A Roadkill Atlas of Northeast Ohio
by Patrick M. Hare
Ohio Writer
Interstate 271N, near mile marker 14, right shoulder. Coyote (Canis latrans), intact.
They were friends, she concluded one morning. An emphatic nod tried to convince an invisible audience that she considered the point settled. Externalizing her thoughts had become an uncomfortable habit. It’s not like she was in danger of being bitten or contracting rabies. She wasn’t friends with a living coyote. This coyote was undeniably dead. Nor was she befriending some sort of ghost coyote. That would be absurd. Rather, something about the way its still-fluffy coat ruffled in the wind like ripe grain the first time she saw it on her drive to work sparked an instantaneous and strange kinship. She could imagine she was petting the coyote as the breeze from the semi in front of her tousled its fur, as if she could ease its passing. It was an admittedly odd friendship, that between woman and roadkill coyote, but she found watching it slowly decompose as the weeks passed to be therapeutic. There it was on her daily commute, growing slowly more ragged as the calendar cycled and the weather changed. Grief embodied, stretched over the months, parceled into the gap between breakfast and the morning Slack queue.
State Route 83, 1 mile north of Township Highway 229. Red fox (Vulpes vulpes), intact.
At the funeral, she ached to flee, sign over her father’s apartment to an estate clearinghouse, load as much as she could fit into the Subaru and head back west, trusting to her boss’s decency to let her work her last two weeks remotely. But the thought of leaving the coyote to face its fate alone dropped her stomach, so she stumbled through work, fixing bugs on the app she couldn’t remember building for the Cleveland Zoo, marveling at how quickly her coworkers expected her to rebound.
US Route 250 and Railroad St. in Norwalk. Fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), identification by tail (separated).
Roadkill had always been a facet of life that was beneath someone like her, derisively joked about when not ignored. After befriending the coyote, dead animals snuck into her awareness. An extended friend network for the coyote built itself in her mind: the opossum on the way to the grocery, a squirrel on the way to the lawyer, the deer seen only on weekends by the bar. The community grew and her curiosity unspooled. Trepidatious searches on academic sites led to evenings spent reading. She became an expert in roadkill, a competence unhelpful on résumés, useful only for trivia shared deep into the night’s drinking. She amassed facts, made connections, became unsettled by the obscure details she found herself speaking aloud while cleaning her father’s empty house: The earliest roadkill surveys were undertaken by naturalists in the early 20th century, a side project from their planned objective to time birds in flight. Smaller animals are hard to resolve at highway speeds, so only pedestrians or stopped traffic will find them. The average size of roadkill animal is inversely proportional to the speed limit. This has been shown scientifically.
Interstate 71N, mile marker 232. White tail deer (Odocoileus virginianus), gender indeterminate. Dragged onto the berm.
Quickly, dry academic prose became unsatisfying; to understand her new friends she needed to approach them in the flesh. Visiting the coyote would be too dangerous she felt, suppressing the awareness that she had really thought ‘too presumptuous.’ An early Saturday adopt-a-highway trip on the west side was good cover, a means to casually sidle up to some unfamiliar dead thing. True to expectations, amid the bags of discarded food containers and construction debris, the group scented then found a deer, several weeks gone.
“Scientists tell us we are more microbe than human,” she heard herself saying to the group, falling back on the distance provided by her reading as they stopped out of carrion fly range, debating what to do about the deer.
“It’s more maggot than ungulot,” someone suggested, then the group got lost arguing over the confusing forced rhyme.
Directed motion is so normal to us in living beings, she thought, such a property of life, that we are unnerved by its lack. To then have what is unmistakably a body from which life has fled undulate randomly is a second-order confusion.
“I read that the writhing of maggots in dead flesh is behind the attribution of tentacles to monsters,” someone else offered once the debate flagged.
“That’s interesting; I’ll look into it,” she said absent-mindedly, then was mostly successful in ignoring the uncomfortable glances the group shared in response.
“Scientists tell us we are more microbe than human,” she heard herself saying to the group, falling back on the distance provided by her reading as they stopped out of carrion fly range, debating what to do about the deer.
“It’s more maggot than ungulot,” someone suggested, then the group got lost arguing over the confusing forced rhyme.
Directed motion is so normal to us in living beings, she thought, such a property of life, that we are unnerved by its lack. To then have what is unmistakably a body from which life has fled undulate randomly is a second-order confusion.
“I read that the writhing of maggots in dead flesh is behind the attribution of tentacles to monsters,” someone else offered once the debate flagged.
“That’s interesting; I’ll look into it,” she said absent-mindedly, then was mostly successful in ignoring the uncomfortable glances the group shared in response.
