Sunday, August 24, 2014

From the archives: [Junk] collecting in Gainesville, Fla.

Note: The following was written for Professor John Marvel’s Spring 2006 in-depth reporting class at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Diane & Michael Buchanan


I expected 7 a.m. to look different.

For one thing, it was too light outside.

As a longtime advocate of the weekend “sleep-in,” I hadn’t witnessed too many early Saturday mornings, and I guess I half-expected an all-encompassing darkness that would lend a sense of mystery and importance to my mission.

A car horn sounded: They had arrived.

I finished buttoning my shirt, grabbed my wallet and half-stepped into my sneakers, pressing down on the backs with my hovering heels. I shuffled out the door and toward the driveway where my mom was holding open the gate. We climbed into the backseat of the purring Lincoln Navigator and it rolled in reverse.

It was my first garage sale experience and friends Michael and Diane had offered to show me the ropes. As residents of Gainesville for more than 20 years and garage sale patrons by instinct, they were the perfect tour guides: driven, determined, well-prepared.

From her position in the passenger seat, Diane turned around and pressed a hot cup of coffee into my mom’s grateful hands. The bottle of juice and folded newspaper located on the console were for my use. Between sips of cranberry juice cocktail, I glanced over the likely targets.

My first mistake was suggesting the estate sale on page 3.

“Translation for an estate sale is ‘expensive [junk],’” Michael said as he turned the SUV down 16th Avenue.

“Some people just say ‘estate sale’ because they’re selling their old grandma’s stuff,” Mom offered. (She really was just along for the ride.)

Michael explained how middlemen often jack-up the price of merchandise at estate sales so they can make a profit. His disgust was palpable.

And simply relying on the classifieds was a no-no too.

“If people are running an ad in the paper, it usually means they think their [junk] is more special than everybody’s else’s,” Diane said. The newspaper provided a rough guide, but it was only consulted when the neon-colored cardboard signs ran out. In any event, it seemed Michael and Diane had already scoped out a target: The Duckpond.

Located in the northeast section of Gainesville, the Duckpond neighborhood hovers between downtown and the no-man’s land of the east. The area earned its name from a narrow strip of water between West and East Boulevards, a favorite hangout for waterfowl. They seemed oblivious to the splendid architecture surrounding their murky existence – the towering Victorians, sturdy rock Colonials and old Florida homes with inviting porches are all historic remnants of the 19th and early 20th century. And as the real estate is generally upper class, so was the discarded junk.

“Diane’s got this snobby attitude: She won’t shop in some parts of town,” Michael confided as we headed east on Eighth Avenue toward the Thomas Center.

But the Duckpond seemed bereft of signs that Saturday morning, and as it was nearing 8 o’clock, the pressure of uncovering that first sale weighed heavily upon Michael. In Florida, most garage sales begin at 7 a.m., and if you want to get the good stuff, you need to arrive early; As a general rule, Michael and Diane didn’t shop past 10 a.m.

Michael, perhaps in desperation, began tailing a blue Volvo. It was moving much like the Navigator, cruising at a slow speed and periodically breaking with each yard sign it passed. Our convoy passed a cardboard square with magic marker arrows promising a sale up the road, but after a mile, Michael dismissed it as a decoy.

“I’ll tell you something that’s unforgivable: leaving your signs up –“

 “Yes, that’s unforgivable,” Diane interjected.

“— leaving your signs up until the next weekend,” Michael finished.

The Volvo sensed the decoy too and turned north. We followed.

At the north end of the neighborhood, we came across our first real sale of the day.

Like a shining oasis in a desert of sleeping homes, the two rows of used furniture along that driveway served as a promising beacon. But we certainly weren’t the first to sip from the watering hole; As we pulled up to the single-story home, a station wagon loaded to the brim with odds and ends pulled away from the curb.

“Look at this guy,” Diane said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“The man is probably a professional shopper and has certain items he searches for,” Michael said.

But Diane’s attention was soon diverted.

