by Robert Pope

Sometime in the year 1970, I received an invitation to interview for a teaching post in Rio Dell, a small Northern California town built on logging on the Eel River in Humboldt County. I had my best pants and shirt, a sports coat and tie laid out in the trunk and planned to stop at a cheap motel for the night, in the morning shower and put on my teacher identity. I looked forward to eggs, bacon, toast and coffee at a strange coffee shop in an unknown town, my kind of adventure.

After a year of work following graduation from the University of California at Berkeley, I had moved far south to the San Fernando Valley where my parents lived, into a small apartment with my wife of a few months. My only source of income came from a job as steakhouse cook while I finished coursework for a teaching credential in English and French. At the time, I drove a red 1963 Ford Falcon Futura convertible which I like to think of as the subject of this memory.

I bought the car used while at Berkeley, on money earned as a hospital dishwasher. Though I put many miles on the car, it was still in decent working order. In a faded photograph, I wore a green t-shirt, blue jean jacket and jeans, and scuffed orange work boots the day I drove up the length of California into mountainous terrain. In those cool and shady environs, trucks pulling double trailers and bearing the weight of long redwood trunks careened past at death-defying speeds, unable to stop if they wanted to. I drove terrified, laughing at death in the remains of my youth.

What made it so exciting was that if those brakes failed, if those drivers lost control on a wild curve, those trucks would become unguided missiles plowing into whatever cars were unlucky enough to be in their path or plummeting off the precipitous edge of the steep downward lane to my left. These truckers were folk heroes, each one a true to life Paul Bunyan, in spite of the horror I felt that the ancient trees had been cut down in the first place. I might have entered a Tolkien novel somewhere along the way, half-expecting Tom Bombadil to step from the forest.

Of course, I had tapes in the tape deck, listening to my favorite tunes, which included Blood Sweat & Tears: “What goes up, must come down, spinning wheel got to go round.” Truer words were never spoken in such a way, was my thinking. It was visceral. I may have snapped my fingers once or twice. Their sound found me. This took hours, San Fernando Valley up to the Redwoods. I’m going to try to keep this short. It’s an imposition on you to go on too long about something I care about just because it’s been up there in my mind all this time and it wants to drive out, the way you might drive right through the cutout tunnel through a Redwood.

It was getting dark when I turned off what passed for a highway up there and headed directly into the trees, where I saw a young couple with backpacks holding out their thumbs and watching me with hungry eyes, both of them dressed about like me. So, of course I stopped and picked them up. They were living the life I imagined. Dirty, ragged, happy, they piled in the back seat laughing with their equipment. I told them where I was going, and they said that was fine because it was getting dark quicker than they expected.

By now, I’m driving with the lights, we’re talking up a storm, and everything’s all right with the world when my lamps flash on a sign with the outline of a leaping buck. The hitchhiker made some joke about the sign, and I told him I took these signs seriously. I had known people who hit a deer and completely totaled their car. I said those words a moment before a real buck, a huge buck with an enormous rack of antlers, appeared in my headlights an instant before crashing into the front end of the Futura, shattering the windshield, stopping us dead in our tracks.

We got out—I don’t think we even had seatbelts in that car—unharmed, standing on our own legs and looking at one another in the dark of night in the middle of the spooky woods. The shape of the buck had been imprinted deep into the engine block of the Ford, and though the buck itself was nowhere to be seen, his hair and blood and teeth had been implanted in the caved-in grill. For my part, my head had gotten thrown forward in the collision. I thought I might have hit the top of my head on the rear-view mirror, as it hurt like hell for about five minutes and evened out to a dull ache.

We waited quite a while before another car came along and stopped to chat a few minutes before heading into Rio Dell to use a phone. You see, none of us had a cell phone. Actually, no one had a cell phone. We waited longer, more or less at ease for thinking help was on its way but taking its time. I remember them as young blondish people, happy with themselves and life. I did not think then that they had made some foolish choices, for I had made some good choices, albeit accidentally, and here I was stuck in the middle of a forested mountain with two pleasant strangers until at last the police arrived, two of them in one patrol car, country boys who bemoaned the fact they had been hunting all weekend and not seen one buck, and here I had hit one with my car like they were falling out of the sky.

One of them had on a blue shirt that resembled a policeman’s blouse, the other a flannel shirt and jeans. The latter cop strode off into the dark of the trees, and when he returned said he was a big sum-buck and asked if I minded if he came back and took the deer for meat. I told him no, of course not, help yourself. It would make me feel better about killing the deer in the first place. He shook my hand and said, You got yourself a big sum-buck, my friend. By this time, my head retreated to the dull ache I mentioned, so I could ignore it if I tried.

