On Death

Someone recently asked me if I had seen a lot of wildlife while I was riding to Nashville. The answer is complicated.

Many of you have already read about the exploding deer incident in Washington. Perhaps some of you have had your own experiences with roadkill. I assure you, until you have ridden a bike for 3,000 miles along American highways, or worked in a hot dog factory, you will not have seen as much dead wildlife (wilddeath) as I have in two short months. The following is a hastily compiled list of creatures I have seen just on this trip.

Animal	Dead?	Alive?
Deer	x	x
Antelope	x
Squirrel	x	x
Dog	x	x
Cat	x	x
Vulture		x
Hawk	x	x
Various little birds	x	x
Badger	x
Armadillo	x
Possum	x
Fox	x
Snake	x
Frog	x	x
Bald eagle		x
Porcupine	x
Mouse	x
Chipmunk	x	x
Prairie dog	x	x
Rabbit	x	x
Turtle	x
Butterfly	x	x

You'll notice a couple of things about this list. First, only two animals escaped the grim spectre of death: the vulture and the bald eagle. I have to assume the vulture survived because it was dining upon the veritable smorgasbord of rotting flesh set before it along America's highways and byways. The bald eagle's status as a survivor is, I think, largely dependent upon numbers. As an endangered species, there are fewer available to be hit by speeding motorhomes, so the likelihood of seeing one before it was gobbled up by a hungry vulture is low.

The second thing you may notice is that I sighted no live antelopes. Though I passed the spot where "Home on the Range" was written, any locations where the "antelope play" is essentially a shooting gallery these days, where antelope are taken down either by hunters with high powered rifles, or by their Ford F-350 pickups as they speed home to watch preseason football. And believe me, there is nothing quite like the wafting cloud of stench that emanates from a three day old antelope carcass in the Utah desert, especially when you're breathing heavily from riding uphill.

Probably the saddest roadkill appeared as I was riding through southern Illinois and I came to a section of highway where there were ponds on either side of the road. At first I thought the piles of black stuff were horse manure. I was like, "what kind of idiot rides a horse on this highway?" As I got closer, it became obvious that hundreds of turtles had attempted to make the dash from the northern pond to the southern pond and had been crushed beneath the wheels of passing semi trucks and boat haulers. Flashes of TMNT passed before my eyes. Leonardo! Donatello! Stay in your pond where it's safe!

One thing that isn't revealed by the chart above is the ratio of dead to live animals. I saw plenty of live dogs, but probably only two or three dead ones. But I think I saw four or five live prairie dogs and literally thousands of dead ones, pounded flat by traffic and dried to a crispy golden brown by the hot Kansas sun. The same goes for squirrels, frogs, and many other species. The amount of death far outweighs the life on that list.

So what did I take away from all of this? You'd probably expect that all the death would make me think about my own mortality, and you would be right. Seeing crushed skulls and broken bones day in and day out made me less cautious; I started to accept it as almost inevitable that I would be knocked into a guardrail somewhere in the midwest and pounded into a fine paste by bread trucks and Greyhound buses. When that didn't happen and I made it to Nashville, I'll be honest, I was a little surprised. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to be alive, but ending up roadkill was probably a more likely conclusion.