The sun is still asleep, and the Crescent arises in the east, southlands of the skies, and yellowish in hue. The air is cool, down in the fifties where last week at this point it was below freezing. This is fall in the middle of November, south of the Gnat Line, three miles north of Florida, in the middle of South Georgia.
I once stood at the place where a car had tried to pass another, couldn’t make it, slammed into the car it was trying to pass, and eventually, a three car pile up was created. The driver of the oncoming car was killed, his passenger maimed, and the other two drivers largely escaped serious harm. Something about the bodies I’ve seen being put into plastic bags slows me.
I’ve got my driving hoodie on, hood up, and I let the windows down. I want to feel the air, fresh, crisp even, and breathe. The air in South Georgia is a semi-liquid for six or seven months out of the year, the humidity carrying gnats and heat and a glimpse of hell. But this morning the air smells of the Crescent Moon and being alone on the road before five in the morning.
I have “Body” a song by a group named “The Necks” playing. Loud.
I cross the railroad bridge, built in the 1930’s into Quitman, before five. The bridge is ancient, decaying, and slated to be replace. There’s a sign under the bridge declaring it a “Fallout Shelter.” That’s where I want to be during a nuclear war, oh yeah!
I wend my way through a silent town to a predawn Pilates class, in Valdosta. I like playing long songs, and the mode of the day is a sense of wariness. This a morning when deer like to get out and feed. The dark hides them, there’s no breeze so the deer’s’ already acute hearing is accentuated, but I am hurtling through darkness at nearly eighty-one feet per second.
Monday is trash pick up day on this backroad I travel. And every Monday I see many empty cans of Busch beer littering the road between one certain spot and another. How much beer do you drink for the empties to escape the trash can, every time?
Four deer on the side of the road stare as I pass and I flash my high beams at the car heading towards me. His brake lights flare, so I know he knows why I did. This is South Georgia Semaphore at its finest.
Some places on this road are dark. No houses, no lights, no people, and the deer are shadows under shadows, and I might pass by a dozen and never know. They can hear me, see me, and I wonder what they think of the song, the product of human senses echoing through the darkness of a sharp moon. I wonder if they have their own creative measures recognized by the other deer.
This is mine.
Tell me of yours, please.
Take Care,
Mike
my inner twelve year old is giggling at the “Tree Boner” balancing said moon
Tonight while leaving mom’s house and traveling on North Main street in Acworth (the part that goes right along the edge of Lake Allatoona) I saw a sizable buck on the left shoulder looking to cross. I too speak “Southern Semaphore” and flashed my lights to an oncoming car whose driver apparently didn’t. He bared his brights and laid on the horn as he passed, and I watched with bemusement as his taillights flailed left and right to avoid said buck.
he won’t make that mistake again
Mike, I may well have to abandon my backroad in favor of the four lane. A buck ran between me and another truck heading in the opposite direction and it was a miracle neither of us hit it.
That “Southern Semaphore” is common on the smaller roads in the Midwest, too.
Deer are crepuscular (they are active at dawn and dusk, mainly), so while driving, always look for eye shine (as the tapetum on their retinas will reflect light very well), only one section of grass moving, and sudden movements on the side of the road. This helps avoid painting your hood with deer blood, but it is not foolproof.
In Illinois, the “Prairie State”–which are fields of grasses–we have county-run parks called Forest Preserves (I don’t know if anyone who grew up in Illinois gets the irony). These Forest Preserves have deer, so even in Chicago, you will occasionally hear of people hitting deer.
Here in suburbia, there is plenty of traffic, many-lane streets, and not much quietness from street noise. We do have lightning bugs in our yard, so that is nice to see at sunset and early night during the summer.
Tim, I’m one of the few people in this part of the world who have fireflies. I keep a lot of the leaf litter in my yard intact, so they have a home here at my home.
Mike, we are doing the same–leaving some leaves and leaf litter on the lawn to help the critters over the winter.
Tim, I’ve got four or five piles, large piles, of storm debris in the woods that I hauled in from the yard.
At the time, it was too wet to burn, and now the piles are home to many small creatures.
So I’ll let nature have them. Let all of the stuff return to the earth.
It is as it should be.