About Roadkill

I have a persistent fear of our dachshund disappearing into a muddle of bone and fur beneath the wheels of a minivan hurtling down our street.  This is not our dog’s story.  I have borrowed it from a friend, who did lose her family dachshund to an oncoming vehicle.  Why I fear the same story will play out again in parallel detail in my life is an unsubstantiated question.  But fear persists.

The other day I saw a fox, dead, in the road.  I sped past at 48 miles per hour, and while I didn’t slow my speed, my head turned, snagged by the flash of orange.  The fox had cowered against the concrete barrier between lanes of traffic on route 28N.  It was nature’s construction cone, displaced in a deathtrap of road, asphalt, and paint.

Foxes are so rare here that I’ve seen maybe one pinned to the yellow lines.  The color of these furtive slinkers is muted brown in headlights.  On the particular morning when I spied the fox (RIP, construction cone orange and inexplicably intact), I considered maybe it was a child’s stuffed animal.  Or someone put a little installment art in our questionable times to slow highway hurry to a pace of wonder.

Passing at 48 mph, I registered that wedge-head, white and tapering with almost impolite delicacy to a black nose resting on the white line.  A nose that seemed to have spent its dying momentum pulling the head attached to it toward safety.

Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania, I know roadkill.  I share every Country Mouse’s fear of driving anywhere at night where there are trees alongside the road.  This is pretty much everywhere in rural Pennsylvania.  White tailed deer spring like pop-up clowns in a horror show to bound across the road just inches from bumpers. 

Now a City Mouse, I’m still dodging roadkill.  Flattened squirrels, raccoons, and deer pockmark roads.  City Mouse drivers don’t swerve to avoid these cow plops of bone, blood, and fur.  Roadkill is ignored, as a matter of course.

But that fox, so perfectly still and plump and curled against its final obstacle?  It has unsettled my mind.  I can’t stop noticing how many other animals have stopped dead in their tracks.  The other day, I counted six squirrels and three raccoons in a two hundred yard death-aisle of route 65S.

My children have a campaign going to adopt pets into our family.  In addition to the dachshund, whose road expiration date I anticipate at any minute, they would like to upgrade to a husky.  Failing that, they would agree to settle for a lizard.  Or, if we find ourselves more amenable to feather over fur, a parrot has been suggested.  Most recently, after pet-sitting for a friend, guinea pigs have joined the campaign trail.  There is greater love for the fur in my house than the fur on the roads. 

Yet all animals come with a death guarantee.  Some, like the husky, could quickly follow the dachshund’s expiration date.  Others (the parrot), I’m told could cling to life for fifty years or more.  Guinea pigs require a mid-range commitment, probably something around 8 years, but with the advantage of being least likely to come in close proximity to car tires.

We negotiate pet adoption carefully in our household.  We have a wooden cross in our backyard that through recent neglect has become a wooden stake, the crosspiece fallen and lost under a tangle of weeds and ivy.  The cross marks the final resting place of Clementine, a bunny adopted in an Easter-moment of weakness.

Clementine lived for five years in a corner of my kitchen.  She faithfully consumed kale ribs and celery butts.  And then one day, she could only hop with half of her body, and her breathing turned syncopated.  Not sure what else to do (and 100% unwilling to employ a hammer or car tire), my husband and I ushered Clementine into a cardboard box, which we put on our back deck, and which we monitored for sound.  Waiting for silence.

My heart cannot handle any more ragged breathing coming from cardboard boxes.

My husband and I weigh pet options and determine that the date of demise is a deciding factor. 
“How long does that one live?  Shorter the better.”
“Let’s discuss quantity of kid tears over a fish vs. guinea pig?”

(For the record, there can be an excessive amount of tears, springing up even years after a goldfish’s death.)

I knew the orange fox on route 28 for milliseconds of my life, yet I have spent two weeks thinking about it. The fox joins another nocturnal mammal that invaded my life in college and occupied minutes, adding to hours, in the years since.  The skunk from Robert Lowell’s poem, “Skunk Hour”:

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Why do these animals haunt me in life, death, or poetry, long after any marker of their lives has dropped into weeds, flattened on the road, or closed in a book?  It reads like the beginning of a bad joke: “A dead rabbit, fox, and skunk walk into my life…”

My husband’s childhood neighbors pay homage to roadkill in a rather interesting way.  They eat it.  John and Jean sally forth with shovel to walk their country roads.  They lumber along next to stone walls placed by farmers over two hundred years ago.  On successful days, John and Jean come gloating home, an outstretched shovel bearing a squirrel pancake.

The grill is already turned on, water boiling in a pot, awaiting the scalding of a scavenged sacrifice.  I do not know if Jean skins the roadkill first, or, if she does, how such a feat is even accomplished.  Instead, I imagine she tips the shovel into the pot, sluicing sinew, bone, fur, and asphalt into the water.

John and Jean swear by roadkill stew.  Good neighbors, they frequently offer a bite.  We always, always, politely decline.

Let’s just make this a general life rule: roadkill is best ignored.  If an expiration date has arrived, let’s not mark it.  Shall we instead wait in planned ignorance for the offensive carcasses to disappear from our lives?  Let police or tires do their best work.  Police, who join John and Jean in the thankless job of scraping our roads clean with a shovel, or tires, which mangle, mash, and fling organic matter to the four winds.  

The demised fox on route 28 does not follow the general life rule.  It refuses to be ignored.  Or decay.  It draws notice to dead compatriots.  That darn fox makes me mark six squirrels and three raccoons along my errands on 65S.  It makes me catalog a white tailed-deer’s rib bones skewering a bloated gut as I flash by on 279N.

I’d like to discount the death around me with the same disregard I feel toward a pet lizard (life expectancy=3-5 years).  But then I remember a dachshund and imagine the thud, spatter of gore, and a little black nose stilled at the end of a wedge-head.  The thought of death by road for dog or fox?  It simply will not scare.