Contributing writer
This particular column has often been built around the contrast between my living in the country in California and then what it was like to come to Kansas and spend another day in the country. These two experiences are very different although I honestly lived in a rural area on an acre and a half of land in California and I have lived in a small town in Kansas surrounded by acres and acres of country.
My little California Acre was two miles from a grocery store and gas station. It was a community built around a Christian college so the locals would joke and say that Angwin (the name of the town) was 8 miles from any known sin — meaning there were no movie theaters and no bars.
Common phenomena between California country and Kansas country are the deer. I lived on the side of a mountain and we had a lot of free-range, rose-nibbling deer. Being a non-gun-toting, non-violent, vegetarian community also meant that we weren’t shooting the deer, which made it a grand place for Bambi and his kin to live.
The deer population kept flourishing on Howell Mountain until the college leased their land during hunting season to a gun club; but, heck, during hunting season those deer were smart enough to move off the college land and take a vacation in our backyards — they already knew them well since our yards were their yards and our trails were their trails.
We even have a long winding road through the Napa Valley aptly named “Deer Trail Road.” (hint, hint, hint)
Everyone had deer in their yard and we all dutifully fenced in our gardens, our yards, and our vineyards. At one point, I told my neighbors that I thought it would be smarter to fence in the deer instead of fencing in the humans, since we were obviously outnumbered.
While the deer usually kept to the underbrush — and we have a lot of that on Howell Mountain — there were plenty of times when they claimed the road at the spur of a moment, and met their maker. They also had this disconcerting habit of foiling even the most practiced deer-watcher-eye by jumping off the side of a hill, landing smack on vehicles as drivers negotiated the road. Because of this, I started calling them “kamikaze deer.”
When I came to Kansas, I discovered that the deer here were twice the size of their California cousins. Tim had lots of deer stories since he was meeting up with them rather regularly on the back roads of Ramona as he tooled along in the early morning hours, going to work at the quarry site.
Kansas deer were phantoms, appearing out of nowhere, attempting to jump through windshields, side windows, or become the latest hood ornaments.
It seemed like people who had just purchased a new car or truck were most vulnerable. Tooltime Tim lost several trucks to the deer, “Nah, nah, nah-nah-nah,” as they thumbed their noses at his latest mode of transportation.
We had hunters from California who came to Kansas this fall to hunt deer. They didn’t find any. We saw several, including a buck with a fancy rack, run across the road in front of us while we were showing them the land where they could hunt; but they came up empty handed.
Although I’m not a hunter and they were quite experienced, I tried to tell them that while Kansas deer are a bigger target, they might be a bigger challenge to hunt. After all, we do not have the miles and miles of woods and cover that they do in the mountains and our deer are a sly lot. While I may see a whole herd, 10 to 15, on Marion’s Main Street at 10 p.m., they were party deer and not the norm.
“Do you think Kansas deer come out from behind the trees and just line up?” I teased my California friends. “You can’t walk the ground once and then just sit in the truck to keep warm — you’ve got to hunt.”
I’m sure that it’s someone’s rule that says, when you aren’t hunting for a deer ... there they are, jumping over your hood, trying to sit in your lap, and scaring the daylights out of you. Or, like yesterday when I saw half a dozen does and a handsome buck cross the Lincolnville/Durham road — in no hurry at all, out for a stroll at 9:30 a.m. on another day in the country.