This morning, as I was driving in to school, I noticed that someone had hit a raccoon on the northbound side of 19th. It was lying relatively peacefully on the far side of the lane, and it would have looked asleep but for the bloodstain on its stomach and the magpies picking at it. In life, it was a fair-sized raccoon; it probably would have weighed in the neighborhood of 20 pounds. In death, it was just a lump of gray-brown fur in the road.
I didn't think much of it at the time. I've seen a lot of roadkill and I've hunted numerous varmints since I grew up on a farm. A dead raccoon is nothing new.
Per my usual MO, though, the raccoon took on new significance as I was driving home. It was much less recognizably a raccoon when I came back, thirteen hours later. It had been hit again at least once and it was starting to look more like a blood-tainted grease stain with fur. I swerved to avoid it.
Then it occurred to me: death is one of the few things common to every species, with the possible exception of certain jellyfish. This thought was reinforced as I kept driving. There's a certain mailbox on the east side of the road that always makes me flinch as I'm driving by it since it fell off to the side of its little post and looks suspiciously deer-like. I drive a tiny Honda--I really don't want to hit a deer, so I pay very special attention to anything on the side of the road that might remotely resemble one.
Tonight was different, though. I didn't do a double-take, because the mailbox wasn't there. As I looked a little further, toward the edge of the sweep of my headlights, I saw that the two houses that used to stand about 30 feet from the road weren't there, either. There was only flat ground, a few bushes where the walls of the houses used to be, and an electrical pole with an ancient transformer perched on its top.
And just like that, the evidence of human existence is erased.
About a mile down the road, on the west side, there's an abandoned house that still stands. It was well-built; none of the walls have buckled, though it's been abandoned for as long as I can remember. The windows are boarded up, and the only visible door is locked, at least as far as I know. It's on private property, so I've never bothered to find out. The paint has long since flaked off its weathered brown siding. Here some vestige of human occupation remains, however drab. Who lived there? Why did they leave? Did they die, and no one came after them to live in the house? Is there something wrong with it? Why hasn't it been demolished? Who owns it? Do kids have legends about it? It does look like the sort of place that would lend itself well to haunted-house stories. I know nothing of its story. I wish I did, but I suspect Death has taken the memories of that place hostage and will not let them go easily. He knows that in every answer I would obtain, I would see him. His presence is inexorable and unavoidable. He lurks behind everything, always breathing down our necks and reminding us in the smallest ways--like a raccoon squished on the road--that he will one day come for us, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Tomorrow the raccoon will doubtless be no more than a smudge on the road, washed away when the first snow melts.
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