Deer X-ing (3/1)

  Wrote some words about road kill and the existential horror of being killed by something you cannot ever understand! I got to the thesis of this at the very end, lots of writing was just circling the point before I pinned down what I wanted to say.

        Roadkill is a very unnatural thing.

I don’t pity the animals for their deaths, no more than I pity any dead thing. I understand tragedies happen, I understand life has a limit that cannot be exceeded. The River Styx runs in one direction.

No, what disturbs me about roadkill, what keeps me from moving on from it, is that the poor animal has no idea what’s just happened to it. A higher power, or evolution, whatever wizard pulls the strings of creation from behind its curtain, never factored in cars. This is something entirely incomprehensible to an animal. It may understand that this certain area of its home is black stone, and there are loud things that move very fast and smell terrible. A raccoon may understand that those things are deadly, and scurries to avoid them. No deer or squirrel will ever understand just what specifically did them in.

“They don’t know what hit them,” to an existential degree.

The fundamentals are lightyears beyond their reasoning. This isn’t death for food, there is an animalistic understanding of that. A human killing a deer with a bow is different from it being struck by a Buick. There’s the animal aspect. The predator kills prey. The method of the killing may be more advanced than fangs and claws, but the desire and result are the same.

With roadkill, there’s not a part of it that factors into the animal world. A deer has no idea what metal is. It never will. It may understand that an object is hard and makes a clang when struck, that it gets cold when the air is cold. But it can never understand the fact that this was once ore, ripped from a mountain. It can never comprehend that the metal is then shaped in factories (What would a deer make of a factory other than the gates of Hell itself?), and rolled off the production line (A process implemented over a century ago, a scale of time that does not and cannot exist to an animal) and then it appears on a strip of black stone with eyes blazing like the sun, a rumbling in its throat animalistic and a vast distance from the natural.

It doesn’t even know that there’s a human involved in making it go. Would a deer, watching a man enter his car and speed off, be able to comprehend the connection of the two?

This is not to say that human comprehension makes getting hit by a car a cakewalk. As I bounce and vault over the hood of a Toyota Corolla, I’m not calm because I understand that this is a car, an automobile manufactured for transport. It is terrifying because you understand what’s happening, the speed at which the car is moving, the weight and danger of the vehicle inherent in its manufacturing. There’s security in knowledge, in understanding. The boom of thunder is less scary when you understand it’s friction and heat instead of the trundling steps of an ill-at-ease god. Disease is not as terrifying when you understand the root cause of it, microbes and bacteria, rather than curses and omens.

I do not want to get hit by a car. I’d rather not. I understand the danger and pain and anguish. I understand that there are very heavy metal boxes, powered by the combustion of long extinct lizards, screaming down roads whose existence I comprehend. I know to look both ways, I know where cars are allowed to go and where they cannot. I understand that there is a human behind the wheel. If I get hit by a car, I know what I got hit by.

Cars, and the infrastructure around them, were created through the ever growing demands of capital and industrialization. More and more wild land is taken year after year to expand the great ribbons of asphalt that trace the distance from coast to coast. I understand the smell in the air comes from the fumes of the engines, the rumble isn’t the growl of a predator but the movement of pistons and crankshafts. I don’t know anything about cars themselves, I don’t know the specifics of how an engine functions or what an ignition timing is (outside of the use of the term in My Cousin Vinny). I don’t need to know the specifics because I’m capable of grasping the general. I know what a vehicle is.

Animals do not, and cannot. They have no need for a car. They don’t have to drive to grocery stores, or to work, or to school. They have no purpose for such a thing. The needs of the homo sapien exist on levels and tiers beyond what a chipmunk can process. Freudians may disagree, but our lives exist beyond the limits of eating, sleeping, and reproducing. The animal hierarchy of needs is a flat plane. The purpose and design of their demise, the poor deer clipped by a passing semi-truck, are entirely beyond their comprehension. The semi is carrying food, fulfilling the basic animal need. The mechanics of food production and consumption are so advanced, so foreign, to an animal, that it may as well be an entirely different thing.

In William Gibson’s Hinterlands, mankind discovers something in the vast dark of space. This something is the Highway, a hole in the fabric of reality that eats people and spits them back out, mad from the sights on the other side. They often have advanced or unknown technologies, seashells from alien lifeforms, or equations that exist beyond modern science. He describes it as being a fly in an airport, accidentally getting on a plane. Can a fly comprehend an airport? The purpose of it? The mechanics and logistics required to make it work? Human beings are more intelligent than flies, so we don’t live in animalistic ignorance. The response to all of those who have returned to our solar system (The “hinterlands” of the title. A galactic and sapient backwoods so below the notice of the advanced intelligences responsible for the creation of the highway) is catanoia or suicide. The mind cannot process what it has seen, and each of the returning bodies attempts to kill themselves to keep others from going in after. It doesn’t work.

I wonder what human roadkill would be. What casualties will pile up as the consequence of the uncaring notice of a vast alien intelligence, utilizing tools and materials we cannot fathom, to achieve ends we couldn’t even begin to describe. Are there already people, flies buzzing over them, on the side of vast Highways whose purpose and design are incomprehensible to us? Would we even be able to recognize the carrion for what it is?