The old mill

“And, now we have cities of 20 million that are environmentally sustainable.” “Rural people are never innovators; the great innovations are always made in the cities.” So says the host of a new podcast called American Innovations. The first claim is over-the-top grandiose and utterly indefensible, only by the credulous to be accepted without question and as fact. The second is embraced by someone who celebrates the peripatetic life, the empty life of the consumer, the illusive mastery over the natural, the machine.

To the host and his ilk, I offer no defense; their ears and minds are closed.

Last weekend we had just pulled onto our road and headed out to meet friends at their nearby farm. We had rounded the curve below our property and passed the old mill, when we came upon a scene that was just unfolding. We were a few hundred yards down the road before we realized what had happened. A car with a crumpled front end was parked in front of the mill. A woman was sitting in the driver’s seat, red-faced and sobbing. A deer, gasping and unable to stand, lay on the other side of the road. We slowed and turned around.

Cindy immediately approached the driver. She had been on the way home from work when a deer appeared seemingly from nowhere and leapt in front of her older van. The woman was far more upset by the injured deer than by the damaged car. I, meanwhile, approached the large doe. She held her head upright, but blood trickled from her mouth and she was dying, slowly. Somewhere, in the nearby woods, would be a fawn. We could only hope that it had been born early enough to now be able to forage on its own. We discussed what to do. Cindy stayed with the distraught driver while she called her husband, and I headed back up the road.

After first checking with a neighbor for a rifle, I returned with my own .30-30. It took two shots to make sure the doe was dead — an act of mercy that was captured on a cellphone by a spectator in a Prius, for what purposes one can only speculate.

Once the van driver’s husband arrived, we left for our scheduled appointment, the rifle behind the seat of the farm truck. At our friends’, we helped them review plans for a cattle chute. We walked around afterwards, admiring the growing gardens and the newly built brick raised beds as we caught up on the day’s news.

We passed the old mill on our return home. The van was being loaded onto a tow truck. The deer was now hanging from a makeshift hoist on a tractor in our nearest neighbor’s yard, already eviscerated and in the process of being skinned.

Back on the farm, we tended the livestock and enjoyed a satisfying dinner, then sat on the back deck and watched the night deepen over the ridge.