(07-05-2015 08:33 AM)furious_blue Wrote: If I'm in an area where I suspect that there are deer around, I slow down until a car catches up to me. I move over and wave the car past. I then follow the car at a safe (normal) distance and let them deal with any deer up ahead.
One of the more chilling deer scenes that I ever saw was on a rural highway in eastern Oregon. I was nearing the crest of a hill when I saw a whole pack of deer (what's the correct word for a group of deer, BTW ?). There were probably 6 to 8 of them and they were spread all across the road covering both lanes. I thought: 'if anybody is cresting that hill from the other side and is going at a reasonable clip, they are doomed, there will be deer on both sides of the road, no way to avoid a hit !' Luckily, no one was coming the other way..
That reminds me...of a fated trip I took from Montana to Wisconsin, part of my move out here. Now...I hate the slabs. Cage or cycle, I hate the slabs. I hate the trucks; I hate the passive-aggressive dominance of so many cretinous drivers; I hate the texting idiots.
So I took a state route that roughly parallels I-90.
First indication I had that things were not all well...was a traffic backup, 11:30 at night, in the middle of nowhere. When I got to it, seems that a car pulling a camper trailer, had lost it on a bridge over a dry creek and was laying in the ravine. There were plenty of passers-by aiding assistance, but oddly, no uniformed, strobe-lighted emergency personnel. But...no point in my stopping.
Twenty minutes later, coming from the east, comes an ambulance. That's not good. When seconds count, the EMTs are hours away.
Hoo-kaaay...now, about thirty miles east, I find out what might have been the trouble. Keep in mind...that traffic backup notwithstanding, this road was not heavily traveled that night. Nor was there ANY light ANYWHERE...it was my two yellowed headlights in my old Toyota truck that gave all the relief I was gonna get in this black-hole of a night.
And what appears, just like that, to my eyes? Why...a veritable FOREST of antlers! Hooo-lee. I dynamited the brakes; saw them come closer...closer...a herd, stampeding across the road. This was gonna be bad.
I closed my eyes. Didn't want glass in them when the windshield shattered.
That white-noise >
THUNK!< and a mild sensation...and it was all over. Windshield was still there. Hood wasn't rippled...look to the mirror, outside...IT AIN'T THERE. Ripped clean off. MAN, that was close.
At the next town I stop to check everything...and get a surprise. Just behind the cab, the bed-box is stove in, before and after the rear wheel. Apparently a big fellow got hit on the head and his carcass kept on moving in a 90-degree collision...two hundred pounds of buck, up against the light sheet metal of a Tacoma pickup box.
Dodging the bullet. I thought of those poor saps in that car-and-trailer...there, but for the gods, lay I.