Friday, April 13, 2007
There Ain't No Game in the West
I returned in September, before the snow started flying, from a cross-country driving trip from the Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay to the California coast.
It was a trip that covered 10,000 miles and took a month. I deliberately took what writer William Least Heat-Moon called "the blue highways." Those are the old blue lines on the map, the secondary roads where they still sell Blue Plate lunches.
And I returned with a puzzling conclusion.
Somebody lied to us. With the exception of little pockets, there is a paucity – which is to say, a major shortage – of game out West, compared to the East.
My conclusion was based on two things: (a) the wild things I saw (or more correctly, did not see), and (b) road kill.
If you want to get real scientific about it, road kill is probably the better indicator of the two. In reality, you really can’t expect to see 100 ark-loads of game from the highway – unless, of course, you’re dodging deer in Tennessee or Virginia in which case you’d better be alert all the time.
You see, critters large and small tend to wander across roadways after the sun goes down, and five pounds of possum or 30 pounds of raccoon comes up in your headlights so quickly that neither critter nor car can take evasive action.
As a result, road kill is so common in the East and South that flattened-out, sun-dried possums, skunks, rabbits, coyotes, deer, snakes, squirrels, turtles and chipmunks are a lot more common than the old Burma Shave signs used to be.
No such effusive evidence of wild things exists west of the Mississippi.
Which makes me wonder. Why do so many of my friends use up all their vacation and half their children’s legacy to go out West to hunt?
Oh, you can see wild game occasionally. In fenced game preserves. In national parks such as Yellowstone where a herd of 50 buffalo tied up traffic for half an hour.
There are pararie dog towns in places like The Devil’s Tower, and I must admit we probably spotted hundreds of antelope along a short stretch in Wyoming.
But we’re talking about driving thousands of miles surrounded by millions of acres of sparsely settled land that ought to make excellent wildlife habitat. Yet with all the traffic, there weren’t enough animal-car connections to write home about.
With one exception.
Along a single stretch of I-90 somewhere between Spearfish, SD, and Sheridan, Wyo., rabbits were squashed on the highway by the hundreds, only a few yards apart, joined by an occasional mule deer. When it came to the number of rabbits, I never saw anything like it. I don’t have an explanation for the phenomenon even today, except maybe every rabbit within a thousand miles was attending a convention there recently, got cross-eyed drunk, and didn’t make it across the highway to home.
That was my third trip out West, and my first odyssey all the way to California’s coast at Big Sur. I’ll go again if my money and my good driving partner hold out.
But I will never again keep my nose pressed against the window watching for wolves, elk, grizzly bears, mule deer and coyotes. I just don’t think they’re there in the numbers they’re reputed to be.
I’ll go back to see The Badlands. And the Grand Canyon. And the Painted Desert. And the crossing of the Rockies at Denver.
But if I want to see wildlife – both living and deceased – I think Virginia and Tennessee are my best bets.
END
It was a trip that covered 10,000 miles and took a month. I deliberately took what writer William Least Heat-Moon called "the blue highways." Those are the old blue lines on the map, the secondary roads where they still sell Blue Plate lunches.
And I returned with a puzzling conclusion.
Somebody lied to us. With the exception of little pockets, there is a paucity – which is to say, a major shortage – of game out West, compared to the East.
My conclusion was based on two things: (a) the wild things I saw (or more correctly, did not see), and (b) road kill.
If you want to get real scientific about it, road kill is probably the better indicator of the two. In reality, you really can’t expect to see 100 ark-loads of game from the highway – unless, of course, you’re dodging deer in Tennessee or Virginia in which case you’d better be alert all the time.
You see, critters large and small tend to wander across roadways after the sun goes down, and five pounds of possum or 30 pounds of raccoon comes up in your headlights so quickly that neither critter nor car can take evasive action.
As a result, road kill is so common in the East and South that flattened-out, sun-dried possums, skunks, rabbits, coyotes, deer, snakes, squirrels, turtles and chipmunks are a lot more common than the old Burma Shave signs used to be.
No such effusive evidence of wild things exists west of the Mississippi.
Which makes me wonder. Why do so many of my friends use up all their vacation and half their children’s legacy to go out West to hunt?
Oh, you can see wild game occasionally. In fenced game preserves. In national parks such as Yellowstone where a herd of 50 buffalo tied up traffic for half an hour.
There are pararie dog towns in places like The Devil’s Tower, and I must admit we probably spotted hundreds of antelope along a short stretch in Wyoming.
But we’re talking about driving thousands of miles surrounded by millions of acres of sparsely settled land that ought to make excellent wildlife habitat. Yet with all the traffic, there weren’t enough animal-car connections to write home about.
With one exception.
Along a single stretch of I-90 somewhere between Spearfish, SD, and Sheridan, Wyo., rabbits were squashed on the highway by the hundreds, only a few yards apart, joined by an occasional mule deer. When it came to the number of rabbits, I never saw anything like it. I don’t have an explanation for the phenomenon even today, except maybe every rabbit within a thousand miles was attending a convention there recently, got cross-eyed drunk, and didn’t make it across the highway to home.
That was my third trip out West, and my first odyssey all the way to California’s coast at Big Sur. I’ll go again if my money and my good driving partner hold out.
But I will never again keep my nose pressed against the window watching for wolves, elk, grizzly bears, mule deer and coyotes. I just don’t think they’re there in the numbers they’re reputed to be.
I’ll go back to see The Badlands. And the Grand Canyon. And the Painted Desert. And the crossing of the Rockies at Denver.
But if I want to see wildlife – both living and deceased – I think Virginia and Tennessee are my best bets.
END