“Ooooooh, I want that little table,” she said, pointing at a cute wood piece with narrow legs. “Let me out! Let me out!” Our vehicle was still coasting to a stop when she leapt from the running boards.

Yet the man in the Volvo was two strides ahead of her. By the time Diane reached the driveway, he had hoisted up the table by a leg and was carrying it toward the young woman seated casually with her back to the garage door. It was gone.

As Michael bent down to inspect a box of colorful plates, Diane and my mom busied themselves by surveying the other furniture, including a set of side tables and a matching coffee table, each priced about $20. The seller said her husband had purchased the tables — against her wishes — from another garage sale less than a month ago. Ah, the circle of [junk].

In the end, Michael and my mom decided to split the plates and a box of coffee mugs amongst themselves. Michael planned to use his half for mosaic art projects. My mom would employ hers as a bargaining chip to reclaim the expensive set she had loaned to me. They paid for the dishes, and we jumped back into the Navigator.

“I wanted that table,” Diane moaned.

“You just gotta grab it, and if someone else is grabbing it, you just pull harder,” Michael said as we glided over a speed bump. My new dishwasher-safe dining set clattered in the trunk.

It was during our drive to the second stop of the day that I received the lowdown on “shabby chic.” According to Michael and Diane, the term refers to dated novelty items that still retain an aura of “coolness.” (Apparently, “shappy chic” is a garage saler’s “rosebud.”)

Just west of Main Street on Eighth Avenue, we came across a benefit sale for the restoration of a historic building. Area families had donated the wares and arranged the collection on folding tables within a fenced dirt lot. We parked.

“This would not be my neighborhood of choice,” Diane said.

“Yeah, but you get great stolen stuff,” Michael joked.

But after appraising the booty, I had trouble believing we were dealing with stolen goods; It was unlikely anyone would go to the trouble of stealing and then attempting to sell Vicki Carr’s “It Must Be Him” album on vinyl or a knock-off Louis Vuitton purse.

Empty handed, I trotted back to the car where the others were waiting for me; I had come to realize retreating to the Navigator was the official signal for Michael and Diane’s dissatisfaction with a sale or the completion of their shopping. I jumped into the backseat and we were off.

“They didn’t even have stickers on their stuff,” Diane said. “That means it’s too expensive.”

We paused briefly for three more “decoys” before locating our next stop. The first was a “Lot for Sale” sign and the second a plea for the return of a lost house key. An older man was in the process of affixing the third, an orientation sign to his sale, to the pole of a stop sign.

“Just look at this guy,” Michael said. “I can tell this isn’t going to be a good one,” “He isn’t suave, shappy or chic.”

And he obviously wasn’t ready for us. We turned onto Northwest Fifth Avenue and found someone who was.

The owners of a white, concrete blockhouse had littered their front yard with a baby stroller, a cat carrier and a ferret cage. A row of clothes on hangers swung from a low tree branch. The offerings didn’t look promising, but we filed out of the car anyway.

By the time Michael uncovered a pair of used panties near the makeshift clothesline, he was ready to go.

“Now that was an experience,” he said. “Some people just out garbage out on their yards and call it a garage sale.”

“We always run into one or two of those,” Diane said.

By then, it was getting late – 9 a.m. to be exact – and Michael steered the Navigator toward 43rd Street.

Just off the busy road, a group of Santa Fe Community College students and faculty members were conducting a combined sale to raise money for a trip to a radiography conference in Orlando. The goods were plentiful: a stack of bikes with rusty chains, a fake poinsettia plant, a typewriter, a weedwacker, rolls of wallpaper and a bird cage, sans bird. A dancing teddy bear sang Elvis tunes when his hand was squeezed.

Michael presented me with “The Official Italian Joke Book.”

“You can’t get that just anywhere,” he said.

Also among the “limited edition” items was a pair of nunchucks priced at $3 and a set of bullhorns fastened to a leather display board.

“We’re betting the yogurt maker won’t sell,” said Robin, one of the faculty members.

