* * Like dodgeball on a motorcycle

Sometimes it gets a bit spooky out there.

Motorcycling is my favorite pastime. The combination of curvy roads, mild climate, scarce traffic, and great scenery makes our mid-Appalachian region one of the world’s best places to ride. And never are my rides better than with my only child on the back. Thus it was on last evening’s ride.

Until we started seeing the deer.

Whitney is 28 now, but she’s been riding pillion (back seat) on my bikes with me since kindergarten (hers, not mine). So she’s basically got 23 years of experience riding with me. I have wireless communicators that affix inside our helmets that allow us to talk while we ride.

So after she finished work, we suited up and took out the 2015 BMW R1200R, pointed northeast. It was a clear, pleasant evening, 5:30 p.m. by the time we left. We rode from my house in south Blacksburg down Jennelle Road into Ellett Valley. On Luster’s Gate Road, we spotted our first deer, a doe munching on the grass on the left side of the road. Then three more before we reached Luster’s Gate. We took Harding Avenue towards town, then Happy Hollow Road over to Mt. Tabor Road, where we saw a couple more before reaching the new pipeline crossing. It was getting worrisome.

She has a job and friends and a busy life of her own now, so we never seem to have enough time together. These are our opportunities to catch up. We take turns telling about our lives. She talked about joys and challenges in her job. Friendships. Holiday plans. Everyday stuff.

She said, “We’ve not had a lot of common activities, so this has become our easy form to have uninterrupted chat time. I’m not on my phone and you’re not on yours. I’ve had weekends busy lately, so we’ve gone in the evening.” And that’s prime deer time.

Then another one ran across the road.

We talked about the danger, about how this felt like playing dodgeball. Everybody around here has a deer/car collision story, of damage or a near miss. Fortunately, neither she nor I have ever hit one, but my wife did, causing significant damage to our car.

Whitney has been around horses her whole life, and she commented on how an experienced observer can typically anticipate a horse’s movements and reactions. But deer are totally unpredictable, and there are too many of them. Their carcasses are littered all over local roads, even the interstate highway where you’d think the noise of the vehicles would scare them away. Hit one with a car and there’s often significant damage. Hit one with a motorcycle and it is often fatal to both deer and rider.

I had a couple of conversations recently about the deer population around here. One was with a man from Oregon who moved here to take a job. He said there were deer in Oregon, too, “but nothing like here. I commute on Route 8 and I see them every day.”

One friend hit one with his car two weeks ago, and he said, “After being blindsided 2 weeks ago on 460 and almost killed – and my Cadillac a total loss – I am discovering that there’s not much you can do.”

Another friend told me, “Deer are very predictable to an experienced observer. You can predict where a deer is likely to be and at what times of day, but ya gotta know the territory and stay alert! I sold my deer rifle last year but harvested over 50 deer in my hunting career. I enjoyed the hunt and my family loves venison. One of the survival strategies of deer populations is to reproduce fast enough to replace the members lost to predators. They are really good at that! If there are not enough predators and hunters, an area can quickly be overpopulated.”

Perhaps they’re predictable to an experienced observer, but typically when you’re hunting, you’re stationary and just watching them, while when on a motorcycle, you’re moving rapidly, lucky to see them at all before they become a danger. On one near-miss I had years ago, a fawn ran right across the road in front of me, narrowly missing my front wheel. I had zero time to react.

“There’s three deer in the field on our right,” Whitney announced. “I hate hunting and the senseless killing of animals,” she continued. “It’s sad for me that there is an overabundance of some species and not enough of others. Too many species are going extinct, but we’re overwhelmed with deer.

“As a passenger, I could look at all the deer that weren’t a hazard and see them for their beauty while you as a driver were focused on the road. There were lots more than you saw.”

Hunting has never appealed to me either. But if anybody wants to cull the herd, I’m all for it.

If I die an accidental death, I suspect it’ll be by collision with a deer.