Tonight I narrowly avoided a potentially fatal collision with a...

Tonight I narrowly avoided a potentially fatal collision with a deer twice within the space of two hours and in two different states. So that's food for thought.

I was returning home from an evening photo shoot. Within the first half hour of the trip I was driving along an undivided highway when the first deer ran across the road directly in front of me. It gave me a start, but thankfully it crossed quickly enough that I was able to break without hitting it. After the near miss, the deer bolted for the woods like crazy.

Then, about an hour later, I was driving on a different (divided) highway in an entirely different state. This stretch of the highway is generally very dark and it is heavily wooded on both sides. A deer ran out of the woods to my right, ran in front of my car, evidently noticed me, and then ran forward along the road in the same direction as me as if I were chasing it. Except, of course, that I was going a lot faster than it. Had I been a predator, it would have been dinner. Naturally, I hit the breaks as hard as I could. Even so, as I was breaking the car almost hit the deer (and when I say "almost" I mean that I was positive it was going to happen right up to the last moment). Then after I came to a dead stop the deer bolted off to the right and returned to the woods, which it should have done the moment it saw me!

In the second incident there was another car driving behind me, and I'm glad the driver had the presence of mind to break and change lanes when I stopped. I don't want to imagine what a two-car-and-a-deer pileup would look like, especially with me in the middle.

This has been a weird and not particularly calming night.

Statistically I should probably be dead, or at least have been in a horrible accident at least once tonight. Hopefully I dodged a bullet twice for a reason.