For years I’ve taken a route that runs along Cayuga Lake when I visit relatives on another of New York’s Finger Lakes. On the drive there, I reach this stretch just north of Ithaca around noon, and on a sunny day it’s a beautiful 20-minute drive. On the return trip, though, I hit Route 89 early in the morning, when the hilly road glistens with dew and deer.

Most times you see them in adjacent fields, in groups of three and four, always in perfect Christmas card formation, a little mist for effect. Slowing down usually triggers their game of Red Light Green Light 1-2-3, where they scuffle slightly ahead and suddenly stop, bolt briefly and stop again, more of the scuffle-and-bolt until they finally clear the road. You wonder why you didn’t “Seek Alt Route,” like the yellow signs warn when men in lifts are chain-sawing tree limbs. Why did I think it so important to save 20 minutes by going this way and not another?

Probably because all of the other drivers on Route 89 seem unworried about deer. They go 15 miles over the speed limit in giant trucks. What used to be called “sound judgment” has been replaced by partisan ideology on one side and bending analytics to suit your purposes on the other. The confidence of the deer deniers always makes me feel like a lightning rod for everyone’s bad luck. It calls to mind a line from Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”: “Most things may never happen: this one will.”

Maybe I kept taking this route at sunrise to appease the gods. When I’d reach Ithaca intact, I’d activate catharsis by singing a song my sister made up at age ten or so, in the backseat as we drove along Route 352 at night: Deers might come down and hit me in the face.

When you headed west on 352, out the passenger side was a steep hill with barely a shoulder; out the driver’s side was a ravine down to the Chemung River. My mother was always nervous on this road because one night she and my father had seen a deer slide almost straight down that hill and crash itself onto the windshield of the car directly ahead. My sister and I knew that, for several minutes in the dark night, we were supposed to be afraid. Singing this song repeatedly was how we appeased the gods.

Route 89 has a similar narrows when heading south, though not as extreme as Route 352—a hill on the right side and a drop down to the lake on the left. I never feared that segment because I couldn’t imagine a deer wanting to crash itself down on me. The problem, though, is that I didn’t bother to imagine one wanting to rise up.

I’ve read many accounts of accidents where time is experienced as slowing down, but the pulse of a deer makes time manic. In a fraction of a second, I heard a phrase I thought came from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about a moose that has stopped a busload of travelers: “glistening black orb.” (I later saw that Bishop’s moose is “Towering, antlerless, / high as a church, / homely as a house”—no mention of an eye.)

There seemed three simultaneous acts to my audience with the glistening black orb: the wallop to the fender, his enormous antlered profile, and the smack creation of a seemingly infinite spiderweb of glass. In the half second before the spiderweb, I could see with precision that the hair on his back and around his face was speckled with enough black to make it look like he was wearing a greyhound-style coat that continued up to a ski mask.

The Safelite guy said that because bucks are top-heavy, they tumble over your hood and launch themselves away. I didn’t see this one tumble before or after his hoof laid waste to the windshield, but I knew somehow that he had continued upward without pause. My car slowed but never stopped. Though I couldn’t see what was in front of me, I, too, just wanted to return home.

I thought there might be some relief given that my anxiety about Route 89 had been finally realized. But I immediately worried that the deer had been mortally wounded, that I might have killed something much larger than myself. I couldn’t tell people “I hit a deer,” but it wasn’t because I refused blame; it was because it seemed chauvinistic to claim that much agency.

He owned the narrative in which my life was temporarily bound up: he was the creator of an event that issued a wake, not me in my battered car. Our stories collided, and the only reason mine would seem the one that matters is that I am able to tell it over and over.

But then here I am with my chauvinism, thinking I have the right to tell the story of this dark animal that runs across time. It’s funny that our name for them is both singular and plural, the thing that makes obstinate ten-year-olds certain there’s an “s.” Being one and many, he contains multitudes—from the deers that might have crashed down on us on Route 352 and continuing on through the arches of the years, only to stage his Odyssean return not down from on high but up from some mysterious depths on Route 89. He seemed pure life in his brute force but somehow not at all real, an apparition, or maybe a dream that picks up where it leaves off every few days—one continuous streak of shared mortality: this one will. §