This evening I was first on the scene of this accident:


The driver was a 16 year old boy who had his drivers license for only a few days. He turned to avoid hitting a deer that jumped into the road ahead of him. He avoided the deer but lost control and rolled the car.
He sat in my car while talking to the 911 dispatcher. He claimed he had just skinned his knee, but the dispatcher sent an ambulance anyway. I’m not surprised. He was not talking clearly. He was obvious very shaken up.
His grandmother (I knew her when I was going to grade school even though she is about seven years younger than me) showed up a few minutes later and is shown in the picture above. She comforted him for a while. Then his mother and sister showed up. A bunch of hugging occurred and grandma explained the deputy would ask some questions and that it didn’t matter about the car as long as he was okay.
The deputy showed up. Grandma said, “It’s Jeremey, good.” Jeremey talked to the family for while and after the ambulance and fire truck arrived he took some pictures.
The medics evaluated the boy, put him in a neck brace, put him on a stretcher and hauled him away. I don’t know his diagnosis but I expect he will be fine. But I’m not surprised they wanted him to get some in depth attention.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Avoiding the deer certainly caused more physical injury than if he had hit it. And, almost certainly, it caused more damage to the car. Hit the brakes and reduce the impact velocity, but if you worry about avoiding the impact, you almost certainly put yourself and vehicle at greater risk. I hit a deer at 65 MPH and car and driver were in much better shape then this kid and his car going probably 35 MPH or less and avoiding the deer.
Deer are dangerous.

Last Tuesday I took most of the afternoon off from work for a doctors appointment and then to drive to Idaho. I needed to be onsite to take delivery on 18” surveyors stakes used for holding the Boomershoot reactive targets and some other Boomershoot tasks.

About dusk, going 65 MPH on highway 26 west of Dusty, I hit a deer. Even though the radiator was pushed back, the left turn signal and headlight were flopping about, the driver door was difficult to open, the seat belt had retracted and locked (the indicator on the dash indicated the air-bag had deployed but had not actually done so), the car was still drivable. I made it on to my camping trailer near Boomershoot and successfully took delivery on the stakes and did most of the other business. A few days later the insurance company declared the car totaled, so I now have a new, to me, car.

I had planned to drive that car for several more years. Barb and I both loved the metallic blue color. The “new” car was what I could find on short notice which met my immediate needs. That was a high price to pay for a trip to Idaho.

Later, when talking with my cousin Alan, we discussed the interaction between people and deer. He has hit five and one of those was while on a motorcycle. He spent a few days in the hospital for the motorcycle. He went on to say that white-tailed deer cause the death of more people than any other animal in the continental U.S. I knew that the most frequent cause of vehicle accidents in Clearwater County Idaho was a collision with a deer, but I didn’t know they claimed more lives than any other animal in the U.S.

Alan’s claim is confirmed in this video:

It is almost as if they are attempting to get revenge for our hunting of them.

Update: These are sequential frames of the video. From the first frame until the last is 1.05 Seconds:

Rolf reports his high school reunion is coming up soon. It turns out my class is having reunion this year as well.

Rolf included a link to High school reunion shocker: They’re dying off! Which is interesting. The number from the article are:

To estimate the statistical death-rate norm for any class size, Polasky provided the following rough figures:

• 10 year reunion — 1 death per 100 graduates.
• 20 year reunion — 1 death per 50 graduates.
• 30 year reunion — 1 death per 20 graduates.
• 40 year reunion — 1 death per 10 graduates.
• 50 year reunion — 1 death per five graduates.

Even though his is not this year, I was talking to a cousin of mine a few days ago about reunions and he was saying about 40 or 44 percent of his class was gone. And while I don’t have the most current numbers for my class the number is uncomfortably high with another couple dying in the last six months. And I know the numbers from my last reunion are about 50 percent higher than this. In part, this is probably due a high percentage of logging and construction type jobs my classmates went into. That area of Idaho is also known at a “cancer belt”. I don’t think anyone knows for certain why, but the cancer rate in that area is higher than normal. The speculation I have heard discussed is:

• Being downwind from Hanford
• Toxic chemicals from the pulp mill
• Farm chemicals
• Outdoor activities and exposure to high levels of UV

I have enjoying the reunions but there is also a fair amount of sadness is seeing how many are now gone.

Follow up to Names you don’t hear anymore.

Via Brother Doug:

This was Mardelle Patterson on my father’s farm about 1956. She was a double first cousin to my father. Their mothers were sisters and their fathers were brothers so they shared all four grandparents. Mardelle was born just 2.5 miles from where I live today in the house where she would live in her early years. Mardelle and my father largely grew up in the same household during the Great Depression. For the last six years, Mardelle has been the sole survivor of that household. She introduced my parents to each other in July of 1953. My brothers and I all called her “Aunty Dell” even though she wasn’t really my father’s sister. Mardelle and her husband, John contributed several memories to my father’s biography when I was working on it a few years ago.

Mardelle passed away last night at the age of 91. Her passing marks the end of the Huffman family members that once lived together here in Cavendish and struggled through the dark years of the Great Depression. Although the adults remembered the Depression as a difficult time, the children had fond memories of those days. They had never known anything different, so growing up in poverty didn’t cripple them, it only made them stronger.

The depression era mindset of making things last was installed in us when we grew up on the farm. The tractor Aunty Dell is on is one I still use for moving dirt for Boomershoot and other things. Doug uses it, among other things, to clear snow from the driveway and parking areas.