When civilizations fall into barbarism, the arising culture fetishizes strength. So it has always been. It can feel as if the weak and sensitive have no place and no voice in a time when throwing one’s weight around is the done thing.
This was the world in which Cai Yan, a Chinese noblewoman at the end of the Han Dynasty (around 200 A.D.) found herself when her homeland was thrown into war. She was kidnapped by nomads and taken into the desert as the concubine of a chieftain. She says her captors had the practice of killing the old and weak, while idolizing the young and vigorous. By the time the Han Court negotiated her return, she had borne two sons whom she had to leave behind in the desert, never to see again.
Cai Yan is that rare phenomenon—a voice from the ancient female experience. She tells the story of her life in “18 Verses Sung to a Tatar Reed Whistle“, a lamentation with an interiority that feels ahead of its time. Though she had such little agency in a life dictated by men, there are glimpses in the poem of her power to assert herself in the world. One is her mention of her decision to raise her sons without shame, despite the circumstances of their birth. Another comes from the self-conscious reference to her own art: “As I sing the second stanza I almost break the lute strings / Will broken, heart broken, I sing to myself.”
I can imagine this woman, alone in a world of macho men, singing to herself in the nomad camp. But then I imagine another gentle soul picking up her melody on the wind, taking brief respite (as from the Cellist of Sarajevo). The whole poem feels like an act of resistance, and I find it fitting that her art is so compelling it has lasted for thousands of years while those who subjected her to violence and insults are lost to time. As deflating as it may be to create with posterity alone in mind, know that there may be others listening from neighboring tents, similarly despairing, taking heart from your humanity right now.
There is always one section in our utensil drawer that is emptier than the others. Spoons are useful for so many things, and they seem to have a natural restlessness. They leap away from the confines of the kitchen. They jump into cars and carry-ons. Sometimes the places they go are even stranger. All they need is for some piece of china to whisper “Hey, diddle diddle,” and there they go, sneaking out with the dish again.
In their absence, I have learned more about them. Spoons have, depending on who you ask, between four and seven parts. There is the bowl and the handle—the two parts I know the best, because I hold one part and the other one has the food in it. But there is also the neck, the shoulders, the drop, the tip of the bowl, and the tip of the handle.
Different types of spoons are paired with different purposes. A slotted spoon can strain beans and lentils, a ramen spoon helps you sip the broth and scoop your noodles. When you need a break from eating ramen, the bent tip of the spoon’s handle is like the shepherd’s crook that used to lean against the lifeguard tower, a tool for preventing your spoon from drowning. The name of a ramen spoon is chirirenge, a fallen lotus petal.
Well this story is just a pure delight. In 2017, the Chinese said that by 2030, they were going to be the world champions of AI. So in 2022, the U.S. put export controls on the fancy computer chips, especially Nvidia chips, that AI needed. Then in 2025, the Chinese announced an AI entity called DeepSeek that used, in part, outdated Nvidia chips but mostly inventive software. DeepSeek works as well as or better for AI’s LLMs, the large language models like ChatGPT. It uses 2,048 of those old Nvidia chips, and costs $5.6 million. An LLM built by Meta used 16,000 new Nvidia chips, and cost $60 million.
I’d say — quoting Pappy O’Daniel — the U.S. got its behind kicked. Which as a U.S. citizen, I don’t find delightful. The delight is this: years ago I was interviewing a famous old Cold Warrior, Sid Drell, about the US/USSR Apache standoff over missile defense systems. He said, “What you want to be very careful of, is not the make the fallacy of the last move.”
Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up a sinuous dry canyon, guarded by two guys with broadswords. The hopping university town of Fort Collins, then just a smallish scatter of purple squares along a tidy grid of streets. And there’s Boulder in 1957, my hometown, where I’m visiting my family for the turn of the New Year.
We press the map folds flat with our fingers and lean closer. The city then was a tiny yolk at the core of its current footprint, pressed hard against the mountains. The mesa where my parents live formed its eastward boundary, a new neighborhood then, not yet swallowed and sprawled miles beyond with malls and business parks and subdivisions and natural gas wells, the fingers of the city and its neighbors creeping outward over the plains, grasping each other to form an amoeba of light and noise that pulses with traffic along a vasculature of roads. A place forever swallowing itself. Becoming new and new again, without becoming better.