Welshfield-Limaville Rd, 3.25 miles north of Hiram. Raccoon (Procyon lotor), stretched across the center line.
While educational, the encounter with the deer was not one she was enthusiastic to repeat. Immediacy did not supply the insight she needed, and the number of corpses she noticed kept growing. Slowly her mental map of north-east Ohio slid from the tan and green land and orange roads of her phone’s map app to a constellation of bodies. Subtract the roads and houses, fields and forests, and one could navigate by bone and sinew, feather and fur, blood and viscera and smeared meat. Isolate the layer of former-life and raise it above the earth like a 3D topographical map. Color it blood red. Geography becomes defined by species cluster. Here is a blind curve in the forest: deer, fox, vulture. A blob of squirrel, chipmunk, and skunk signal a four-way intersection in a wooded suburb. A line of rat, opossum, and pigeon define an urban alley. With this information she did what someone with her skillset was assumed to do: she turned it into an app.
One evening, her boss found her working on the app and, curious, had her demonstrate it. A mere week later, she was leading the small development team, consulting with a contact at Cleveland State University, pitching the app to conservation granting agencies, and arguing over whether the icons for the animals should look dead or like they were merely sleeping.
One evening, her boss found her working on the app and, curious, had her demonstrate it. A mere week later, she was leading the small development team, consulting with a contact at Cleveland State University, pitching the app to conservation granting agencies, and arguing over whether the icons for the animals should look dead or like they were merely sleeping.
State Street NE, just outside of Alliance, across from the Scout camp. Bird, crushed. Black feathers indicate crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) or starling (Sturnus vulgaris), although the decrease in crow populations since West Nile arrived suggests starling.
The Roadkill Atlas was meant to be a small citizen science project before blowing up in a confluence of reasons debated at marketing meetings but helped no doubt by that peculiar snowballing of vulgar attention at which social media excels. ‘Grubhub for hicks’ was a memorable review, but the app seemed to tap into a deeper need for contact with death at the safe remove provided by a difference in species. Morbid fascination was not to be discounted, of course.
Soon people were organizing tours with the app. Schoolteachers reached out in gratitude, parents in ire. When pets went missing, a brave friend would try the app in between Nextdoor posts. Some users were competing to see who could tag the most uncommon animal or net the highest number of ID’s, spurring the team to develop an algorithm to monitor such accounts, lest they start gaming their numbers by producing their own kills. Two users were referred to local wildlife departments in the first month.
Soon people were organizing tours with the app. Schoolteachers reached out in gratitude, parents in ire. When pets went missing, a brave friend would try the app in between Nextdoor posts. Some users were competing to see who could tag the most uncommon animal or net the highest number of ID’s, spurring the team to develop an algorithm to monitor such accounts, lest they start gaming their numbers by producing their own kills. Two users were referred to local wildlife departments in the first month.
I-90 E, just past the West 85th St. overpass. Snake, in the berm along the median, flattened. Based on length, black rat snake (Pantherophis alleghaniensis).
In the way of small groups, her team assembled a slang for their work. Multiple deer carcasses were a rut. An unusual density of birds was a Tippi. A stretch of road with lots of varied kills was first a meat grinder, then a backwoods buffet, and finally, following a surprisingly acrimonious work dinner, a stereotype. In concert, patterns began to emerge from the data, the metaphysics of which she spent hours arguing over with her team. One could only stare so long at animal archetype icons, eyes cartoon x’s in death, before the great imponderables rise.
The highest number of reports were mammals (specifically skunks, for obvious reasons), carrying a minimal taint of kinship murder, however distant the relationship to humans. Deer, squirrels, rabbits, opossums, racoons: these are conveniently distant enough relatives to make acceptable ‘others.’ Consciences are soothed. In fact, the victims deserve blame for damaging our cars by their deaths, with the blame proportional to the damage.
Birds elicit a strange thrill. We’ve killed so many dinosaurs. We are mighty, we slayers of T-rex’s tribe, our vehicles fueled by their salad bars, as if some theropsidian lunch buffet had manipulated us into wreaking their vengeance on their attackers’ descendants after 100 million years. Trust plants to play the long game.
Buzzards and crows inspire judgement and disapproval for scavenging embodied by a thousand pounds moving at sixty miles per hour. Drivers feel regret in proportion to the damage done to their vehicle, but never remorse. The birds are vile, and the world is better off with fewer of them. By killing one scavenger, we create sustenance for others, an outcome we habitually ignore. The same is true of insects, she realized on the way to a late fall concert at Blossom Music Center. The trip was a birthday gift, although she ended up driving, not in the mood to drunkenly direct the orchestra as her friends would. Away from the highway, wooly bears streamed across the country roads as her car undoubtedly crushed many, although there was obviously no sensation of that. She was indifferent to their cousins the insects splatting on the windshield but upset by the deaths of the black and orange fuzzy cylinders. Insects and other groups like reptiles that lack those physical traits deemed most appealing to humans do not tug at the heartstrings when they die.
