Last week, while sitting in a parked car on Queen Street East, I saw a deer.
It was an entirely surprising scene, one that was simultaneously sad and beautiful.
It was on the north side of the street, trapped in a kind of corridor that had been formed by a construction fence bordering the sidewalk and the storefronts facing it. Terrified, the deer ran along the cement path, searching for some sort of escape. It turned into the entranceway to one store, sort of scrabbled at the door with her hooves, and then, with a look of panic in her eyes, turned around and took off from whence she came, vanishing down some side street.
This entire micro-drama took place– without the benefit of any sort of soundtrack– in about five seconds. If I had been changing the radio station instead of staring out the window, I would have missed it. It’s kind of odd to think about that, to consider for just a moment all the strange and remarkable things in this world that we don’t see, even those that are literally taking place right in front of us.
But it wasn’t just the event that was strange, but also my response to it. For a moment, just before the deer ran away, it turned and faced me. When this happened, I got out of the car. I suppose that whenever a person happens upon an unexpected or dramatic scenario, they want to embed themselves in the narrative somehow, and I guess I was following that instinct. I have no idea what I thought I might do, but I wanted to help, I wanted to be a part of this story.
At any rate, a few astonished people, scratching their heads, emerged from some of the stores along the street, each one asking the other, “ did you just see a deer? ” Nobody really believed what had just happened.
I spoke with one woman who described– very poetically and emotionally– seeing a stunning male deer, just minutes before, running down the middle of Queen Street. She’d been told that a herd of deer were swimming in the lake, and that somehow they’d been scared out of the water, (I imagined boys on bicycles, playing a kind of cowboys and Indians, hollering and screaming, marveling at the strange powers they had to influence the world around them) and then scattered and took flight, quickly finding themselves up in the chaos that was Queen Street.
The fear and panic that I saw in the deer’s face and body was vivid. Completely dislocated, she had been shaken free from her world of comfort. Hooves slipping on the pavement, streetcars, like terrible monsters, rumbling past, she was in a blind frenzy to find some sort of safety, some sort of center.
You see this sort of fear in people in the city, also. Lost to innumerable sorrows, they traverse the streets looking for some kind of home, too. But few of us watching step forward to help as we did with the deer, when astonished, we marveled at her unexpected beauty and worried about the uncertain life awaiting her just around the corner.