Every time I come back, I grumble about how much things have changed since I was a kid. For all my sharp words, though, there’s something unchanging here. It rises in me when I see the rolling ponderosa-covered waves of the foothills breaking on the snowy, treeless slopes of the high Rockies to the west, when I see the plains reaching boundlessly east, haloed pink at the days’ two turns, from and towards darkness.
A bird, seeing its parents, learns its identity. Its shape. Its dance and song. The pathways it should migrate. Who and how it should love. This is like that—an imprint, but on the land where I was born, where I first learned the movement of light, the shapes of trees, the way yellowed grass, beneath a storm and slanting sun, becomes lit velvet. In a pigeon, magnetite in the beak is a compass to the Earth’s magnetic fields. Perhaps our bodies contain homing deposits of a kind too, oriented to something deep and indefinite, beyond conscious memory. I imagine my own as a tiny glass vial between my lungs, full of red dust and ponderosa bark and juniper berries and curling petals of moss campion and alpine forget-me-nots and meadowlark and hermit thrush song. A taste a smell a sound. A stirring unexpectedly awake.
It’s a small but substantial talisman I have learned to hold to. This past year, three friends died. This past year, I relearned how fragile is the machinery of my own body. This past year, so many friends have brought new lives into their own. Laying a hand over that spot on my chest—that homing place—I can touch a sense memory that reminds how some things remain steadfast, even as we careen always forward, awfully and beautifully, looking back at what was, looking ahead to the same-and-not-sameness of what is and will be.
The broad, jagged sandstone planes of the Flatirons—an ancient river delta broken skyward by the mountains’ uplift. The hard and sudden winds that stretch wings of cloud over the peaks, throwing garbage cans and picnic tables, snapping trees and power poles, howling around the house, drawing the world into older motion than the heartbeat of our cars back and forth on their diurnal schedules of 9-5, endlessly looping between home and work.
Leaving for the airport at the end of my visit, the Flatirons stand orange with sunrise, motionless despite the bus’s rushing speed. It’s a journey I’ve made dozens of times now. Seeing the lit stone, I think of another time, not so long ago, when the bus passed a coyote loping along the side of the road. She paused, unafraid, her head swiveling to mark our passage–so brief, and gone–before resuming her journey eastward.
By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, a period of exponential growth for both Odocoileus virginianus and Homo automobilis,the Deer-Vehicle Collision has been a staple of modernity. Drivers hit more than a million white-tails every year, accidents that cost the public billions in hospital bills and vehicle repairs. In the wolfless East, cars are practically the only predators deer have.
No wonder, then, that the deerkill has become an enduring pop-cultural trope, as ubiquitous onscreen as in real life. Ryan Reynolds kills a white-tail in gratuitous fashion in The Voices; Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain do the deed in A Most Violent Year. Deer crashes have been played for horror, as in The Ring 2, and for comedy, as on The Simpsons. Some representations defy the laws of physics; some are pointlessly cruel; some feature Tom Green. Nearly all involve the weaponization of a buck’s antlers, even though hunting pressure tends to skew sex ratios toward does. Cars and animals fly into the air as easily as kite surfers.
Despite the many duds, the annals of entertainment history contain the occasional roadkill masterpiece. In recognition of these gems, I’ve developed a precise, novel, and extremely science-based cinematic DVC ranking system. After some intensive YouTube perusal, I scored DVC scenes from film and television in four categories, each of which was worth ten points, for a total of forty possible points. Why forty? Why not?
The categories are as follows:
Verisimilitude: Is your scene a plausible collision, or did some prop lackey blatantly stick a bad taxidermy job in the road?
Road ecology insight: Deer-vehicle Collisions aren’t random — they’re the predictable product of road type, topography, ecology, temporality, and so forth. Two-lane highways are more susceptible than eight-laners; dusk is riskier than high noon. The best roadkill cinema instructs as well as engages.
Plot relevance: If your movie is going to brutally end the life of an elegant sylvan creature, it better do so for a damn good reason.
Compassion: Let’s not forget that every deer-related crash involves two parties, and that the armorless ungulate almost invariably fares worse than the primate encased in the two-ton steel wrecking ball. Is your movie treating its non-human characters with the respect they deserve?
Without further ado, the five best DVCs ever put to film (it’s a low bar):
Synopsis: Rory is sitting at a stop sign when a deer bumps the side of her Jeep.