“Who’s going to buy a yogurt maker?”

Well, it was additive free.

But Michael was headed for the car and the rest of us trotted behind him.

In a bordering neighborhood, we came across Fili, a woman purging items before she moved to a new home located off 34th Street. She worked a craft booth at the Waldo Flea Market and among her sale items was an assortment of thread spools, most of which were bright pink.

“People come out, and that’s the color they like,” she said. She wore a fanny pack fastened around her hips – presumably the sale cash “box” — and a University of Florida Gators T-shirt.

As Fili sold a plant to a skinny youth with a handlebar mustache, I sorted through the video collection, including a VHS tape of the 1993 Bill Clinton Presidential Inauguration.

The lady beside me, a middle-aged woman named Brenda, was searching for crafts.

“I’ve probably been shopping at garage sales since I was 15,” she confided, clutching a spool of brown thread. “I never go to the mall.”

Brenda is what many garage sale patrons call a “free-styler.” She scorns the newspaper advertisements, opting instead to drive aimlessly around town and stop wherever she pleases. Other garage salers will plan a route of attack. They scan the Friday and Saturday newspaper classifieds and then map out the order in which they shop. Within this second classification is a subclass of  “professionals,” a few devoted individuals who rise at the crack of dawn every Saturday so they can beat the crowds. Often they arrive at sales even before the hosts open shop. At such times, they’re referred to as “Early Birds,” a distasteful distinction in most garage sale social circles.

John Maxwell, resident of a house off Northwest 35th Way, was not a fan of Early Birds. In fact, he maintained a careful tally of how many flocked to his garage sales before the advertised time. At the time of our arrival, there were nine new pencil marks on Maxwell’s garage door. The first was recorded at 6:47 a.m.

“I’m an accountant – I just do it by habit,” Maxwell explained, tucking his pencil into his left breast pocket.

Maxwell, a retired U.S. Military captain, said he averages about one garage sale every six to nine months; He has to in order to keep up with all the knickknacks his daughter-in-law sends him from Colorado. From the collection of display, I gathered she likes items with a western motif.

“We get it, and we get rid of it,” Maxwell said. “But she’s becoming aware of that after being married to my son for awhile.”

Empty-handed, Michael, Diane and my mom had retreated to the Navigator, and I soon joined them. It was nearing 10 o’clock, and we had one more stop to make.

At a house along 16th Avenue, we came across a mother forcing her daughter do the unthinkable: sell her beloved stuffed animals.

“I made her weed them down,” explained LuAnn Carter.

 “Fine, but you have to take me to Build-A-Bear,” said Katie, 10.

 “I don’t have to do anything – maybe if you got straight A’s…”

This delightful family was attempting to scale back before moving, and a laundry basket piled high with toys was part of the sacrifice.

“I was going to buy one and tell her, ‘I’m going to give this to my dog,’” Michael joked when we were back in the car. “Actually, she was asking 50 cents – I was going to try to talk her down to a quarter.”


The Navigator turned east on 16th Avenue to return to my stop, my house. Michael, Diane and Mom were headed for breakfast. I was headed for bed.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Winslow’s Dictionary of Universally Accepted Garage Sale Terminology



I can spot baby crap from a mile away.

I owe this remarkable superpower to my friends, Michael and Diane, although, outside of mixed company, we tend to refer to such secondhand sale offerings as “baby sh*%.” If colleges offered a PhD in “Garage Sale Sciences,” Michael and Diane would undoubtedly score honorary degrees. They’re that good.

