Death in the Afternoon

We decided in late afternoon to drive to the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. My wife loves to shop there. Well, really, she loves to shop everywhere, but Stanford happens to be one of her favorite shopping places.

To join Interstate 280 southbound from Highway 92 one has to drive through a curved highway underpass at the interchange. This tunnel-like structure is perhaps a couple of hundred yards long, two lanes wide going one way, well lit even during the day. Cars usually travel through it at high speeds, if for no other reason than that radio reception is blocked by all that concrete and earth surrounding it. I have had cars pass mine on the right at eighty miles per hour. Crazy drivers.

So here we are traveling along at a good clip, oh, at about the speed limit, I would guess. Just as we are about to emerge from the tunnel into the late afternoon sunlight, suddenly there appears ahead of us a couple of jackrabbits. One makes it to safety easily, hopping into the shadows on the left. I can still see its mate, long ears upright, frozen in silhouette against the sunlit road ahead. Instead of leaping forward to join its companion, it suddenly backtracks, hesitates, and immediately I hear a bump beneath the car.

It's dead, I know. I have taken the life of a creature in one split second, willy nilly. Let me rephrase that, so as to absolve myself of blame. I have been the unwitting agent of the untimely demise of another living creature. The jackrabbit was wrong to hesitate and to backtrack. It could have gone forward, like its mate. Why did it do this dumb thing — hopping directly under the left front tire? No way could I have avoided hitting it. I could not have swerved in time. And if I had swerved, I might have hit one of the speeding vehicles on my right.

As far as I know, I had never before knowingly caused the death of anything larger than a housefly or a yellow jacket. But this jackrabbit made an definite impression on me. Maybe it was the unexpectedness of the incident, or the fact that the bump under the car reminded me of the pivotal scene in the Krzysztof Kieslowski movie "Red" when Irene Jacob's car hit the judge's dog, or my wife asking 'What was that?'

But for the next seven or eight miles I could not get the image out of my mind of this dead jackrabbit, the first road kill I had ever made in my life.

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