Just over a month ago, a deer hit my car on the way to work. There is a section of road where, if you’re traveling north, the road curves to the east about 25 degrees. I was just going into this curve when I heard a loud thump on the left side of my car. I glanced in my rear-view mirror and saw the surprised face of a deer looking back at me. I glanced forward again, because I was turning and wanted to stay in my lane. When I looked in my mirror again, I could see the deer running back toward the woods where he had come from.

Because of that, I figured there wasn’t a lot of damage to my car. About a dozen years ago I used to drive a Saturn and the exact same thing happened. It was a cold morning in early spring or later winter (my memory is a bit fuzzy here), and I assumed that my car had sustained a lot of damage. But when I got to work, there was no damage at all—the fiberglass body panels had returned to their original shape, and I could find a scratch or even a hairline crack in the paintwork. This deer also ran off, and so I thought that once, again, there was not damage.

When I got to work, I couldn’t open my car door. You can see that video on YouTube. I had to put everything on the passenger seat onto the floor and crawl out that side, dust myself off, gather up my things, inspect the damage and see if I could fix it then and there (I couldn’t), and wrote myself a note of the time and place it occurred for the police report I would file after work.

After all that, I made it to work just on time. As I settled in to my first class, I was glad that I had taken off early that morning, because it gave me time to deal with this.

Then I realized just how ironic that was. If I had taken off at my usual time, the deer and I would have never met.

Considering how much damage was done to my car, I bet the deer wishes I had just stayed in bed. Although he was running off when I saw him, he was probably running on pure adrenalin. The impact from the collision probably caused serious enough internal injuries that he is probably dead now. Even though there are far too many deer around here for our local ecosystem to handle, I am still bummed about that.

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