When I was in college, Michael and Diane did me the great honor of allowing me to tag along on one of their epic Saturday scrounges, and I wrote an entire essay on the experience for my in-depth reporting class (I earned an “A”). I recently uncovered the original essay, but here’s a rundown of what I learned and have since adopted as “Winslow’s Dictionary of Universally Accepted Garage Sale Terminology:”

Antique (adjective): Reserved for items at least three decades old.
Baby Sh*% (noun): Kid-related junk the owner (usually the youngest child in the household) has outgrown and which is being peddled by overly optimistic parents desperately trying to make a few bucks so as to buy more kid-related crap.
Classifieds (noun): Once, a long time ago, printed publications known as “newspapers” existed. Sellers would pay exorbitant sums of money – generally more than they would eventually make at their forthcoming sale – to advertise in these publications.
Craigslist (proper noun): An online list from a guy named Craig through which sellers can advertise sales for free.
Drive-by (noun): The act of surveying the proffered goods from the safety of one’s vehicle before committing to grapple with parallel parking on an already crammed, one-way residential street.
Early Bird (noun): An inconsiderate jerk who either can’t read or doesn’t care to adhere to advertised sale hours and arrives five hours early on the off chance he might score a limited edition Perry Como Christmas Collection LP.
Estate Sale (noun): Overpriced, free-for-all sale of the entire contents of a home once the owner has kicked the bucket or been forcibly relocated to a nursing home. If organized by the deceased’s family, deals are possible. If organized by an Estate Sale Company (see entry for “Kofskis”), run the other way.
Freestyler (noun): One who dismisses sale advertisements and drives aimlessly around town, leaving a wake of near-accidents as he or she slams on the brakes upon detecting yet another handwritten, cardboard sign.
Garage Sale (noun): Moderately priced sale of random household crap assembled in a garage or carport.
Kofskis (proper noun): South Florida-based antique and estate sale company. Among the worst offenders when it comes to overpriced junk.
Rummage Sale (noun): When an entire community collectively compiles its crap and attempts to tempt buyers with round neon price stickers advertising “5, 10 and 25-cent” price points. Generally hosted in a church. Proceeds often fund charity projects or some youth group’s field trip to perform at the International Yodeling Competition in Fargo, North Dakota.
Shabby Chic (adjective): Used to describe a vintage item universally considered hideous when new but which has since acquired an aura of novelty and is thus desirable in modern times.
Yard Sale (noun): Low-priced sale of random household crap piled atop old comforters strewn across a front yard. NOTE: In South Florida or Seattle, not recommended during the rainy season (namely, 11 months of the calendar year)

Sellers and buyers alike: Note these definitions. Write them down or commit them to memory. Mislabeling one’s sale is a near-capital offense and will be punished accordingly.

The absolute worst offender of mislabeling is the overzealous housewife who advertises her Baby Sh*%-grade offerings as an “Estate Sale.” That is wrong on so many levels. First of all, she is diverting traffic from real estate sales, the ones in which someone has actually died and buyers like me get to creep around the vacant house rifling through filament light bulb collections and shelves of Betamax cassettes. Second, she’s responsible – during this heightened period of Super-Intense, Radioactive Global Warming, no less — for the squandering of immeasurable amounts of gasoline as we buyers conduct repeated drive-bys to determine whether her rinky dink starter home is truly the estate in question. How dare she. A patchwork quilt piled high with a kid’s stained onesies is not an estate sale.


Thursday, August 21, 2014

Rats, mealworms and smelt



It’s funny how the horror of snipping a wriggling mealworm in half suddenly becomes tolerable (at least for the one wielding the scissors) once you’ve progressed to segmenting a defrosted rodent.  I can now say I’ve done both as a Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA Wildlife Department volunteer, and, without a doubt, I prefer beetle larvae decapitation.

For months, I’d been dissecting live mealworms and cutting defrosted crickets with surgical scissors in order to accommodate the beaks of the smallest of the bird nursery fledglings. That was OK; Even halved, the mealworms kept up their writhing, and the little birds always seemed so thankful when swallowing the morsels. Then came a day when I was assigned to the courtyard shift, and I joined a college intern in preparing dinner for the raccoons and opossums. This proved an alien task for both of us.

