It was 5:30 am and dark in Cedar Knolls, NJ; my son-in-love was taking me to the Newark airport for my 7:00 a.m. flight back to Indianapolis. As he drove up the street leading from the apartment complex, I pointed out a dusky form, rimmed by an overhead light: “Deer.” Bing slowed the car, and I murmured, “There’s another one. And two more.”
I had spent twelve days in one of my favorite places and with my two grandchildren as they vacationed from school. Their apartment complex is bordered by wooded areas that bleed wildlife onto its streets and walks. I have seen wild turkeys strut down the sidewalks as calmly as a human pedestrian; watched groundhogs wobble up onto the berm of a dirt dam, and paused in my walk with my granddaughter to quietly watch a fawn in the scrub as it awaited its mother. My visit to Cedar Knolls in December had rewarded me with the sight of deer grazing at the edge of the woods, just by the mowed area that the complex maintains. I looked out of the kitchen window and recalled my daughter’s imaginative recounting of a previous sighting of the deer.
“They came up to the edge of the woods, and the larger ones folded themselves onto the ground. A smaller one broke the tree line and came into the open area.” It seemed, in Lisa’s imagination, that the young deer, dancing onto the mowed area, was trying to assure the other deer: “See? There’s no danger! Look! I’m dancing out here!” The other deer stayed bedded down at the edge of the tree line, perhaps rolling their great brown eyes at the rebel among them. But the deer at 5:30 a.m. gave way as Bing carefully eased his SUV past them and onto the road that would take us to the airport.
As he drove, my son-in-love told me a story of another deer on another night. Bing had pedaled my grandson’s bike to a nearby gathering of friends one Sunday evening, and at the end of the night, pedaled back home. As he neared the entrance to his apartment complex, he saw a deer, paused in the street. “This was a buck,” he told me, “and he wasn’t moving out of the way” as man and bike approached. A collision between a deer and a moving automobile usually results in death for the deer and extensive damage to the car, and Bing knew this at some level; as he powered his son’s Kent 21-speed, front suspension 2.4 Terra down the street, the buck stood abreast of him, unmoving. “I was getting ready to (bail out) and let that buck deal with the bike by itself,” he told me. The deer moved away before Bing got too close.
In 1978, Michael Cimino directed Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter,” an award-winning movie about the brutalities of the conflict in Vietnam. De Niro was a hunter who, once he returned from war, could not kill the deer in the way he had before. Twenty years later, as I climbed through the Pennsylvania hills featured in the movie with my two children asleep in the back seat of my car, a magnificent buck poked its head through the fog at the edge of the highway. I was not going very fast, and we were lucky that the buck did not move as I passed it.
I’m glad that the deer of Cedar Knolls, unafraid, gathered at the edge of my road back home to grant me the blessing of a deer at dawn.