Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

I ran over a squirrel on the way to work this morning.

A complete accident of course. It was rainy so I was already going slower than usual and I saw it running across the road several seconds in advance, but it didn't continue across, hesitating instead just on my side of the center line. I had enough time to worry about what it would do and even attempted to steer around it, but presumably panicked, it did exactly the wrong thing and ran right under my driver-side wheels.

I definitely hit it. I could see it lying on the road in my rear-view mirror. And now all I can think about are things I could have done differently or morbid anthropomorphized visions of his squirrel family waiting for him to come home.

On a random impulse, I took a slightly different route to work today. Why? Well, I started to take the wrong exit, then realized I could go that way too, and I hadn't in a while, so why not? It's a nice little back road instead of the highway. But that's where I hit the squirrel. I'm thinking, if only I had just done what I usually do, that squirrel would still be alive. I wonder if I should have steered the other way. When it started to cross my lane right in front of me, I tried steering to the left, hoping that it would pass underneath, but it switched back. If I had tried steering to the right, maybe it would have dashed away safely.

I wonder if I should have done something afterwards. Should I have stopped? What if it wasn't dead but just mortally injured? What would I have done then. I have this image in my head of me standing on the side of the road in the rain, looking down at it's little body.

I know I'm being a little melodramatic. It was an accident, and I wasn't doing anything wrong. I was driving under the speed limit, I was paying attention, I tried to steer around it. There's no way I could have known that taking that road would be any kind of problem. These things happen every day, and though it's sad, there's not really anything that anyone can do about it.

But it is sad, and I'm sad. I'm not a vegan or anything, but I am the kind of person who uses humane mouse-traps and tries to catch spiders alive to put them outside. And I like squirrels. I remember my mom's frustration at the way our local squirrels would always find a way to get into her bird-feeder, no matter what she did. But secretly, I always cheered them on. I'd much rather watch them than birds anyway, and seeing them rise to the challenge every time made me happy. My softball team last year was the Squirrels. I didn't choose the name, but I loved it and defended it whenever anyone else made fun.

Well, there's not really anything to be done here. In the grand scheme of things, this is ultimately pretty small. But it was still upsetting, and as much as I know that the kind of thoughts I mentioned above aren't really helpful, I can't really help dwelling on them for a while anyway.

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