Raccoons in recovery, it should be noted, eat a regimented diet of dry dog food, fresh produce and smelt, an appropriately named, small odorous fish. Each raccoon, depending on their size and age, is entitled to a certain amount of each of these ingredients, as stated within a “diet binder,” and that amount is then multiplied by the number of raccoons present in the enclosure with roommates sharing one or two colossal metal bowls “family style.” That particular day, we were dealing with six enclosures, each containing between five and eight raccoons.

The intern and I assembled the dog food and chopped carrots and apples into chunks to fill the bowls. Then she hacked away at a frozen block of smelt and I carefully counted and deposited the defrosted fish (or pieces of fish) she dislodged into each labeled bowl. I used my gloved hand to mix in the glassy-eyed stinkers, concocting a medley I hoped was both appetizing and pleasing to the raccoons’ palates.

This assembly line procedure went on for about an hour, and we had just managed to shove all the bowls into the fridge when we realized we had mistakenly followed the diet for adult raccoons – not juveniles whose diet requires less kibble and fish.

Out came the 10 or so dishes. And so commenced some frantic mental math as the intern and I recalculated each quantity of kibble and smelt, guessed how we had divided the original amounts among multiple bowls marked for each enclosure and then scavenged in the heinous piles to retrieve the extra. It wasn’t pleasant, but in the end, the raccoons had just the amount of grub they were supposed to.

I was about to leave for the day when I asked Patrick, the head of the department, about dining options for the opossums.

“Get a rat pup and divide it between the five of them,” he said.

I swallowed. Huh?

I found the rat pup in a bag in the freezer, his frozen white fur slicked back with ice. Attached to the fur were pieces of tiny pink rat hands that had snapped off his litter mates when they were individually detached from the frozen ball of rat bodies. 

Despite the extra appendages, our pup was pretty darn cute and looked more like a mouse than a rat.

The intern placed the rodent popsicle within a bowl of warm water, and we watched in silence as he floated around. Periodically, she would employ a gloved finger to dunk him into the warmth.

When the intern had deemed the body “soft enough,” I grasped the body with one hand and held it over a dish while the poultry scissors quivered in my other hand. I decided to start at the head and turned my own slightly to look away as I began to cut. The sinews were stringy and tough. I struggled to bring the blades together.

“Imagine you’re cutting fabric,” the intern said.

That advice actually seemed to help, and I successfully made it through all four cuts. The intern placed the five sections into five dishes and these we crammed into the fridge beside the raccoon dinners. I tried my best not to think about them when I ate my own that evening.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Excursion to Deer Hollow Farm




Maybe it’s the sense of calm presented by the animals or the way dust-mote speckled sunlight shines through the wood slats of a barn, but there is something about farms I find utterly bewitching. Deer Hollow Farm in Cupertino is no exception.

Nestled within a valley of the 4,000-square-mile Rancho San Antonio County Park and Open Space Preserve, the peaceful, shaded property features grazing livestock, an abundant kitchen garden, an orchard and the kind of old-timey hay barns that simply demand to be photographed. Naturally, such a place represents heaven for yours truly, and I planned my whole week around paying a visit.

It might seem odd that Silicon Valley, home to multinational companies at the very forefront of technology, could include a 160-year-old working farm, but perhaps it’s that irony that makes Deer Hollow all the more special. The farm and its associated, volunteer-run educational programs are ideal distractions for young families, school groups and animal lovers in general. As an added bonus, entrance and parking are free – seemingly a rarity in the San Francisco Bay Area, land of $30-a-head museum admittance.  

Deer Hollow Farm is located just off North Foothill Boulevard, behind Maryknoll Seminary, the green-roofed complex that looms over Interstate 280 where the highway curves to meet Interstate 85. Cristo Rey Drive is a meandering road that passes entrances to upper class neighborhoods before leading to the Rancho San Antonio County Park parking lot. From there, visitors must hike the Lower Meadow Trail about a mile to arrive at the farm, but the path is leisurely and crosses over idyllic streams and under the canopies of majestic oak trees. Fearless fox squirrels, quail and, of course, black-tailed deer, populate the woods and can often be spotted near the path, a portion of which is paved to accommodate bicycles, strollers and authorized vehicles.

