I always knew flying squirrels lived among us, probably of the southern variety, in the trees at our cabin-in-the-woods in central Virginia. But those buggers are hard to spot. They’re night-owls, first of all, and they’re pretty small. So, I was delighted to see a whole nest of them in our woodshed this winter. (Okay, truth is my husband found them when I wasn’t there one weekend and bragged about his discovery, and I only got to see them by pics and video. Had I been there, I surely would have plucked one out of that nest and kissed it on its little velvety head, so perhaps it’s best I was elsewhere.)
When I saw there were numerous squirrels tucked into the nest together, I assumed they must be pups (also called kits, funnily enough) and thought, huh, why would they have babies during this cold, hungry season? Then I read that the adults commonly come together in the winter to stay warm; nests have been spotted packed with as many as 50 of the things. (This one had eight or ten.)
They don’t actually fly, of course; they have this flap of loose skin on each side of the body attaching fore leg to hind leg, and it creates an airfoil so they can glide in a downward direction (steering with their tail), usually 25 feet or so but sometimes more than 200, or so I’ve read. They have white bellies and pink ears and glorious huge eyes allowing them to see in the dark, all of which makes them extra cute. (Big eyes is one of those traits we humans especially love in other creatures, as it projects innocence and childishness and a request for love and care, in a way.)
Flying squirrels have an impressive repertoire of calls, more than any other type of squirrel, with some utterances out of the human range of hearing. If I’d actually been there with the nest I would have recorded these calls, but I wasn’t, so I couldn’t, so I’ll attach someone else’s recording of their chirps. (Scroll down to “Voice.”)
I’m hoping next time I’m at our cabin the nest is still there, overflowing with little warm bodies. At times like these when the world feels like its imploding, it’s comforting to find wild things living their lives as if nothing is wrong.
Decades ago when I was hoping to become a scientist, I got a master’s degree dealing with the actions of water in the desert, part of which was studying the hydrology of flash floods on unvegetated bedrock. One term for the result is a “slot canyon.”
When people died in a flash flood in a narrow canyon in Zion years back, NPR brought me on to explain what happened and why. I told listeners that these desert rainstorms touch ground far away and run fast over forty or fifty miles, finding people in a dry, sunlit cathedral dazzled by the convoluted walls around them, perhaps wondering what could have formed such a place. Water and debris arrive in what is called a “flood bore,” either a towering wave or a long, inescapable slope: ankles, knees, and once it’s to your waist you’re ass over teakettle. It keeps rising ten to forty feet or more, a maelstrom of mud, water, and boulders leaving a log jammed between walls sixty feet up in the air. No skill or strength can save you. Everything is up to the flood.
The best chance you have is scrambling to a high ledge when it hits, and hoping it’s high enough.
I interviewed workers on body recoveries, usually Park Service or land agency employees (those now being fired) telling me of a wedding ring being the only thing still on a man, or how three people were all swept together under a ledge miles from where they started as if the water took them in its hand. I was told about a person’s face like a mask, only the face, no bone or anything else. The flood seems to have some kind of agency. Anything in the way enters into the equation.
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.
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