Oh, Deer!

The Friday after Thanksgiving is, of course, the traditional first day of the Christmas shopping season, even though it seems most stores begin displaying their Christmas wares at least two months before then. But for my wife Carol and me, the Saturday after Thanksgiving was always Go Out to the Movies Night. Not that that was the only time we ever went out, but it was one of the few times we always did.

In 1979 the big Thanksgiving weekend movie draw was The Muppet Movie, so Carol's brother, Thel, and his wife, and Carol and I decided to take our kids to see it.

We had our choice of four theaters in our general area that were showing the movie. The one in Coloma, a small town about ten miles away just off I-94, had the cheapest ticket prices, so we decided to drive there on Saturday night. All eight of us, including three kids six years old and younger and counting four-months-pregnant Carol as two, piled into our old Nova for the twenty minute drive.

The small theater was jam packed with kids, none of them quiet. The movie started a few minutes late, adding to their restlessness. Even after the movie started, kids seemed to be bouncing off the walls. At one point, early on, the movie stopped and an usher came down and actually threatened to throw everybody out if the kids didn't stop running around! We were proud of, and a little surprised by, our kids for being veritable angels compared to them.

The movie continued without much further incident, although I doubt if anybody really saw all that much of it. (This probably had a lot to do with why we rarely went to the movies.)

The show ended about 8:30, well after dark. We all piled back into our Nova and pulled back onto I-94 for the return trip home. No one wore seat belts in those days, and all our kids were on someone's lap, including our three-and-a-half-year-old son Justin on Carol's lap in the front seat. Thel's family was in the back seat. The weather was cool and clear.

About five miles down the road I caught a quick glimpse of something orange and pretty big streaking toward us from the right. I only had time to say "Hold on!" as a deer tried to cross right in front of us. I hit him almost directly head-on doing about 70 mph, and he bounced off the front of our car and over the top. It's probably a good thing I didn't have time to brake or he might have just deflected through the windshield.

I inexplicably continued to drive. Was everyone okay? Did the car survive? Fortunately, everyone in the back seat was fine, but Justin suffered a split lip and a bloody nose as his face bounced off the dash. My watch had flown off my wrist and slammed against the windshield as the band broke, but that seemed to be the extent of our damages inside the car.

Then the temperature light came on, but we could already smell anti-freeze and we could hear the sound of metal against metal coming from the front of the car. That could only mean one thing, the radiator had been pushed against the fan, so I had no choice. I pulled over onto the side of the highway. There we all were, stranded several miles from home, with steam billowing out of our wrecked car. At least it wasn't raining or snowing. But what were we going to do now?

As luck would have it, a couple of minutes later two young guys in a Suburban, a 70s version of a mini-van but big enough for all of us, stopped and offered us a ride home, which we gratefully accepted. As we all piled in I glanced back down the highway and saw brake lights come on in the distance as someone stopped, apparently to collect the deer we had just hit. That was fine by me. They could have the meat if it mattered that much to them. We had a ride home, and that's all that mattered to me.

On the way to our house, our rescuers offered us a joint, which we graciously declined. After they dropped us off we offered them some money but they too declined, accepting only our thanks. Now the question was, what were we going to do about our only car on the highway?

I called the police to tell them what had happened, and that I'd get my car in the morning. This was to keep them from having it towed away. Then I rounded up some empty milk jugs and old anti-freeze containers and filled them with water. I knew the radiator was leaking badly, but if I could keep refilling it maybe I could limp the car home where I could fix it better. I had no idea how many jugs I would need, so I filled as many as I could find, about ten, as I recall.

In the morning I went out to our barn and took down an old radiator that was hanging on a nail. It had been there when we bought our house about three years earlier, and there was no way of knowing how long it had been there before then. I had no idea if it was any good or not, but someone at some time must have thought that it was worth keeping. In any event, it had to be better than the one on my car, so I took it along with us when Thel came by to pick me up. Maybe we would get lucky and even fix the car right where we had left it the night before.

When we got to my car, which thankfully was still where we had left it, we could see that it wasn't all that badly damaged, but it clearly couldn't be fixed on the side of the road. The front end nearer the driver's side was smashed in worse than the passenger's side, and the hood was bent up. The radiator had been pushed by the impact onto the engine's fan, tearing it up pretty badly, but amazingly not really damaging the fan very much. The driver's door would only open part way, and there was one other problem I wouldn't notice until Monday morning. But the main thing was that the car's frame and wheel alignment seemed to be okay, so the car was drivable, sort of. But the body would need some straightening out, that was for sure.

Thel filled the radiator and water started pouring out even before I started the engine, so as soon as he closed the hood I took off, leaving him to hop in his own car and give chase. I drove as far as I could before having to pull over. Thel pulled over behind me to give me another refill, and then I took off again. We did this several times, deciding along the way to drive over to my other brother-in-law, Andy's, house, since his was closer to where we were on I-94 than my house was. He also had some tools we didn't have that we were clearly going to need.

Those tools included a winch and a small, portable, hydraulic jack, both of which we needed just to pull the front of the car's body away from the engine enough to remove the damaged radiator. The winch pulled from outside of the car while the jack, wedged against the engine, pushed from the inside slowly and by small increments, as we repositioned both several times in order straighten out the front end of my car's body and engine compartment. We tried to get it as close as possible to where it had been before the accident. It was a long, tedious, yet tricky task.

Finally, as I had hoped, that old radiator I had brought along with us didn't leak, and it fit into place even though it had to be coat-hanger wired onto the frame and grille. We had managed to finish the entire repair job without spending a single penny, which was good, since money was always tight.

All of this work took us basically all day Sunday to accomplish, but I needed it done in one day. It was important for me to be at my job the next morning at 7 am in order to get my Thanksgiving Day holiday pay. (You had to work a full shift the day before and after any holiday to get paid for it.) And it looked like the car was going to be okay. I drove it home and there were no leaks or other problems I could see. Not in the daylight, anyway.

But the darkness of the next morning revealed that other problem I hadn't noticed in the daylight. The driver's side headlight was pointing up at about a 45 degree angle. The thick, pea-soup fog that morning must have made for a comically cartoonish sight as I drove down the road.

Naturally, I drove right past a cop who normally wasn't around, and he pulled me over. I explained what had happened over the weekend and how I had discovered this headlight problem just minutes before, which I would fix right after work. He just laughed and wished me good luck as he let me go. Good thing, too, because if he had kept me much longer I would have been late for work, losing out on my holiday pay.

Later that day I managed to straighten out the headlight enough to be usable, or at least enough to not get me stopped again. I was also able to get the driver door to open and close almost all the way.

One other fallout from the accident was that Joshua, our unborn baby, shifted enough within Carol's body to cause painful problems with her kidneys, enough so that she was hospitalized for precautions about a week later. But after a few days that situation resolved itself. And of course Joshua was just fine and was born the following April without incident.

This deer encounter happened right at the end of deer hunting season, but here in Michigan it's not unusual to see deer all year round, especially in the countryside. From then on we always tried to have those little deer alert whistles on our cars. And it seemed like they really worked. Several times we noticed animals scrunching down by the side of the road and staring right at us as we passed by, as if the humanly inaudible sound from the whistles was giving them headaches, stopping them in their tracks. At least, that's how it looked to us.

Even so, from then on we developed a kind of phobia about the Saturday after Thanksgiving. We never wanted to be out driving after dark on that day, for any reason, if we could help it, even though we knew it wasn't that much more dangerous, really, than any other day. But that's just the way it was.