Oh, Deer

Last week, as always, a diversity of pedestrians paraded up and down Orange Street.

Only in New Haven have I seen a woman navigate the sidewalk perfectly in spite of her nose being stuck in a book. And then there was the intruding doe, which I didn’t see, but heard about.

Members of our early morning klatch at the coffee shop alerted me to the news. A frightened animal had apparently mistaken the bustle of Orange Street for the expanses of East Rock Park and tried to sprint away from creatures she naturally considers cruel and unusual: human beings.

One of the witnesses pointed out there was a certain measure of shock and awe in the neighborhood.

Nutmeggers are generally aware that the state is overrun with these hoofed mammals, nearly 100,000, though the number is an estimate, as the deer haven’t yet submitted their census forms. Yet, it is presumed that coffee shops and Italian markets are not common destinations.

This is true although some years ago a buck that had just been grazed by a car wandered in his stupor into a Madison bait and tackle shop. The owner later told me that he circled the aisles a few times, dripped blood on the floor, exacerbated his wounds by ramming against the glass on the back door trying to escape, but never disturbed the merchandise before retreating to the front door, which the owner had opened, and out to the relative safety of the nearby meadow where he licked his wounds. I suggested that the proprietor put up a sign with a slightly altered version of a Harry Truman doctrine: ​“The Buck Shops Here.”

The recent Orange Street deer incident wasn’t the only East Rock sighting of late. A doe, in some measure of distress, jumped off of the Mill River bridge into the water below. She seemed to sense that the river is deeper on the east side of the bridge, which made for a safer dive.

And then there was the specimen discovered in another unlikely spot: the administration office of Quinnipiac University. It was there that in the summer of 2019 I took my college-shopping granddaughter for a campus tour, and we watched as a doe approached us at lightning speed, as if worried it might be too late to apply for the next freshman class.

These encounters triggered a recall of other meetings with these agile but not altogether brilliant animals.

One morning in 2015, just after we had moved into our Orange Street house, I looked out of the back window and saw a doe. She was on her knees, seemed almost asleep, so didn’t notice me at first. And when she finally did, she performed that magic that only certain animals master –- jumping over the fences that separate backyards on her way back to the park greenery.

The idea of a deer, here in the city, startled me. I thought, as we were new then to the city, it must be some sort of omen. The natural world saying, ​“Hey, you lived in the woods for three decades and now you’ve abandoned us, but we forgive you because, understandably, at your advancing age, you want to live closer to the theater and concerts and lectures, which we don’t have a lot of in the wilds.”

For 30 years, we had lived in a barn house we built in Chester, where a family of deer (between seven and nine) was almost always present on the hill below the house.

There was a connection between the deer, which continually found our garden the source of easy cuisine, and myself.

When one of the members of the group turned up lame, I saw the limits in her movement, and thought I came to her rescue, putting out a bucket of water every morning. This only meant that she drank from it after eating the parsley, sage, rosemary and, yes, Paul Simon, the thyme.

Over one summer she and I developed a kind of relationship. I told her -– she was a captive audience because of her delicate condition, and I love captive audiences – that I had once in my life been an expert on deer.

This, as it turned out, was something of an exaggeration. In the summer of 1963, well before Chester or New Haven appeared on the horizon, I became a tour guide in the Upper Peninsula, of Michigan. The UP, to those in the know.

Back then, before anyone ever heard of the term ​“climate change,” a deer was something you saw first in a children’s book, then in a Disney film. If you wanted to see a real Bambi in civilized portions of the Midwest, you had to drive up through Detroit, Lansing, Petoskey, and Mackinac Island to the little town of Hulbert. There, on the riverboat on the way to the falls of the Tahquamenon River, I would regale people with the lore of deer in the surrounding forest and point out with delight anytime we’d spot one on the shore slurping the tea-colored water. That summer, I wore a flannel shirt and an agate tie, looking very much like a nature expert, though some of the time I was making things up, or otherwise disguising my general ignorance of natural wonders.

Twenty years later, of course, Bambi turned into Cruella De Ville. Some new and complex illness was being reported on the Connecticut shoreline, and it appeared as if she was the savage source of it. Nowadays, Lyme Disease still baffles medical experts and their patients, and we no longer think of deer as mere innocents.

Just before the Lyme discovery, however, New Haven’s own Richard Selzer, the late surgeon and author, had warned readers against basing their assessments of such beloved creatures on thin evidence. He wrote an essay in the magazine I edited in which he made the point that humans are suckers. He asked: Why on earth do we favor the deer and despise the tiger?

In large part, of course, it’s the Aw Factor, as in, ​“Aw, isn’t she cute,” which isn’t the nature of other beasts. It doesn’t help, also, that tigers are omnivores, even interested in consuming latte lovers, should they have the opportunity.

As a survivor of Chester’s wilderness, where no lions roam but where fisher cats, red foxes and coyotes are in residence, I saw Selzer’s point but only to a point.

To be sure, our lives in the city have been enriched by less frightening species. For some reason, a mother robin built a nest on the railing of our back porch a few years ago and protected the blue eggs until three young’uns emerged and learned to fly.

Adult robins now find our backyard irresistible so of course we believe these are the former hatchlings coming home. 

For years, our bluebird house has been empty, but this spring small avians built a nest inside. Suzanne thinks they’re house wrens, but since they weren’t bluebirds, she wasn’t too interested. We’ll have a fuller report once we witness some floundering first flights.

Today, as I write this, is Father’s Day. and we remember our lost dads even reminding each other that we’re orphans. A found dead robin in the garden this morning unsettled us, but Suzanne took it as a memento mori. We try to make the best of things, try to figure out whys and wherefores and deer ones, while ordering our early morning coffees.