Verisimilitude: The notion of a deer plowing into a vehicle in broad daylight seems implausible, to say the least. Maybe this buck had been chowing down on fermented apples, a la the drunken moose of Sweden, or maybe he had Chronic Wasting Disease. That must be it. 2/10
Road ecology insight: Don’t park in a migration corridor. 1/10
Plot relevance: This is the only snippet of Gilmore Girls I’ve ever watched (I admit to being charmed by the banter), so I’m cribbing from fan pages here, but apparently Rory was on her way to take a big Shakespeare test in a high school English class when the deer struck her, causing her to miss the exam and get sent to the headmaster’s office. Drama! 5/10
Compassion: Rory seems genuinely concerned for the deer’s well-being, despite the fact that, again, her car was not moving at all, and the deer appears totally fine. Good for you, Rory, whoever you are. 8/10
Synopsis: Geena Davis hits a deer, sustains a concussion, and, because brain damage is known to improve long-term memory, suddenly recalls her past as an ex-CIA assassin.
Verisimilitude: After crashing through the windshield, the hokey animatronic deer slashes insanely at Geena and her companion with his hooves for what feels like five minutes. No thanks. 3/10
Road ecology insight: This DVC occurs at night, on a low-volume two-lane road in a densely wooded rural area. What’s more, the driver is being actively distracted by her boorish male passenger at the moment of the incident. Many authentic risk factors at play. 8/10
Plot relevance: The fact that a deer collision is the catalyst for Geena recollecting her past is a bit random — like, she could’ve just skidded on black ice or been t-boned by a drunk driver to achieve the same effect — but I guess it sets the entirety of this ludicrous movie in motion. 4/10
Compassion: This poor deer gets put through the wringer, but Geena — aka Samantha Caine, aka Charlene Elizabeth “Charly” Baltimore — does use her CIA skills to grab the buck by the rack and put him out of his misery by snapping his neck. Dock another point for realism, add one for semi-humane euthanasia. 6/10
Synopsis: David Spade and Chris Farley hit a buck, stash him in their backseat, and then watch in horror when the deer revives and trashes their controvertible.
Verisimilitude: This is less preposterous than you might imagine. In 2016, a Wisconsin driver stuck a seemingly dead deer in his trunk for later eating. Reported the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “(T)he man gingerly opened his trunk. The deer moved and the motorist pulled it out of the trunk. A few seconds later the deer bounded into the woods on shaky legs… Adams County Sheriff’s Department posted the incident the next morning on its Facebook page with a photo of actors Chris Farley and David Spade.” 5/10
Road ecology insight: LOL. 1/10
Plot relevance: The car’s deterioration throughout the movie is a pretty good running joke, so props to the deer for kicking that off. 6/10
Compassion: It’s satisfying to watch a deer-vehicle incident in which the car is totaled and the wildlife bounds away unharmed. The glorious climactic shot (see the top of this post), in which the 10-point buck stands victorious athwart his vanquished gasoline-powered tormentor, took a month to nail, and belongs in a museum. 11/10
Synopsis: Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya hit a deer on their way to Williams’s parents’ house, where Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener plan to enslave Kaluuya, steal his brain, and transplant it into a rich old white guy. Yikes.
Verisimilitude: Easily the most realistic DVC in cinematic history: It’s abrupt, jarring, and occurs (rightly) with the deer moving at a perpendicular angle to the vehicle, rather than standing stock-still in the middle of the road. (Alas, no complete version of this scene seems to exist on YouTube.) 10/10
Road ecology insight: Another rural, lightly trafficked two-lane highway. Deduct a point for taking place in broad daylight, a much less common collision time than the crepuscular “deer o’clock.” 7/10
Plot relevance: Jordan Peele’s intellectual creativity cannot be fathomed by us mere mortals, but I think the deer is a horrifyingly apt metaphor for the way these wealthy white suburbanites simultaneously revile and commodify the Other. Although Whitford’s character rants about how deer have overrun the neighborhood — “one down, a few hundred thousand to go” — he also has a buck mounted on the wall of his den. Like the black men that Whitford and Keener kidnap, deer are simultaneously perceived as undesirable community members and coveted trophies. Jordan, if you’re reading this, debunk me in the comments. 9/10
Compassion: Kaluuya eventually impales Whitford with the antlers of the aforementioned mount, so Peele does let an ungulate play a role in the protagonist’s righteous triumph. If you’re complaining that this is a spoiler, I counter that you should have seen this movie twice in theaters. 7/10
Synopsis: Our down-on-his-luck hero Alvin Straight is driving across the Midwest on his John Deere (heh) when he encounters the Deer Lady, a distraught woman who’s just hit her thirteenth white-tail in the past seven weeks.
