I could have been much worse! I could have been seriously injured... but I escaped with only a few minor cuts on my arms. The picture on the left is my car... a 2007 Chevy HHR, now named "Sherman". It was 1:30 in the afternoon... I was driving down Rt 9 in Delaware (ironically near my home) minding my own business (not talking on the phone, not speeding, etc)... and BAM! I was hit. Blindsided... out of nowhere. All along Rt 9 farmers, and anyone with a considerable amount of land are growing corn. Corn for Ethanol. Only problem with corn, is that it grows tall... and you don't know what's in a cornfield. Could be dogs, could be bears (well maybe not bears - in Delaware) but Deer... Yes! I just happened to be driving along, when something spooked a young buck in a cornfield near my home... in an instant, that deer shot out of that cornfield at top speed... unfortunately there happened to be a major road where he decided to dart out across, and I happened to be travelling there. He hit me square under the driver's side window... less than a foot from my face. Upon impact, I instantly knew something had hit me... but in that instant you don't know what it is... Did I hit something? Did I miss something in the road? Has another car hit me? Is anyone hurt? Am I hurt? The driver's side window shattered and showered me with broken glass, and it's times like this that you're thankful that automotive manufacturers make shatter-proof glass (it was everywhere). In those milliseconds that I was processing what possibly happened and squinting my eyes so as not to get glass in them, I looked in my rearviewmirror to see the buck get flipped up into the air and land onto the highway. I held course... I did not swerve, did not loose speed, did not travel into the other lanes or shoulders. The HHR was indeed a little tank... thus his new name "Sherman". I turned to go home, pulled in my driveway, and began the process of what to do next. I had an encounter like no other... yet many people have hit deer. And those that have hit a deer can vividly tell that story in an instant when asked. In the marketing world... that's a frequency of 1... and immediately stored in long-term memory... WOW! Businesses would love to have that kind of impact on their ad messages. I survived, the deer did not... and for that I'm sorry. I'm sorry that development has interrupted your habitat... and that at 1:30 in the afternoon when you simply were looking for a snack, you found something else... I'm sorry that something else was my "Sherman", but I'm thankful that I was unhurt, and more importantly that I did not have my children in the car with me... or that nobody else was hurt. With Ethanol more and more the focus of fuel, more people will grow corn... and the more corn that is grown, the more cornfields will hold surprises inside. Be careful... and mindful of this when you're travelling.
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