You can't drive: Lars von Trier's Antichrist edition
So I live in the woods now. People commonly associate the woods with trees; this is false. Everything in the woods is bugs. Anything in the woods resembling a tree is just a shape taken by bugs to fool you. Downstairs, when you turn on the lights at night, you will see the floor blanketed in enormous black crickets and smaller, long-legged weta imposters that have been hiding somewhere in your skin during the day. At about 3 am, when you check again all the crickets are gone, and have been replaced by plump, scrambling ground spiders the same size as the crickets.
Anyway what was I talking about? Driving, right. Deer are another form of insect, and just as ubiquitous. In my lifetime, I've seen perhaps 2 before moving here, and from a great distance. Now there's a 50% chance of encountering them on any extended outing. I once walked into a neighborhood, ran into a mother/child pair of ghost deer, and doubled back to the opposite side of the block to avoid them... where they were waiting for me. So I turned around and walked back the other way, where at that end of the block they were waiting for me again. Clever girl. Earlier I narrowly avoided hitting a buck with my bicycle as I rounded the corner to my house, which bounded away into woods toward a parallel street from which blaring horns quickly uttered. Last night, at 11:05 PM, a driver passing directly in front the house was not so lucky:
The sound woke me up; that familiar "SKIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRR" followed by the unmistakable crack of plastic and metal. I went outside with the flashlight, and the first thing I noticed was how utterly pitch black it was (there are no streetlights in the woods), and the second thing I noticed was a rear bumper sitting in the center of the driveway. I shined the light towards a car down the street. "It was a deer! We almost hit a deer! Just a deer! Deer!" the two males shouted in unison repeatedly as I walked closer. I tried not to shine my crazy high-powered LED space light directly on them to blind them, but as a consequence I couldn't make them out at all. Are they okay? "We're fine!" Do they need any help? "Nah, we're good!" they said in their college-male voice, which sounded entirely like "dude" and "bro" despite containing neither of those words. "Aww this is so embarrassing," one said to the other as I started back toward the house.
In the morning their vacant car was obviously still there (with a note containing their phone #) and the bumper was not, but I noticed something I hadn't the night before: they hit the concrete water box next to the driveway (in addition to crumbling the gutter pipe), the contents of which were now at an angle, and there was wetness soaking the dirt around it. The internet suggests this item is the water meter used by the utility provider, which further suggest that all the water to the property flows through here. So if it's leaking, there might be some kind of underground contamination going on and we're all going to die. I've referred the details of the vehicle and the driver's # to the property owner and suggested they phone the utilities to take a look at it, but I strongly suspect they don't care.
So to recap, the woods are nothing but bugs, deer, and foxes talking to Willem Dafoe. Well, that's not really true. There's also poison oak / poison ivy / poison everything, and at least 4 varieties of thorn-something. Mostly blackberry bushes. Whenever I tell people about them, they say to me "Oh! Blackberries are so sweet and delicious. How enchanting it must be to have fresh, organic, all-natural, hippy flowerchild starship-earth namaste drum circle blackberries right outside. Do you pick them?" No. Look at this thing. It is saying "Oh you want these berries? Fuck you. How 'bout I take your sweet and delicious neck juice and call it a trade." Blackberry bushes are in fact cunning predators of the plant kingdom who, much like the pitcher plant, use the promise of their sweet nectar to lure foolish animals into falling into their clutches where they can be devoured and drained of blood. Blackberry vines grow in two principal locations: 1) everywhere, and 2) snaking in from the edges of all the unlit, shoulderless, 45 mph paved roads, mostly at bicycle tire and knuckle height. Which incidentally makes trying to go anywhere by bike or on foot an adventure in dodging from both sides of your body.
I'm not saying that the temptation of blackberries caused this car to flip over, blocking both lanes on the only road leading into and out of the woods for hours, in order to back up a conga line of stationary drivers all the way up the road where they would be at the mercy of vampiric blackberry vines picking them off one by one in the gathering night, but I'm not not saying that.
Anyway what was I talking about? Driving, right. Deer are another form of insect, and just as ubiquitous. In my lifetime, I've seen perhaps 2 before moving here, and from a great distance. Now there's a 50% chance of encountering them on any extended outing. I once walked into a neighborhood, ran into a mother/child pair of ghost deer, and doubled back to the opposite side of the block to avoid them... where they were waiting for me. So I turned around and walked back the other way, where at that end of the block they were waiting for me again. Clever girl. Earlier I narrowly avoided hitting a buck with my bicycle as I rounded the corner to my house, which bounded away into woods toward a parallel street from which blaring horns quickly uttered. Last night, at 11:05 PM, a driver passing directly in front the house was not so lucky:
The sound woke me up; that familiar "SKIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRR" followed by the unmistakable crack of plastic and metal. I went outside with the flashlight, and the first thing I noticed was how utterly pitch black it was (there are no streetlights in the woods), and the second thing I noticed was a rear bumper sitting in the center of the driveway. I shined the light towards a car down the street. "It was a deer! We almost hit a deer! Just a deer! Deer!" the two males shouted in unison repeatedly as I walked closer. I tried not to shine my crazy high-powered LED space light directly on them to blind them, but as a consequence I couldn't make them out at all. Are they okay? "We're fine!" Do they need any help? "Nah, we're good!" they said in their college-male voice, which sounded entirely like "dude" and "bro" despite containing neither of those words. "Aww this is so embarrassing," one said to the other as I started back toward the house.
In the morning their vacant car was obviously still there (with a note containing their phone #) and the bumper was not, but I noticed something I hadn't the night before: they hit the concrete water box next to the driveway (in addition to crumbling the gutter pipe), the contents of which were now at an angle, and there was wetness soaking the dirt around it. The internet suggests this item is the water meter used by the utility provider, which further suggest that all the water to the property flows through here. So if it's leaking, there might be some kind of underground contamination going on and we're all going to die. I've referred the details of the vehicle and the driver's # to the property owner and suggested they phone the utilities to take a look at it, but I strongly suspect they don't care.
So to recap, the woods are nothing but bugs, deer, and foxes talking to Willem Dafoe. Well, that's not really true. There's also poison oak / poison ivy / poison everything, and at least 4 varieties of thorn-something. Mostly blackberry bushes. Whenever I tell people about them, they say to me "Oh! Blackberries are so sweet and delicious. How enchanting it must be to have fresh, organic, all-natural, hippy flowerchild starship-earth namaste drum circle blackberries right outside. Do you pick them?" No. Look at this thing. It is saying "Oh you want these berries? Fuck you. How 'bout I take your sweet and delicious neck juice and call it a trade." Blackberry bushes are in fact cunning predators of the plant kingdom who, much like the pitcher plant, use the promise of their sweet nectar to lure foolish animals into falling into their clutches where they can be devoured and drained of blood. Blackberry vines grow in two principal locations: 1) everywhere, and 2) snaking in from the edges of all the unlit, shoulderless, 45 mph paved roads, mostly at bicycle tire and knuckle height. Which incidentally makes trying to go anywhere by bike or on foot an adventure in dodging from both sides of your body.
I'm not saying that the temptation of blackberries caused this car to flip over, blocking both lanes on the only road leading into and out of the woods for hours, in order to back up a conga line of stationary drivers all the way up the road where they would be at the mercy of vampiric blackberry vines picking them off one by one in the gathering night, but I'm not not saying that.