Sno-Bob waits for a decent snowfall

In 1965 I went to a movie theatre in the small town of my growing so that I could watch a group called the Beatles in their movie “Help.” I came away from the movie coveting a ski-bike contraption that the Beatles rode in a snow scene while “Ticket to Ride” played on the soundtrack. My wife’s sister Peggy has stored one of the contraptions, officially called a Sno-Bob, for decades and recently she gave it to me.

I’ve waited 60 years to hit the slopes, pretending to be John Lennon, singing “Ticket” and just generally having a brilliant time. Friends have suggested that the thing is likely dangerous, especially for a 73-year-old man, and Peggy offered that I might want to send a “teenager sacrifice” down the hill on it first. Now I just have to wait for a decent snowfall and if I end up sporting a body cast I’ll make sure to get a picture for you.

Winter lies cold and long out here. A few nights back I drove around a corner on the idiotically winding road that leads from a nearby town and my headlights caught a scene I wish I hadn’t seen. I slowed to a crawl because a deer was standing right next to the road, not moving. She was standing over the body of a smaller, bloody deer that must have been killed by a vehicle moments before. I’m guessing the dead little one was her offspring. I moved slowly past and she continued to stand over her charge.

The scene has stuck with me and I wish I was smarter and more thoughtful, able to sort out what I’d seen. How we all respond to death is fascinating to this old man. I know how I respond, but what does a mother deer feel? If grief is a sense of loss then we can be sure that other creatures that lose companions and mates grieve. They don’t carry away the dead like we do but, like us, they experience sadness, at least for a time. They may not fully understand or appreciate the concept of death, but they surely understand loss.

Death is so much more than organs ceasing to function. In Thornton Wilder’s extraordinary 1938 play, “Our Town” a character named Emily asks the Stage Manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?” To which he replies, “No. The saints and poets, maybe, they do some.” So there it is. It’s odd that a dead deer challenges my own sense of existence, odd because California is burning, planes are falling from the sky, people around the globe are continuing to kill each other, and I’m spending time contemplating the death of a deer. Sorry.

When thinking of death my wife invariably enters into the mix. I first met her on a cold day in December of 1967. We were sitting near each other on bleachers at a high school basketball game in our hometown and we began chatting. The next day I would turn 16, which was the age my parents allowed us to begin dating someone. That didn’t really mean anything to me but the next day was also the day that I would be wrestling on the varsity for the first time, so I told my pretty new friend that I would dedicate the match to her. I wish I could tell you that I bested the young man who had been a state qualifier the prior year, that my victory foreshadowed a long, happy life with the darling flute player I’d just met. Alas, I was pinned in the first period. The long, happy life happened regardless, though not long enough. Soon snow will quietly arrive and when I take my first ride on the Sno-Bob I’ll imagine her standing at the top of the hill, thinking me a fool, loving me anyway.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here