Eventually, the Lower Meadow Trail funnels into a small clearing containing a cluster of buildings (barns, apple house, greenhouse, blacksmith shed) and the fenced pens accommodating the residents: sheep, goats, chickens, geese, ducks, pigs and beautiful jersey cows. Many of the structures date back to the mid-1800s and were built by Theodore F. and George H. Grant, the original owners. In 1860, the brothers purchased 360 acres of what is now the preserve and grew wheat and raised horses and dairy cows. Their family owned the property for 77 years.

By chance, I happened to meet Kira, a fellow volunteer from the Peninsula Humane Society Wildlife Department, and together we took a self-guided tour of the property, stopping to marvel at an ancient horse skeleton in a barn stall and peek in the windows of the two-bedroom cabin where the Grants lived. The home is furnished to appear as it did during their lifetimes. Visitors are not permitted to touch the livestock, but we introduced ourselves from afar. Afterward, Kira and I hiked the Wildcat Loop and High Meadow Trails to take in the panoramic views of the Vista Point. From that height, we could see the white sails of the distant Shoreline Amphitheater and the hazy East Bay mountains. It proved a satisfying end to the morning’s adventure.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Meeting my doppelgänger

I’m a casual viewer of “How I Met Your Mother,” the ensemble CBS sitcom that concluded in March after nine seasons (Don’t you dare tell me about “the mother:” I’m a season behind thanks to our World Trip). A running joke on the show concerns how each character has a doppelgänger (Married couple Marshall and Lily agree to postpone child rearing until they spot all five doppelgängers, a ridiculous sort of “the universe says it’s time to procreate” kind of logic). Well, I may have met my doppelgänger today. Her name is Kira. Unlike HIMYM’s protagonists, we’re not long-lost twins, but our lifestyles feature more than a few similarities.

Here’s how it went down: I was walking the trail to Deer Hollow Farm in Cupertino when I stopped to photograph a group of quail near the path. A hiker behind me paused so I could snap the shutter. As she continued along the path, I noticed her impressively long telephoto lens (immediate lens envy) – and the fact that she looked awfully familiar.

“I’m sorry, but you look awfully familiar.” I asked. “Do you work around here or something?”

Turns out, I had met Kira a few months before. She happens to volunteer at the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA during the same shift, but she had been absent for a few weeks, so we never had the chance to interact. So I asked if I could join her on her hike. We began chatting and realized we have a great deal in common including: 

-We’re between jobs and volunteer during the same shift at the same animal rescue organization


  • Our partners share the same first name
  • Our partners work as engineers at the same Silicon Valley company 
  • We’re photography hobbyists, animal lovers and hiking enthusiasts
  • We share our homes with feline companions
  • I think we’re about the same age and look somewhat similar

There are a number of other odd coincidences, but I’m not going to share everything for the sake of her privacy and my own. I will say, however, that it was great to make a new friend. And whether she’s my doppelgänger or I’m hers, I hope to see her again soon.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

End of a running rut

Along the San Francisco Bay Trail

My husband doesn’t know it yet, but he’s run himself into a rut; Matt runs the same, extremely steep, suburban route each day and then complains about his aching knees. He loves to get a rise out of me by popping said knees in my presence (gross!). But I have a solution to his problem: the San Francisco Bay Trail.

A neighbor mentioned the San Francisco Bay Trail when Matt and I first moved to Belmont, and I first ventured to explore it a few months ago. The trouble is that I mistakenly took the left path instead of the right after coming off the Highway 101 pedestrian bridge, and I ended up in the Marina Food Market Shopping Center and then had the dumb idea of following Hillsdale Boulevard back to El Camino Real. Thanks to the traffic, I was not particularly enamored with that route.

