The Deer & The Spider
This is Part 3 of a special series about the Outer Voice family summer road trip.
We were doing around 50mph when I hit the deer.
This was supposed to be the penultimate day of our vacation, but instead it became the day I totaled the Jeep and we found ourselves on an extended stay in a Fayetteville, Arkansas hotel learning all about a national rental car shortage.
The Crystal Bridges Museum is located in Bentonville, Arkansas on Caddo, Quapaw, and Osage land. It’s a world-class art museum designed by Moshe Safdie and founded by Alice Walton of the Wal-Mart Waltons.
The day I visited (the day before the deer incident), was hot. June in the south in a cicada year hot. I ventured out of Safdie’s air-conditioned glass arks onto the grounds in search of James Turrell’s Skyspace: The Way of Color, a temple-like dome set in a hillside.
I’d already begun to sweat when I came across a 30-foot-tall surprise: Louise Bourgeois’ Maman. This is one of seven Maman sculptures in permanent collections, the others in places like the Tate Modern and Guggenheim Bilbao. How this black beauty made it to Northwest Arkansas, I have no idea.
Maman is an enormous metal spider. She is 30 feet tall, 33 feet wide, and at her center is a bronze thorax containing 32 marble eggs.
Bourgeois said of her spider sculptures,
“The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend. Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever. Spiders are friendly presences that eat mosquitos. We know that mosquitos spread diseases and are therefore unwanted. So, spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.”
You may not share such a comforting idea of spiders. Standing under this one in the buggy, humid heat, I certainly did not.
All of Bourgeois’ spider sculptures (I saw another on this trip in Kansas City) are incredibly elegant. They are equal part beautiful and nightmarish. Spindly, balletic, carrying an inherent grace in the same legs that seem built to impale.
I saw Maman as beautiful and elegant and sophisticated, but not comforting or protective (perhaps this has to do with my own mother issues but, thank God, we’re not here to discuss those).
To me, Maman is about secrets. Her gleaming white eggs are held safe in their honeycombed bronze sac, where we can just glimpse them but never see them in full or hope to touch them. The eggs are safe, but are we?
As well as I can tell, Maman has neither face nor eyes. I don’t know which way she’s facing, whether her eyes are on the future, on her nest, or on me.
I like to think that Bourgeois would appreciate my fear and find it distinctly male in its essence. I can see her crinkling her eyes and grinning, seeing straight through me.
Although I’d seen gorgeous work by Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Lyonel Feininger, Charles Albert White, and many others, it was this encounter with Maman that burned away all my extraneous feelings about the museum and allowed me to simply experience it. It made me stop and feel without thinking.
The entire day jumped into focus, thanks to her. The Turrell, with its oculus open to the sky and its volumes of otherworldly stillness, felt like a chapel to inner silence after the arresting power of that spider.
In the moment after I hit the deer, this same silence rushed up to fill the moment. It was the silence of shock, this time in a far more visceral form.
The deer was young — a spring fawn that had just begun to mature. It appeared so quickly that I didn’t have time to react. It happened too fast and also in slow motion. We made eye contact.
I know deer can do incredible damage to cars and even be fatal to drivers. Yet I was still surprised by the extent of the damage. The front was crumpled, headlight destroyed, radiator hanging 8 inches too low and gushing coolant. There was hair and fluid and excrement everywhere.
The deer weighed heavier on my mind than the car. It was dead, back broken by the Jeep’s mass and momentum.
In the three days that followed, my family and I embraced uncertainty. We had to wait two days to learn the Jeep was totaled. There were no rental cars available anywhere.
Deadlines wait for no one, and we worked from the hotel business center, trying to stay focused while doing the math on how much all of this was going to cost us. Spoiler alert: it cost a lot.
We left Fayetteville on Wednesday in a brand-new used car, financed by insurance and our savings. We are fortunate.
What’s interesting to me now is that this accident, this horrible moment with the poor deer, forced me to pause in a way that the entire vacation hadn’t. Up to that moment, I’d been living in the moment, but also focusing on moving. Let’s get here. Do this. Let’s go there. Do that.
The deer made me stop. Understand I’m not saying the deer sacrificed its life for me to have an article-worthy epiphany. Its death was senseless and terrible and my fault.
What I am saying is that this terrible thing forced me to stop, much in the way Maman did. I had to stop and feel without thinking. Then I had to stop and think without letting my feelings run away with me. I had to re-evaluate my priorities in that moment and remind myself that life is really just an extended exercise in improvisation.
Your momentum and your mind will be forced to stop from time to time. This is a universal law.
When we’re forced to stop, whether from good or bad events, what do we do with that space? Will we embrace it and take the moment to evaluate, to listen, to be? To see others more clearly?
How we inhabit the moment, the way we act, the things we make or destroy — those are the things that define our character. Do we let the event define our experience, or do we open ourselves up to the pause, the stillness, the uncertainty?
What we take away from it may be less important than how we inhabit it.
