I'm Gonna Hit These Birds
It was 2002 and just after midnight. I was cruising, and I do mean cruising, in the ‘Cabernet Red’ Ford Taurus that my grandparents had recently sold to me for $1. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about my misplaced sense of worth, I don’t know what will.
I was 17 and returning home after catching the late showing of Analyze That at the MJR Brighton Towne Square Cinema 16. I had zero interest in it and hadn’t seen the first one, but I’d gone because a boy, nay, man, who I worked with at Hollywood Video had asked me to. He was older than me and I don’t remember his name but I would later take him to prom. He was the oldest non-chaperone there. Nothing would ever happen between us, sorry.
So there I was positively cruising, singing along at the top of my lungs to “All By Myself” (Celine not Eric), going 70 in a 55 because I. Can’t. Drive. 55. When something darted out in front of me in the road. A little black cat with white spots. I’ll never forget it because my first thought was “That cat looks like a little cow” and my second thought was “Uh-oh, I’m gonna hit this cat.”
Inexplicably ready to throw my life on the line for a cat I’ve never met, I swerved hard to the left, and when I tried to correct back to the right, the wheels locked, sending a whole dollar’s worth of Built-Ford-Tough into a full 360 degree barrel roll. Cabernet and I landed first hard on the passenger side, then the roof, then the drivers side, before finally stopping rightside up, smack dab on a fence, fencepost sticking straight through the hood.
I was very lucky. I was awake, alive, and physically unharmed. I called my mom. The paramedics came and checked me out. Every adult I spoke to for the next several days said the same thing: it’s not worth it. Next time, just hit the damn cat.
As dictated by my Catholic upbringing, I walked away from this accident with a whole lot of guilt and anxiety. I felt guilty for crashing the car my grandparents cared so little about, they sold it to me for a dollar. I felt guilty for worrying my mom. I felt anxious every time I drove or even rode in a car. I saw spotted cats everywhere.
That’s why, five years later, there, in Carrie Underwood’s hometown, when The Birds came for me, I was ready.
I was on a road trip from East Lansing, Michigan to Austin, TX with 3 dude friends, all of whom continue to be friends and only one of whom did anything ever happen with, sorry. We loaded all 4 of us plus camping equipment into my oldest pal Erik’s ‘Champaign’ Mercury Sable, and hit the road at the crack of dawn one morning. We drove in shifts, and because at that time I was a passive fool who deferred to men, I drove the 4th shift.
At this point it was sunset and we were Somewhere in Oklahoma, on one of those highway roads that stretches out straight as an arrow so far up ahead that you can seemingly see for miles. The kind of dusty highway that makes you want to put on Against the Wind on purpose for the first time in your life. I’d already been driving a couple hours and the sun was too low for the sun viser to do anything, but still high enough to be a beautiful, retina-searing nightmare.
We hadn’t seen anything but dust for miles until we passed a marker that said “Checotah, OK: Home of Carrie Underwood.” I read it aloud, ready for the jokes to come rolling in, because you see, at this point I was not only passive but also a dick about pop music and extremely unsupportive of other women just trying to live in the damn world. I got no response and realized My 3 Sons were sound asleep.
I smiled into the rearview mirror. A proud mama carefully driving my 3 Sleepy Young Men home, trying to remember what songs Carrie Underwood sings. Then, up ahead I saw a handful of silhouettes disrupting the blazing sun. As I got closer the silhouettes revealed themselves to be a dozen tall, gaggly, long-necked birds. As their features slowly began to materialize, I was struck by how beautiful they were. I’d never seen anything like them: they were tall and purely white save for a shock of black and red on the sides of their faces. They had the kind of stately posture and perceptive eyes that make you think of their ancestors, the velociraptors. It was a shame I was barreling toward them in a ‘Champagne’ Mercury Sable
They seemed to be gathering as if on purpose only in my lane, but luckily, there was a car ahead of me in the next lane over. So I’m thinking, when that car drives by these birds will do what, in my experience, 100% of birds have done when faced with an approaching car: they’ll fly away. That car roared by. They did not fly. If anything, they gathered themselves even more tightly in my path, forming a roadblock of beautiful idiots just for me. It wasn’t worth it, I had to hit the damn cat.
I gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands at 10 and 2 and leaned back in my seat, locking my arms straight and tight. And I yelled, over and over,
“I’m gonna hit these birds! I’m gonna hit these birds I’m gonna hit these birds!”
In an instant, my 3 Precious Angels awoke, confused and probably a little scared.
And then it happened.THUD. THUD THUD THUD BAM BAM BAM THUD. A blizzard of white feathers enveloped the car. In the rear view I watched in horror as a dozen or so lifeless bird bodies rolled in the road, the momentum of the crash turning them to tumbleweed in the dry desert.
I positively creamed those birds.
With the adrenaline from that event, I drove the rest of the way to Austin. “I’m gonna hit these birds” shot up the friends-from-college-inside-joke charts, replacing “Three 40s Mike” and “Carl’s bald”. We spent the whole camping trip worrying about coyotes and joking about these birds. Unlike totaling my $1 car, my guilt about the birds vanished pretty quickly. I had done the right thing! I had hit the damn cat, heroically saving myself and all 3 of my Strong White Sons.
But those thuds, and those huge white feathery bodies in the rearview still haunted me. I saw them every time I looked up in that mirror.. I had to find out what they were, as if studying them would mean that this whole tragedy was in the name of science. And that’s when I found myself on a Wikipedia page entitled “Birds of Oklahoma.”
It was perfect: an alphabetical list of birds in the left column, with photo examples in the right column. I carefully studied the photos of everybody on the roster but was getting to the end and none of them fit the bill (sorry). Then, near the bottom, I saw them. The birds who hadn’t been haunting my dreams, but definitely had been haunting my mirrors. There you are, you poor idiots! I scanned over to the name:
Whooping Cranes. Endangered. Only 400 alive in the wild.
I felt a complex mix of emotions like perhaps you are right now. Shock. Guilt. Sadness. And embarrassingly, slightly tickled at the tragic punchline.
EPILOGUE: I looked up whooping cranes while writing this piece, and there are 800 alive in the wild today. So they seem to be doing pretty okay.
Drive safe, everyone.