Verisimilitude: Although the crash itself isn’t depicted — Straight arrives in its immediate aftermath — the ambient circumstances are certainly conducive to roadkill. First, the collision occurs in Iowa, the state with the country’s fifth-highest DVC rate (West Virginia holds the dubious crown). Second, judging from the senescent state of the background vegetation, the movie appears to take place in fall, when deer enter the rut, or breeding season. Addled by the pursuit of mates, deer in fall seem to cross roads more frequently and, perhaps, less cautiously. 8/10
Road ecology insight: Credit to the Deer Lady, the only driver on this list who actually takes steps to prevent collisions. “I’ve tried driving with my lights on, I’ve tried sounding my horn, I scream out the window, I roll the window down and bang on the door and play Public Enemy real loud!” she wails. The fact that none of these countermeasures work is also, in its way, insightful: Research suggests that interventions aimed at modifying driver behavior, such as speed limit reductions, don’t actually affect collision rates. Better to put our faith in infrastructural solutions like wildlife crossings and fencing. (Granted, scientists have never rigorously tested the efficacy of blasting Public Enemy.) 10/10
Plot relevance: Alvin, who’s begun to run out of food, eats the venison, which sustains him on his journey. Don’t waste good meat! 8/10
Compassion: This is what makes this brief scene so wonderful. For the first minute of the Deer Lady’s rant, the viewer assumes she’s dismayed by the damage to her car. At around the 1:15 mark, though, she crouches over the buck and briefly lays her palms on his neck and flank, a gesture of heartbreaking tenderness. “He’s dead,” she cries. “And I love deer!” Her grief isn’t for her damaged car, but for the stricken animal. (Note that she refers to the buck as the personal he rather than the dehumanizing it.) She knows who the real victim is. 10/10
Total: 36/40
What a year for David Lynch — first that Oscar, and now this extraordinary honor!
Did I miss an important DVC? Let me know in the comments. And thanks very much to everyone who commented on this Twitter thread. You sure know your deer.
The forecast for Friday above five thousand feet called for more than a foot of snow, high winds, and temperatures well below freezing. So dire were the models that the National Weather Service had issued a Winter Storm Warning for much of the southern Cascades in Washington, and around Mount Hood in Oregon.
“Why exactly are you going tomorrow?” a colleague had asked. The weekends either side of this one had had or promised sun and crystalline skies. I shrugged. This was the weekend that my friend Carson and I had determined months ago fit with our schedules as working parents, so this was the weekend we got.
We were off on an annual trip I have come privately to think of as Winter Stupid. The inaugural Winter Stupid was several years ago, when we skied a few miles into the Mount Hood National Forest to camp for a couple of nights, except on the first night someone who shall remain nameless spilled white gas in the tent. After a few hours of lightheaded sleep, we headed home the next morning.
Our plan this year was to go back to Hood, snowshoeing out of Bennett Pass and camping at a spot with a grand vista. I had been looking forward to the trip for weeks. Of course I always look forward to Winter Stupids in the way one looks forward to gratuitous recreational hardship, but this time my need had a different tenor. I have of late been feeling a certain tenuousness—for those who share my politics, I don’t think I’m alone in this—and I hoped the backcountry would bring back some of the stillness I missed so much, at least for a while. It was, I knew, a lot to ask from one night in a winter storm, so I tried to temper my expectations. Really, all I wanted was to see the mountain once, and I would be happy.
I write to tell you that I am always surrounded by animals. The woods are thick enough with pine and oak trees that I can barely see my neighbors’ houses, so sometimes I like to imagine that I have no human neighbors, and the only creatures sharing the woods with my family are nonhuman. The animals do outnumber us, by a lot. But somehow I can’t divorce humanity from my imagination, or my kids’. This is why we have started naming the deer.
We often anthropomorphize the bears, bobcats, and mountain lions that frequent my yard on a mountain slope, but the turkeys and the deer are too numerous to name. But this season there seems to be more deer than usual, and more repeat visitors than usual. They are getting to know us, I think, so we are getting to know them a little better too.
It has been a colder winter than most, according to climatological records, which may or may not exist by the time you are reading this, and may not ever be kept again in this land; who knows. It was still 2.4 degrees warmer than average, but the winter of 2024-25 has been very cold. I wonder if this is why the mule deer have stuck around more than usual. My yard faces south-southwest, so it is always in the sun, and the snow on my slope melts faster.
