Roadkill

It’s Friday afternoon.  The ever pulsing heart of Denver contracts and fills arteries with cars, in mass exodus, vacating the bustling city.  Interstates congest in all directions, but the aorta is westbound I-70 into the Colorado high country.  Anymore, seasons don’t matter. Whether it's ski season or summertime, year-round flow on I-70 becomes like a hardened artery, choked down to a small orifice permitting only a tightly restricted flow. Cars stop and go as blood pressure of drivers' skyrockets. 

Being caught in the stagnated flow, I breath deep filling my lungs to capacity and slowly exhale.  Getting fired up at Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) keeping their heads in the sand won’t do any good.  Yes, this very issue has been ongoing for decades and ridiculous band-aid remedies are token fixes that they are “trying” to improve the situation.

Another deep breath.

Ignore the chump riding your rear bumper.  Come on, you can do it. Focus on happy thoughts…focus, focus…Just pretend you didn't notice nearly being side-swiped as the dork just cut you off...

What’s that? 

A heap of fur on the shoulder reveals a raccoon victimized by traffic.  Later, a huge blood stain skidding down the interstate ends with a badly disfigured elk crumpled and stuffed up under the guard rail with a snapped antler dangling like a broken tree branch barely hanging by a thin strip of bark. A rarely seen road kill badger, unfortunately trapped against the center median wall, lies motionless.  A yearling deer is later noticed all contorted in an ugly position and my brain drifts away from the annoying plugged artery of cars.

Death. Vehicular traffic is directly responsible for how many deaths?  I’m not strictly talking about crashes being such a huge killer of people every year, but expand it to EVERY living creature who met death by way of a vehicle.

Let's pretend the count begins from the first set of tires Mr. Henry Ford rolled down a dirt road and squished a beetle.  Included in the count will be all the bugs splatting on windshields and gluing themselves to front grills and radiators.  Let's also include each cat, dog, mouse, rabbit, snake and work all the way up to the largest mammal being mowed down by vehicles.  How many deaths of all living things can be attributed to vehicles?  The number has to be gigantic…similar to stars in the sky or grains of sand on beaches? What would the balance of life be on this planet in terms of populations of living creatures if vehicles had not creamed zillions of them? 

The complex thought gets me through the annoying traffic jam .  I exit the major artery Interstate to a smaller state highway that gradually becomes a county road capillary to finally a dirt road ending point.

Like all good things, the weekend comes to an end and I became a member of venous flow back to Denver.  Creeping along the Interstate vein choked to minimal flow, I notice a weird object ahead on the shoulder of the road.  Aside from paying attention to the steady stream of brake lights ahead, I keep tabs on the object and soon I am disheartened to see a great horned owl had somehow ricocheted off a windshield and came to rest on the side of the road adding another tally mark to vehicular death.

It would be hypocritical to exclude myself from the mass killings since I claim lives each time I turn the key and get the tires in motion. I thought a small stone chipped my windshield.  Instead, a poor hard shelled bug became another victim.

Roadkill was just a thought that reached some astronomical figure and allowed my restless brain to wander, and wonder...