Deer Not Interrupted

This morning I ran into a young doe in my neighbor’s yard; ran into it in an almost literal sense: I turned a corner round an apple tree and there she was, eating on the other side of the tree. Forbidden fruit, indeed. I was surprised, but she wasn’t. She gave me an indifferent stare and then looked away as if I weren’t worth bothering about. (And indeed I’m not.) A few minutes later, after I had gone up to the neighbor’s porch, she moved on to eat from their raspberry bushes, fruit that is just beginning to be adequately ripe. Later I found her in my yard, but there she was not finding much to eat as I don’t grow much that deer like. But nowhere was she the least bit fearful.

The thing was that the deer was not in the least opposed to sharing that space with me. Nor with my friend’s husband who went out yelling, waving a stick, and wielding a turned-on hose. Couldn’t care less, was the look on her face. Couldn’t care less about any of us. Previously, deer in this yard have been seldom seen and very, very skittish when passing through. But this summer, they are around frequently and behaving like very large pets. That doesn’t really seem right. I’m tolerant of wild animals, but I like them to be wild, or at least wild enough to have second thoughts about the wisdom of hanging out with people.

Something’s changing, I suppose. That’s why they are here more frequently; that’s why they are less shy. Fewer acres they can call their own, more experience with our presence, maybe less water outside peoples’ yards where ‘water features,’ as the gardening magazines call these small and not-so-small ponds are common. Doubtless, global warming has some role in their newly familiar presence. It seems to be a part of everything we notice.

Al Gore wants something of me in this respect, but I don’t exactly know what it is. I was reading an article in a recent New Yorker about an island in Denmark that is energy independent. It took them ten years to get to that point, but they did it. Experts involved said that the technology was entirely available for doing this. And I got to thinking about whether, if I knew how to access and incorporate that technology in my own life, would I do it? Probably not. It’s just me and what difference would that make?

But of course, that’s the whole point and the whole problem. We are spending countless hours and dollars and psychic energy carrying on about the most trivial things, the most pointless things: things that don’t matter in the least, ranging from choosing a fancy handbag that we have no need of to fighting a war in Iraq in which we do not even understand who it is that we are trying to defeat. (Granted, that war matters a lot to the people involved, but not to most Americans: we just want out in the quickest, least embarrassing way. That war is over for us, just as the war in Vietnam was over long before we stopped and formally called it quits.) But no energy for global warming, for what looks like an ecologic catastrophe. We are, I guess, waiting for someone to lead us, to tell us specifically what to do, because if we don’t all do it, it won’t matter. And whoever passes for a leader nowadays (the kind that has some actual power to do something) is waiting for us to demand that they lead, I guess.

But whether they lead or not, whether we demand it or not, change of a sort that is not going to be easy is coming. Ten years, it took the Samso Islanders. Ten years from when they decided that they might do something of this sort. How many deer will be in my yard in ten years? Maybe, like the deer who seem to be moving from their own land to ours, we will just have to take over some other peoples’ yards--yards that provide us with more of what we want. Or does that already explain how we got to Iraq?