Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

Author:Helen Macdonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2020-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Since returning from the deer forest, my own subconscious mind is full of DVCs. I have tightened my hands on the wheel in anxious anticipation of disaster as I drive through rural woods. At night I’ve dreamed of roads, of mist, of slicks of oil printed with hoofmarks, windscreens crazed by impacts, herds of running deer. I mention this strange new preoccupation to a friend in an email. ‘Are you OK?’ they reply. ‘Is something bad happening in your life?’ I write back and say, ‘I’m fine; I think I want to write about deer collisions, is all.’ They have a suggestion: ‘Have you checked YouTube? You know there are actual supercuts?’ Of course there are. I don’t want to watch them, just as I don’t want to watch videos of other traumatic events that are clickable currency on the internet, things far worse than the accidental coincidence of a deer with an offside fender. But I sit down, find one of the videos and press play.

The video is made of dashcam footage from many different vehicles edited into a long montage of DVCs. The first thing it makes me think of is first-person shooter video gameplay, with deer bursting into view so unexpectedly they seem ghostly artefacts on the screen – until they hit metal. It happens again. Another hit. Another cut. Now dusk, the lights of a gas station, the murmur of talk radio. A roe deer colliding with the car, turning over and over in the air before it lands deadweight on the grassy verge. The car slows and halts. A woman gets out. She wears a blue fringed top and a woollen shrug pulled over her shoulders. She walks to where the deer lies, looks down, looks back at the driver, raises both hands, palms up, in a gesture of helplessness. The driver gets out, shoulders set, ignores the deer and leans down to examine the front of his car. Another vehicle, another overheard conversation, another collision, another dashcam dislodged from the dashboard to point upwards at stricken faces. I pause the video, get up, pace about the kitchen. I sit back down, watch some more, stop again. It’s getting harder to continue. Sometimes the deer leaps high over the hood of the car and escapes all harm; most often it does not, and it will fall lengthways onto the bonnet and slide down, or smash the windscreen, or spin balletically away in parabolae of antlers and flesh and bone. I see the puff of fur as a fender makes contact, hear the click of hooves hitting steel. What most surprises me as I watch this repeated, terrible carnage is how high the deer are thrown in the air. Ten, twelve, twenty feet, tumbling end over end, limp and pathetic. Towards the end of the video I start reading the comments beneath it. I expect them to be grim and they are. ‘Cool ragdoll physics,’ says one. Another suggests that deer have very low IQs. Another thinks deer are suicidal.

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