Speaking of a Deer in the Headlights...

Last Saturday I got up early to perform a recreational activity where I repeatedly hit a little white ball and chase it around a big park. Most of the time it is about as fun as it sounds, but I keep doing it anyway. Mrs. Brown Walker asked that I drive her car (which is new) because she needed to run some errands and wanted to use the car that gets better gas mileage. It was a seemingly innocuous request that I didn't figure would have any consequence whatsoever.

So, I play my round of golf. Meanwhile Mrs. BW heads towards Independence (the whys are not important). She was driving East on I-70 when she noticed a deer running on the West-bound side of the highway up ahead of her. She thinks: "That thing's going to get blasted." The next thing she knows, the deer bounds over the median and stops - head turned and looking right at her - in the middle of her lane. There is no time to do anything. There is no room to do anything. Her next thought was that she heard somewhere about people getting killed when they hit a deer because the deer thrashes about when it is stuck in their windshield.

Impact. Mrs. BW later says that she can't remember if she even had time to hit the brakes. She likely plastered the deer at somewhere north of 70 mph. The deer is launched over the hood and over the roof of the car, landing in a heap in the median.

The car is fucked, although still driveable. The hood is smashed down, the bumper and grill are both destroyed, and the driver's side front quarterpanel is pulled apart. The first thing I noticed when I arrived on the scene was that there was a patch of fur on the bumper. It looked as if it was growing there.

Mrs. BW was damn lucky. At that speed, if the thing had hit the windshield she could have been killed. We were told later that had she been driving her car, which sits much higher than my car does, it would have been more likely that the deer would have hit the windshield. I don't really believe in fate, or cosmic Jewish zombies that save your soul when you eat their flesh, but fuck - that was a narrow miss.