Today, I took the right route – the one that snakes behind Oracle’s corporate headquarters and extends for miles through Foster City along the Belmont Slough until it empties into the San Francisco Bay. The flat, paved path is shared by pedestrians, cyclists and dog walkers (free poop bags!) alike. Traveling toward the bay, the path passes parks, playgrounds and exercise stations before entering serene marshland inhabited by geese, egrets and songbirds. Near the edge of the Bay, sand and dirt trails weave through the tall grasses and lead to a series of jumps for mountain bikers.

In researching the trail, I was dumbfounded to learn it currently extends 330 miles to encircle the entire Bay Area but will eventually expand to cover 500 miles. Apparently, I’ve glimpsed just a tiny fraction of a massive recreational corridor encompassing the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Candlestick Point and the Golden Gate Bridge. Needless to say, there is plenty of new pavement for Matt to explore. I can’t wait to enlighten him.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Death of a friend

A fawn pictured in Winslow's backyard


The sight dumbfounded me: Here was a creature I knew as living and breathing now on its side, bloated and glassy-eyed with flies circling its muzzle. I cried out, and pulled hard on my bicycle’s brakes.

I stumbled across the fawn’s body today by accident; I had planned to ride my bike on another, steeper route, but opted for Ralston Avenue at the last moment. Flying down the hill on South Road felt marvelous, a cooling breeze rushing past my sweaty hairline as I sang along to Paul Simon playing on my iPod. I was reminded of how Roald Dahl, in his autobiography, “Boy,” described a memory of watching another youth experience a similar exuberance of freedom.

Yes, today is a good day, I told myself.

And then, just as I was losing momentum from the steep decline and starting to pedal, I spotted the body in the grass between the sidewalk and the Notre Dame de Namur University tennis courts. I yanked the headphones from my ears. I felt sick. 

Was it really, truly dead? Perhaps the animal was simply stunned. The body looked intact. There was no blood. I used the tips of my trainers to inch myself and the bike closer. I looked down and stared at the ribs, willing them to gently rise with a breath. Instead, they bulged unnaturally outward in a sickening bloat. The adorably dappled back I had seen so many times from afar was now at my feet, but the white spots no longer radiated with life. It appeared someone had struck the fawn with a vehicle and then moved the body to the side of the road. I was grateful the driver hadn’t left the beautiful body to be destroyed by traffic.

This was one of two black-tailed fawns that, along with their mother, had paid daily visits to my yard for months in order to eat whatever they could find.  As much as I bellyached about their systematic destruction of my garden, I delighted at seeing and greeting these graceful creatures each day. I often snapped pictures of them to text to my 80-year-old friend because she becomes so excited when I do so.

“If I lived there, I would go out and hug them,” she liked to say.

Drivers in my neighborhood frequently speed, so part of me knew it was only a matter of time before someone killed a deer. Over time, I developed this inexplicable “Catcher in the Rye” -like feeling of responsibility for the two fawns; somehow, I had to be there to protect them from the “cliff.” Whenever I noticed the two leaving my yard and moving toward the road, I became agitated. Sometimes I even motioned up the hill so approaching drivers would know the family was hovering just beyond the trees.   

So finding the body was a shock. I stared at it for several minutes to reconcile the sight. I whipped my head around to locate other bicyclists and pedestrians to share my horror, but no one seemed to notice the dead deer. The tennis players continued playing. A man walking past failed to acknowledge me or the deer. I was alone. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. I debated riding back to my house to get a shovel so I could bury the fawn myself. I felt like I at least owed the animal this small dignity.

Frantic, I called my husband, and he urged me to notify Animal Control in case the deer was infected with Lyme disease. Based on my experience with the Peninsula Humane Society Wildlife Department, I believe Animal Control will cremate the remains. That seemed preferable to simply letting the body rot. 

Arriving home, I used cardboard and a Sharpie to make a sign asking my neighbors to please drive slowly. I fastened it to my garbage can with some duct tape, the whole set-up looking just about as shoddy as it sounds. But it was the only action I could think of to fix a situation that couldn’t be fixed. Somewhere out there, the dead fawn’s sibling still lives.

*Please drive slowly in wildlife-populated areas.