Inside Out: My third time hitting a deer on Route 114

Living and working along the Route 114 corridor, I think about deer a lot. So should everybody who regularly drives that main line.

As most local people know, any drive on almost any road around here is a game of Russian roulette when it comes to beating the odds of a deer hit. You can take certain precautions but, in the end, you’re at the mercy of the fates. Route 114 is probably the riskiest of roads, simply because it’s the longest, it has low visibility along its shoulders because of close-growing vegetation and we tend to be intent on getting as quickly as possible to wherever we’re headed when we drive it — and that means we’re at cruise speed instead of a slow roll through a residential neighborhood.

My odds ran out on Saturday morning. I was headed home from Sag Harbor at about 40 mph (I stopped pushing the speed limit years ago, after my second deer hit) when a large buck with a rack instantly filled the right side of the windshield and the passenger-side window. I hit the brake and swerved slightly left — not enough to cross the center line but enough to make the oncoming driver veer to his right to give me more room. With a wider view of the event, he probably could get what was happening a millisecond or two faster than I.

It took that long for things to register: A big deer was slamming into the right side of my car, just ahead of the passenger seat, where our six-month-old Westie puppy Stuey was perched. There was a modest bang — not nearly as loud as the bang of a real hard collision — and the sound of something clunking against the body of the car.

It took quite a few seconds more for me to realize that the entire side-view mirror assembly was gone and that the clunk I’d heard was part of its swan song.

By then, the deer — to my immense relief — was not down but bounding across the road behind me into the trees on the other side of the road. I remember thinking as I spotted him in the rear-view mirror that it was way too soon for his injuries to have caused immobilizing inflammation and that panic and adrenaline were keeping him upright and flying. I like to think he suffered nothing more than a wicked bruising thanks to the break-away construction of the mirror assembly.

Stuey never even reacted. It all had happened too fast for him. He’s still new to the world outside the house and just didn’t get it.

I picked up the mirror, which was in three pieces, and checked the rest of the damage to the car: one small dent on the passenger-side door and a couple of chips missing from the fiberglass right-front body panel. He didn’t hit hard enough to make a dent; I think the small crease in the door was from the severed rear-view mirror as it headed for the roadside.

I was lucky. I actually felt relief, even though I’m looking at a very big bill — I have a $2,000 deductible on my coverage, which I suspect is about what a new mirror assembly is going to cost me.  (It’s a BMW. Oy.)

This was the third deer hit for me in my 35 years of living off Route 114. The other two were equally lucky. I was driving a tiny tin-can 1980 Dodge Colt both times.

My first strike was a head-on but by the time the front bumper made contact with the deer I was almost stopped. The impact knocked him down onto the road but he instantly got up and leapt away, seemingly uninjured. I could find no damage to the car except a tiny dent above a headlight. The second time was a little like Saturday’s event: a deer hit the car, not vice versa, coming out of nowhere toward the left side of the car, stopping and wheeling just in time to avoid a collision but denting the driver’s side door with a hoof as she kicked off and headed back into the trees from whence she’d come.

I know people whose cars have been nearly totaled from deer hits, more than once. I’m aware of one human death, locally, as a result of a vehicle-deer collision: it happened on Montauk Highway in Wainscott quite a long time ago, maybe 15 years or more. The deer came over the hood and through the windshield.

I’m sharing my experience to impress on anyone who needs convincing that collisions with deer are a major risk.

You can be vigilant and cautious and never see it coming.

Even if you see it coming, avoiding a deer hit may be impossible — or a better choice than a slamming into an oncoming car or telephone pole. And there’s so little time to react: You might never see the deer coming because its approach is blocked by one of the windshield posts: that’s what happened in two of my deer hits, including Saturday’s.

All you can do is drive defensively: expect trouble, drive fairly slowly and be ready for a sudden stop.

I see speedsters and tailgaters all the time on Route 114. I categorize them, inaccurately, no doubt, as either hot-headed, clueless kids or obnoxious, clueless, arrogant non-locals who have no idea of the risk they’re taking on our own Russian Roulette Street.