Mercy (Part 1)

Traveling through the dark on the Wilson River Road he saw something bulky, misshapen, moving in a strip of foliage a few feet off the shoulder. It moved slowly, awkwardly, crawling not toward or away from the road, more like crawling in a circle.

He slowed, turned off the music, powered down the passenger side window, looked, but could not verify what he assumed was some nocturnal creature. He sped up, but fifty yards later, seized by curiosity, he stopped his vehicle. Normally he would have never stopped, but earlier that evening, in Portland, he had heard a prominent environmental journalist from New York tell a packed audience sitting in the most environmentally friendly office building in the world, that Americans lacked curiosity about the ongoing and obvious destruction of the natural world and did so at great peril to their continued existence. Her new book documented it all. It was a tour de force according to reviewers, and although he didn’t know anyone to give the extra copy to, he bought two books, which she signed with an impressive signature. Her autograph alone made the four-hour round trip from his home on the Oregon Coast through the Coast Range to Portland, worth it. Certainly this was not a superfluous trip. It had purpose beyond his edification. How excited he would be the next morning in class, showing off the book to his high school government students, and trying to convey the urgency of the journalist’s clarion call by writing some of her harrowing statistics on the white board and quoting from memory some of the sayings the ancient holy men had said about caring for the world. As a result, for a week, his students might drive a little less, buy less crap, redeem their soda cans and bottles for the deposit, disassociate Christianity from capitalism, practice what is known as ‘shallow ecology’ and consider that the meek certainly shall not inherit the Earth. No one would. Rather, everyone and everything would live out an unscripted gritty and groveling aftermath when the Earth finally played itself out. Of course, in this scenario, the meek shall die first. They always did.

He shifted the vehicle into reverse and backed up. He passed whatever form caught his attention in the strip and he angled his vehicle in the shoulder so the headlights cast their brilliance on the mystery. What he saw: illuminated, writhing counter clockwise, ten feet away, a deer, a buck, splayed in the gravel, contorted at horrific angles, oozing, gasping, convulsing, and outlined by the detritus of Fast Food Nation, an unused condom still in its packaging, a smashed CD, cigarette butts, dented cans of tasteless corporate lager, and various non-native plants such as English ivy, Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry. Collectively, these things served as a shrine of sorts, but not a shrine to the wounded deer.

He knew this scenario was coming. In recent months, precursors had assaulted him: when he picked up a shovel to finish off the mortally wounded gray squirrel in the yard one of the dogs had partially gutted; when he searched for a suitable piece of driftwood to finish off a delirious Western Gull stranded on the beach, its right wing eviscerated by a coyote; when driving to work only two weeks ago and encountering a deer, a fawn, grotesquely prone in the roadway, flattened, but still twitching, a victim of a landscaper’s flatbed pickup, which had overturned and spilled herbicide and pesticide in all directions. The accident occurred a few vehicles in front of him, in broad daylight, on Highway 101 in Lincoln City, and the carnage immediately halted traffic in both directions while calls went into the authorities. He waited in his idling vehicle, watching the deer spasm. A few drivers, all obese, with coffee in hand, exited their vehicles, congregated, pointed at the chemical spill, and talked to the driver of the pickup. One chatted on a cell phone while eating a maple bar. They all seemed utterly indifferent to the suffering animal. He felt a rising urgency inside him as the scene dragged on. Would none of these people do anything? He wanted to pound the horn, prompt someone to some action, any action, but suddenly it dawned upon him that everyone was probably waiting for a police officer with a sidearm to fire a bullet into the head of the deer and succinctly and humanely conclude the drama. Before the police officer arrived, however, traffic started to flow in both directions. He began to accelerate, and just as he passed the deer, at most ten feet from his vehicle, he flinched and turned away from looking at it. Instead, he swung his head to the other side of the highway and locked eyes with a four-foot, red and green gnome standing in the window of a lawn and garden shop.