My yard is also the only one that is not fenced, so they feel welcome here. They sleep among the trees on my property even though my dog’s scent is everywhere. Their fur blends in with the boulders and fallen leaves in the woods behind my house, so occasionally I don’t notice them until one of them sees me and stirs. They hurt the trees with their antlers and constant browsing, and they leave their scat piles everywhere, and destroy anything that remotely looks like a flower. I find this super annoying. But I will miss them when they go uphill for the summer.
For now, we recognize them as they pass through on their daily constitutionals.
The cutest baby animal
Stronghorn is the largest buck, with a yellow game tag on each ear, a huge rack of antlers, and much more heft than any other buck on this mountain. I can’t be sure, but I think he is the buck that got his antlers wrapped in someone’s hammock last fall, and carried them around for three months looking like a moldy Christmas decoration. I think that explains the ear tags. Stronghorn captains a large herd, and he is afraid of nothing and no one. He and I have had a standoff before, me trying to drive uphill to my house, him standing in the road in my way, staring me down and refusing to move. Another time, I threw a pine cone at him to get him away from a young aspen, and I am pretty sure he laughed in my face. It was hard to tell, because I was 20 feet away, but I am pretty confident I’m right.
He is laughing, isn’t he?
Stronghorn is the leader, but three or four other bucks are usually seen hanging around him. This time of year, they sit together near a clump of boulders while the does and yearlings browse my woods.* Scar is mid-sized and lost an eye, probably in a fight with another buck, probably with Stronghorn himself. He and Stronghorn are always near each other.
Bucky is a ridiculous young buck, all legs, skinny, and a little bit too aggressive with short, very sharp antlers. Chill out, bro, I say to him. He is clearly young. He has a lot to learn. He follows Stronghorn closely.
Scar, left, and Bucky
Youngblood is another literal strapping young buck. But he seems less charismatic than Bucky. He is just sort of there. He is the emoji with a “line mouth,” in the words of my kids. He is a meh deer. I suspect he might be a future Scar.
Then there are the does. Mostly, they are anonymous, because they look so similar to each other that we have a hard time telling them apart. But a couple does have enough distinguishing characteristics to earn names. Antidote is usually seen with at least three or four adolescents, which are maybe her own offspring and maybe their cousins; it’s not clear at this point in the season. Or she could just be a teacher type. She seems kind, I think? This is why she is named Antidote. She is not disdainful like Stronghorn.
Crestfallen is a doe whose history we don’t know, but she is often seen browsing alone, and usually straggles behind the rest of the herd when they are on the move. She seems healthy overall, just slower. I will see Stronghorn, Bucky, Scar, Youngblood, and about 15 does and yearlings cross my yard, and then the game camera shuts off. Then three full minutes later, Crestfallen ambles behind.
The young ones we don’t name. But we talk about them all the time, and we worry about their safety. My older daughter quietly talks about the one that was killed by a car going too fast at twilight last summer. We all talk about the one that leapt past the car as we brought my younger daughter home from the hospital for the first time, like a woodland welcoming committee.
The mule deer of Cheyenne Mountain are ever-present and insatiable and probably full of ticks, and they scrape their antlers on my small trees and they eat my rose bushes, and they look like furry boulders when it snows, and they stare at my house like watchfully beneficent mountain spirits, and their presence in my yard is more predictable than the weather. They drive me nuts, and after five years as their neighbor, I don’t know how I would live without them.
*I know they are not my woods, but I feel protective of them all the same.
“The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity.
Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox colonies swim close to a solid surface, they attract one another and can form stable bound states in which they ‘waltz’ or ‘minuet’ around each other.”
Drescher et al., Physical Review Letters, 2009.
Note: This poem has accompanying audio; to listen along, click here.
Volvox Minuet
In one old studio my round instructor is warming up her knees. Always the knees, she said. You don't know what you've got til it's gone. And then the music: plaintive songs from long- forgotten instruments. My hair has slipped from its braid. My teacher counts, a hypnotist's trope, and I am five hundred years ago. The braid there has slipped too, but there someone has bent to mend it.
There is a pond on the way home, a rich green plate of globular forms. And in there the algae awaken. A shy current pushes their arms to preparation. The music begins.
Like new stars we all have been, so blind to the cosmos and any orbit but our own.
*
Poem by me; audio and music by Squid Pro Crow (that’s me and Grant Balfour); Volvox photo by Massimo Brizzi, CC by 4.0.
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