Eew, drove over a deer tonight

Eeww, icky, stinky gross. The smell of dead venison, cooking hair, bloody metal. I feared for my car, my life, while struggling to control a little honda usually so docile and willing. Scary, nasty, a strange disconnected mix of organic and mechanical, of primative and high tech.

When I mean I drove over a deer, I'm serious. It was late, I'd met some people over at Red Bull Inn for some steaks. I was driving home, it was dark, the onramp was newly opened. It had been raining, the roads were steaming, visiblity was poor. I was driving down the ramp, the darkness was almost solid between street lights. I noticed up ahead, at the most important merge point between the ramp and the highway, that two cars had stopped, not quite pulled off the road.

I was slowing down a little as I commented to my boyfriend, "Look, what the heck do they think they're doing?" At the same time both he and I noticed the bloody stains on the dark pavement, then brake, *brake*, then chunks, then crunch, thunk, bump, bump as my poor little hatchback tried valiantly, mindlessly, to drive over the mount everest of deer carcasses.

Unable to stop with traffic behind me, people already parked in front of me, I slid onto the highway like I'd planned it. Moving forward at just barely the speed limit, I tried to take stock, while, with perfect timing, my boyfriend is taking a call from someone from dinner. "Oh, shit that's right. Okay, where can we meet...?" It seems, while I am still afraid the car is broken, that we are going to die if we don't stop, and if we stop we may never make it home, he's talking to someone who has his laptop bag in their car.

Without skipping a beat, as if the carcass impact had never happened, he starts haggling with the guy on the phone about where to meet so he can get his bag. Meanwhile I am trying to find a bright place to pull over. Somewhere I can see the damage, and possibly wait for AAA, or maybe the police. Of course, he has decided that we are going to pull off onto another highway, turn around, drive a couple exits in the opposite direction, pull off into a King's parking lot, and meet there. Miles out of our way on the best of nights.

...Uh, hello. Just hit a fucking deer here. Remember, the crunching? The bouncing? I am not going to continue to keep driving at highway speeds to eastkabumfuck so you can get your bag...

Sigh. While he is talking, it is obvious that the car, while jiggling at high speeds, is neither struggling, making strange noises, nor pulling in either direction. I seem able to speed up and slow down. I may make it home, but I still don't want to drive around all night. What a stupid thing to do, driving at high speeds after possibly hurting the car. What bad timing.

Dammit. He needs that bag and the phone guy doesn't seem to understand, a) that we don't live where he does, and therefore are not driving on the highway in the same direction he is, and b) we just drove over a deer that, *laying down,* is higher than my wheels are tall. You know, deer are remarkably solid. It's all that bone...

So, I do take the exit to the other highway he wants to take (it makes no difference at that point, they are both equidistant from any useful civilization), then pull off at the first exit, and find a bright parking lot.

It is at that point that he realizes that it did real damage to the car. Crunched my front bumper, did untold damage to the undercarriage, painted the front, side, and all along the underside of the car in gore, blood, meat, bones, and bits of hairy flesh, and reeks of rot and death (with a weird underscent of dog chew toy, like cow hoof or pig's ear). Really reeks, he starts retching when he tries to look under the car.

We are really, really lucky that the car is functioning, but it definitely must be washed before we get home. Unfortunately, the boyfriend must have his bag for work, and he is exhausted. Great.

After going to King's, getting the bag, borrowing a flashlight that really does nothing to clear up the mystery of what is happening under the car, we headed out to find a car wash.

At the car wash, we should have used the hoses to spray the hell out of the undercarriage. But, due to the lateness of the hour, and the exhaustion of the boyfriend, we ended up doing the "ultimate" automatic carwash twice. It is supposed to "laserwash" the undercarriage, and undercoat it with something that looks just like the "wax" they spray on the top of the car towards the end of the process.

Of course, that didn't really help entirely. The funny thing is, when we got out of the car at home, only his side of the car stank. My side smelled of wet engine, and lovely, clean, car wax. No meat, no cooking hair, no cow hooves. Hmm, it seems that the corpse was a bit closer to the passenger side....

That being said, his is also the side my nearly brand new muffler is on. It did sound a little odd on the way home...

So, instead of working on abstracts for a conference I need attend as a presenter next april(the boyfriend would really like to go back next year), I will be trying to find a cheap and effective way to find out the full extent of the damage, and see if any of the existing gore will be an issue, or can I wait for it to wear away naturally.

I am thinking jiffy lube. They specialize in crawling under cars. There is two of them right down the street from my house. I bet they can tell if something is bent or broken if I pay them enough.

Now, should I go to the one I like, with the guys I can trust? They would probably give me their honest assessment of what might be life threatening, but do I want to expose them to the icky, icky, half-cooked deer parts? Or should I go to the jiffy lube I hate, maybe not get told the truth, but get to smile as they crawl out of their under-car crater, gagging from the sight and smell of dead deer bits, covered in cheap car wax?

I don't know. I think I will sleep on it, and think about it in the morning.

More later if it's interesting.

(please pardon my shifting tenses. I will fix it tomorrow, after I've slept.)