“Loss of cuteness is felt,” she responded absentmindedly to her friend’s query about cheese preferences, momentarily bringing the conversation to a halt.
“Sorry, what? I was thinking about work.”
“You are always thinking about work. But not tonight. Runny cheeses. Yay or nay?”
“Yay, no question. Brie has been scientifically proven to be delicious. Can we get some?”
“Whatever the birthday girl wants, of course!”
She smiled. Microbes will have established themselves in roadkill reptiles by two days after death, she thought. This has also been proven scientifically.
The highest number of reports were mammals (specifically skunks, for obvious reasons), carrying a minimal taint of kinship murder, however distant the relationship to humans. Deer, squirrels, rabbits, opossums, racoons: these are conveniently distant enough relatives to make acceptable ‘others.’ Consciences are soothed. In fact, the victims deserve blame for damaging our cars by their deaths, with the blame proportional to the damage.
Birds elicit a strange thrill. We’ve killed so many dinosaurs. We are mighty, we slayers of T-rex’s tribe, our vehicles fueled by their salad bars, as if some theropsidian lunch buffet had manipulated us into wreaking their vengeance on their attackers’ descendants after 100 million years. Trust plants to play the long game.
Buzzards and crows inspire judgement and disapproval for scavenging embodied by a thousand pounds moving at sixty miles per hour. Drivers feel regret in proportion to the damage done to their vehicle, but never remorse. The birds are vile, and the world is better off with fewer of them. By killing one scavenger, we create sustenance for others, an outcome we habitually ignore. The same is true of insects, she realized on the way to a late fall concert at Blossom Music Center. The trip was a birthday gift, although she ended up driving, not in the mood to drunkenly direct the orchestra as her friends would. Away from the highway, wooly bears streamed across the country roads as her car undoubtedly crushed many, although there was obviously no sensation of that. She was indifferent to their cousins the insects splatting on the windshield but upset by the deaths of the black and orange fuzzy cylinders. Insects and other groups like reptiles that lack those physical traits deemed most appealing to humans do not tug at the heartstrings when they die.
“Loss of cuteness is felt,” she responded absentmindedly to her friend’s query about cheese preferences, momentarily bringing the conversation to a halt.
“Sorry, what? I was thinking about work.”
“You are always thinking about work. But not tonight. Runny cheeses. Yay or nay?”
“Yay, no question. Brie has been scientifically proven to be delicious. Can we get some?”
“Whatever the birthday girl wants, of course!”
She smiled. Microbes will have established themselves in roadkill reptiles by two days after death, she thought. This has also been proven scientifically.
Martin Luther King Jr Dr., south of East Blvd. Brown rat (Rattus norwegicus). Intact, on the center line.
A week later someone added the first human fatality to the app. Naturally no category for humans existed; it was only discovered after a search of the murderer’s phone (listed as a rat to make the motive as unsubtle as possible). Predictably, people blamed the app. By the time she was being sought for comment, she was in Nevada, the desert wind starting to scour away the sheath of fear and disgust that had encased her torso as soon as she read about the death. The submission of a deceased human to the app lanced her as no other reminder of her pain and the eventual fate of all living things had. She fled. By Oregon she felt she might approach the app again, but only at the level of remove–physical and mental–that technology permitted. By the time she secured an apartment in Eugene, her company had folded; ‘the roadkill murder company’ proved an inescapable and fatal nickname. She took a week to get settled, then took a job at a restaurant while she figured out how to respond to the stain on her résumé.
Near 1948 Scranton Rd. Indeterminate, in the northbound bike lane.
When the pandemic hit and she took to the streets to escape the isolation of her apartment, she began noticing roadkill again and thought of the two-thousand miles of roads that connected her to her father’s grave. Similarly, when something triggered a thought of her father, her friend the coyote followed behind it. Seeing an old man in a familiar too-wide tie fumble with his umbrella as the wind turned it inside out, she would take refuge in thinking about what the rain was doing to the coyote – matting its fur, folding a leathery ear down, washing the road dust off a line of exposed jawbone – and a small smile would build while her hand unconsciously made small petting motions.
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Words arranged by Patrick M. Hare have appeared in The Stirling Spoon, Vestal Review, iō Literary Journal, The Metaworker, and Photochemistry and Photobiology. They are mostly good words and only a few are made up. He lives near Cincinnati, OH, USA but can be found online at pmhare.wordpress.com.
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