Are there people who are paid to place dead skunks and opossum on the
roads at night? I mean, do you know anyone who's actually run over one of
these unfortunate creatures? I don't. Think about it. If you hit one of
these poor animals on the way home from some late-night social gathering,
your car would stink up the neighborhood for a couple of days. And if you
were on your way to work everybody in the parking lot would know that you
were the one who hit that polecat. Where are all these animals coming from?
For example: I drive about forty miles to work every day. Every morning
there are new dead animals on and along the road, which makes me think that
if it weren't for the automobile we'd be knee-deep in skunks and 'possums.
I know they are nocturnal creatures so we don't see them except at night
but they have to go somewhere in the daytime. We must be importing them
from the outskirts of civilization, brought in at night by drunken hillbillies
careening down our two-lanes in the dead of night flinging 'possums and
skunks from the backs of their pickup trucks. Where else would they come
from? On the other hand, perhaps these animals are so overcome with depression
over the destruction of their habitat that they are in fact committing suicide
on our nations backroads. Perhaps, their natural predators having been long
since eliminated, the automobile has filled the niche to control certain
animal populations.
The other question remains: Where do they go? When you hit something big,
like a deer, the county comes out and gets it and takes it to the local
soup kitchen so the meat doesn't go to waste. You never see a deer flattened
out on the road like a piece of furry cardboard. Who comes along and picks
up the small animals? Other animals? Who the hell's going to pick up a dead
skunk? Even other animals wouldn't want anything to do with that. Buzzard
can't land on the road without becoming another road kill. Is it some county
employee's job to roam the backroads, every day or so, pitch forking those
sun-bloated carcasses and fur-jerky Frisbees into the back of his pickup
truck? Then what?
Way Out West © 1993 Martin Scherer. E-mail: mscherer@tesserak.net