The cop on the other side of the car shouted out a laugh and said, Around here, pardner, that’s how you get to be a man. They gave us a ride into town, me burdened with my clothes for the interview, the happy couple deliriously pleased with their adventure, and dropped us off on the main drag, the only drag I could see. The experience with the cops had definitely lifted my spirits. I told them I might hang around a day longer if they wanted to get a beer. You’re on, buddy, the new owner of the carcass of a big sum-buck said, First one’s on me.

We separated in town, the hitchhikers and me. I took a room in a small hotel that smelled like all rooms in old hotels, where I contacted someone at last who said they would tow my battered car into a garage the next morning. Now my head itched like crazy, and when I stood over the washbowl I couldn’t see the top of my head in the cheesy little mirror. I went to the joint bathroom and got under a shower with a surprisingly nice, steady water pressure. That gave me some relief until I got out and drank off several shots of a fifth of whiskey I had tucked in my schoolmarm clothes, in the inside jacket pocket, where I could get at it easy in case of emergency.

I woke up early, as usual, and my head was more abuzz than itchy. I saw my own shocked face in the mirror when I realized I had two immense, dark swellings on my head, where I had impacted with whatever. Sometimes I think I collided with his antlers if you can imagine that. The window had cracked, broken in a V-shape where something hit it. I must have blanked out for a moment. This came back to me later.

I didn’t think I could go to an interview looking like that. But what choice did I have? I mean, I could have used this job. It would have been a godsend, whatever that means and entails exactly. The swelling didn’t stop, either. I put my good clothes on and walked to the garage—there wasn’t much of this strange mountain town at the time—and talked about repairs. The repairman had on a blue-gray onesie with his name, Lenny, on the pocket. Lenny kept looking at my head and finally asked what happened there. Accident, I said. On the road. He stood back while I cursed at my car in the little lot at the side with the remains of the deer pasted across the crushed-in front of my car. At last, I patted the headlight and forgave her.

If there had been cell phones back then, I would have taken a picture and sent it to my wife and parents and posted it on Facebook, but, of course, I didn’t do any of those things because those things did not exist. Instead, I went to the breakfast nook I had been looking forward to and had a cup of coffee as harsh as my mood while I waited long enough for the mechanic, if that’s what he was, to estimate the damage to my checkbook.

I’ll be honest here. The interview did not go well. I recall two relatively pleasant looking men dressed as administrators in matching gray suits moving about these black-topped tables with sinks, like this was a science lab of some kind. Chemistry or zoology. They spoke with a forced casualness, sneaking looks at my head now and again. I explained what happened which gave them license to stare unabashedly at my head. Unabashedly is a word usually reserved for soft porn.

Once they regained their original graceless poise, they spoke candidly with me, informing me that they believed it would be better for all concerned if we postponed this interview. Until such time as the bumps on my head went down. Of course, it embarrassed me, but I figured I didn’t care enough about either of them to care what they thought. The way I told this much later, One look at me decided them: not for us. Don’t ask me what it was, specifically, but I think they saw who I was at a glance and were not about to put up with my shenanigans.

I’m not blaming them. I had just destroyed my only means of transportation and could not come up with the outrageous and probably accurate estimated sum I would have to pay to get it back. I’m not going to lie at this point. I had bigger problems. In the bathroom mirror of the garage where I bid farewell to my Futura, just a little better than the mirror in my room once I wiped it down, I saw that my bumps had become the antlers of a young buck. Sturdy but still not even half-size. I didn’t know what I could do about it. It looked like something time would take care of, but for now, what could I do? Wear a hat?

I did not linger to mourn my automobile’s passing in the night but took to the road in jeans and boots, abandoning my teacher clothes in a convenient receptacle, sticking out my thumb on what passed for a highway in those parts, with the long drop off one side and the mountain on the other. People hooted or flashed peace signs as they sped past. Logging trucks set my hair to flying.

Two big boys in a battered truck pulled over at last. I recognized the cops from the day before, in well-worn hunting vests, firearms stowed in the rack behind them in the window where they could be seen clearly. Hey, you’re that sum-buck from yesterday. I agreed happily. They said I had inspired them. They were getting in a few hours before sunset. Did I want to come? Are you kidding, I said. I climbed up beside them and introduced myself. The one who turned out to be named Art Hickey, no lie, reached back and came up with a bottle of beer from a cooler behind the seats. He snapped the cap with the church key on his key chain and handed it to me.

Nodding at my appurtenances, he said, That’s some nifty headgear, pardner.