RoadKill

That was a nickname I had in high school.

I can't remember why.
Maybe just because my name started with R?

However, every time I see roadkill I feel a certain level of kinship towards it.

In Tennessee there is a job for someone to specifically collect roadkill.

Utah apparently doesn't have this job. & there is not nearly the amount of roadkill here as there is in TN, either. Job security, right there.

I know this because all 5 animals that have been killed along I-15 in the past month are still there.

I contemplate their deaths as I drive to work. The other day I saw a piece of RK that had a particularly traumatizing death.

It was a raccoon...I believe. It looked something like this.

via

Except it was much more tragic. His tail was sticking straight up in the air.

For days.

The tail was not so straight up in the air this morning.

Last week I was going up the ramp to enter the interstate & right around the corner behind some desert brush was BAMBI. on it's back. Legs STRAIGHT up in the air. It beat out the raccoon's death. & it was staring straight into my car.  Creepy. I think he got hit again though, bc the next day his head was facing the other way.

This morning there is another dead skunk.  I could tell that the wind direction changed yesterday from today. Yesterday I smelled the skunk before I saw it & today I couldn't smell it until after I passed.

Ah, the resourcefulness of roadkill to my survival.  I would have never known the direction of airflow down that highway without that skunk lying there dead.

xoxoRK