisiana girl named Ashley, and I have been married to her ever since, but that’s another story. This one is about Bob, an awkward, guileless Midwesterner with a sunny disposition, a blind spot for irony, and a tendency to drop things that didn’t really qualify him for his job waiting tables in the unforgiving environment of the Bad Ass. On busy nights, when a crash from the restaurant preceded Bob’s reappearance in the kitchen to request a new order of pizzas to replace the ones he’d just thrown on the floor, the Irish cooks tended not to be sympathetic. They gave him hell. “Hey, Bob, if everything’s bigger in America, why can’t you carry three large pizzas?!” … “Hey, Bob, this isn’t McDonald’s; here the food comes on plates!” On slow nights when Bob wasn’t dropping things, the cooks still hit him with every cheap American stereotype they could think of. “Hey, Bob, when you’re back home I hope you don’t drop your guns as much as you drop our plates!” etc. Bob would respond to his tormentors’ questions earnestly, even offering jolly, homespun anecdotes—which only served to encourage them. Finally though, Bob startled the cooks into silence.  “What’s your earliest childhood memory, Bob?” asked Ritchie, the night manager, one slow Tuesday evening—his smirk revealing this to be another setup line. 

“Roadkill…” said Bob. Ritchie, uncharacteristically, was lost for words. Twenty years on, though, I think I know what Bob had in mind.

I suppose animals get hit by cars in other countries, but as a cultural reference, roadkill is a peculiarly American concept. In most developed places—Ireland, certainly—there just isn’t the density of charismatic megafauna wandering about to make collisions between it and the motoring public commonplace. But here—in Louisiana at least—roadkill is a sad fact of life. Many’s the evening when I drive Highway 61 north of St. Francisville, and pass scores of deer placidly grazing by the roadside. Inevitably, many’s the following morning when the commute takes me past the corpses of deer that zigged when they might have zagged. But despite having made that drive almost daily for twenty-two years, roadkill had never happened to me. 

Getting a new car is exciting, even if the car isn’t exactly new. So last month, when the time came to replace a car, and a gently used Volkswagen bought from somewhere up east was delivered to St. Francisville on a car transporter, my son Charles and I were enthusiastically present to take delivery. After signing for the car and admiring its bells and whistles, we turned north on Highway 61 and headed for home. Charles, Louisiana boy that he is, saw the deer before I did, and if I still had the reflexes of a twelve-year-old, I might have been able to respond fast enough to his “Deer, Daddy, DEER!” … As it happened, neither deer nor Volkswagen survived the experience. I had owned the latter for approximately twenty minutes. 

Producing this “Natural World” issue has occasioned reflection about the fractious relationship between we humans and the world around us. With our wealth, our technological prowess, and our innate (and entirely human) impulse to improve our lot, we have pushed the borders between the “wild” and the “civilized” worlds a long way back. Most of the time, our innovations insulate us from nature’s uncomfortable realities, creating an illusion of control that lasts until a flood or a hurricane comes, or a deer darts from the median, lifting the veil to remind us how closely we coexist with nature after all. The stories in this issue consider the line where we, and the wild forces we share the world with, intersect—for better and for worse. I suspect that ultimately, exactly where that line falls might not be up to us to decide.