Phil Ethier wrote:
>
> >While driving my daughter home from a baseball practice we were travelling
> a
> >country road (all roads around my place are country ones). And what comes
> >out of the side of the road, a doe. A big one! It was sooo close in fact I
> >missed it by about a half foot from the front of the spitfire. If I was 1
> >mph faster then we wouldn't be here right now. I think I am going to go and
> >buy a lottery ticket.
>
> I felt the same way when a bear ran into my car last Thanksgiving. If I had
> arrived on the scene a second earlier, and he had got out in front of the
> car and the car had struck him, the car would likely be demolished. As it
> was, it took $2600 to set the Saturn right.
This thread brings up some memories. On bears: in the early-mid `60s, I
lived on an air base in eastern Washington, and a particular lieutenant
bought a new Mustang convertible, shortly after they were released, 289
Hi-Po, 4-speed, and was engaged in a high-speed cruise in the Wenatchee
Mountains, crested a hill and punched out a 600-lb grizzly in the middle
of his lane. The grizzly was shoved about fifty feet from where the car
finally stopped, and the very new Mustang convertible folded up in the
middle.
Fortunately, this young lieutenant was only shaken up, but the car was
totalled. And, thinks he to himself, I've killed a damned bear to boot.
After about a half-hour, someone drives by, and he asks them to call a
wrecker and the game warden. Time passes. Then he hears a
"hhhhmmmmmmummmmphhhhh," looks around and his dead grizzly is wobbling
and weaving to its feet, shaking its wooly head. The bear wanders off
into the woods, and, along with it, the evidence of the reason for his
crash....
On deer: when I lived in Michigan in the `70s, there was, every winter,
a huge herd which wintered down in a farmer's field near a swamp about
five miles away from my house. I knew well the folk wisdom of how to
drive when they were around. One evening, coming back from teaching a
night class, in my VW bus, I saw two sets of eyes about two hundred
yards down the road, so I slowed down to about 15 mph and turned the
headlights off. And, just as I was about to pass the pair, the bigger of
the two does jumped out directly in front of the bus and hit square
between the headlights. On an older VW bus, there's a good few inches
between the outer skin and any reinforcements (few that there are), so
the sheet metal acted like a trampoline. The deer catapulted off the car
into the far ditch, rolled a couple of times and took off like its tail
was on fire. Ruined front end, and no venison to show for it....
About a month later, late for a class, I was going through a
particularly twisty road on the way to work, going pretty fast for a
road with some snow on it, and a fawn ran in front of the bus. Hauled
down on the brakes, lost sight of it as it went below my line of vision,
and heard a faint click as one of its back hooves barely contacted the
right edge of the bumper and I see it scampering away into the woods,
most likely with an interesting story to tell its mother. No sense in
holding a grudge against animals (ask Cap't Ahab about that!). <smile>
Cheers.
--
Michael D. Porter
Roswell, NM (yes, _that_ Roswell)
[mailto:mporter@zianet.com]
The gulf between content and substance continues to widen....
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