Deer Abby

Dear Lord - Joseph Arthur (mp3)
Anonanimal - Andrew Bird (mp3)

You can learn a lot about people when someone hits a deer.

Last weekend, I was on a golf course in Kentucky with family members. We had three groups of three, and I'm probably the second-best golfer in the group even though my handicap hovers around 20. My threesome included a cousin by marriage who struggled to get his drives up in the air. But this cousin is big. And strong.

So we turn the corner and arrive at the 10th tee to see a family of deer eating about 40 yards ahead of the tee box, just outside of a wooded patch. We walked up to the tee box and joked about hitting the deer.

As we looked a little more closely, the family of deer were very emaciated, with their rib cage pushing strongly out of their fur, and I asked how deer surrounded by so much grass and nature could find themselves starving. Apparently most grass is like celery for a deer, which is to say it's not very filling. Apparently only certain strains of grass and nuts and other such stuff helps provide a deer its beefiness... or, um, venison-ness.

The first cousin steps up to the tee, and he's decent off the tee. "Maybe once they hear me hit the ball, they'll scamper off," he said. It seemed like a good plan. So he teed off, and it was a moonball, heading directly up into the stratosphere. The deer didn't even flinch. They just kept munching away on the thin grass. The male even inched out a little more, so that he was now sitting at about 10:30 on the proverbial hour hand.

The next cousin steps up, and Brandon and I look over at each other. He's lined up a little bit left -- he tends to push the ball right -- so I raise my eyebrows at Brandon, and he raises them back to me. "Is he gonna hit a deer?" he mouths to me. I kind of shrug in the How the hell should I know? kind of way, because trying to predict how this dude's golf ball is gonna come off that tee is like trying to predict when the next earthquake will hit Tennessee. But we just sit back and watch, 'cuz I guess we felt like we'd already given these animals a fair warning.

The minute Cousin #2 connected with the ball, Brandon and I kind of yelped and raised a leg and raised our arms up to our faces, acting like maybe we hoped that deer might react, kind of like people who lean the way they wish a bowling ball would roll. But the damn skinny-ass deer just kept chewing away at its tuft of grass as that golf ball hurtled toward it at impressively high speed. According to a super-fast Google search, it's safe to assume the ball hit that deer going well over 100 mph.

Had the ball hit the deer in the head, the result would have doubtless been deadly. Fortunately (I guess), it sailed directly into the animal's hindquarters and struck with a surprisingly strange sound, somewhere between a smack and a thud. Even on a deer this emaciated, the ball hit the most muscled and least bony area of its frail body. It kind of jumped in a shocked reaction, as if to say HOLLLY SHIT!! and then started limping off into the patch of trees. But it didn't run. It reacted like a very sick, very emaciated deer would react. Slowly, and sadly. As if it were saying, "Aw, go ahead and hit me; I'm half-dead anyway."

Now here's the part you don't want to read.

For the first full minute after that deer limped, pathetically, a few feet into the trees, all three of us were on the verge of silence. Maybe one of us said something like "Ohhh shit" or "Ohhh no" or "Ohhhhh my God" or something else with an "Ohhhh" in front of it. And the other two of us kind of held a hand to our mouths in something like disbelief -- seriously, do you really, truly appreciate how impossible it is for a crappy golfer to hit ANYTHING??

And we felt awful. We sat staring at that poor "doe-eyed li'l deeuh," as Marisa Tomei might say, waiting on pins and needles for it to just collapse to the earth and expire, it's murdered soul on our conscience.

But it didn't die. It just walked over to the trees and kept munching on grass. Albeit with a slight limp.

And once we realized he didn't kill it... once we realized he'd only nailed the ever-lovin' crap out of it with a golf ball at 120 mph by pure crappy-golfer accident... well, I don't know who chuckled first. It wasn't me. But I know I was second. I was a quick second. And I laughed pretty loudly. Guffawed, actually.

Now look. (That's an Obama favorite!) I know it's not great to laugh at something like this. But I'm one of those people who laughed when I saw Faces of Death. I'm one of those people who laugh during most of Pulp Fiction, even the twisted scenes with Zed. Laughter, if you didn't know, is a perfectly natural nervous reaction in the face of extreme situations one is incapable of completely grasping. So in the face of almost murdering a deer with a Maxfli... well, I laughed.

We all did.

So, in honor of Serena, Kanye, and Joe Wilson, here is my public apology to the deer:

Dear Deer,

I'm very sorry I laughed that my crappy golfer of a cousin defied all odds and actually hit you in the left haunch with a golf ball at full velocity. There's nothing remotely funny about such a violent act, even if it was unintentional and failed to result in your death. And even if I maybe found it funny at the time, and even if as I write this I'm chuckling a little, laughing at such a painful moment makes me a very bad person, and for that I'm sorry.

Sincerely,
Billy