Occasionally, Mom and Dad would talk in quiet conversation. A few times my father tried to lighten up the moment with his usual humor but with little effect. I was in the back seat in the midst of an anxiety attack, nothing new for me. I had learned to live with anxiety throughout my life. It was no fun.
Nauseated, I rolled down my window a little bit and took long slow breaths, fighting down the sickness. I closed my ears and tried to think of something else, anything else, but what I was about to do.
All at once my Dad slowed down the car and said something I didn’t catch.
“What?” I said.
“Look! …Adon, look at what is in the road ahead.”
As the car came to a stop in the early mist of dawn, I opened my eyes.
There standing in the road was the biggest whitetail buck deer I had ever seen in my life. He was just standing there looking at us, not fifty feet from the front of our car.
“Whoa! Look at the size of him, Dad." He must weigh 350 pounds at least. What’s the matter with him? He is just standing there!
Dad said, “I think he came to say goodbye to you, Adon”
Dad shut off the engine, parked at a dead stop, right in the road. As we watched this magnificent creature, he apparently decided that standing in middle of Route 1, the heavily traveled coastal route, might not be the safest place for a trophy buck to be standing. He slowly walked across the road and into the woods on the other side. All the while he still looked at us, at me, until at the last second as he disappeared out of sight.
My Dad started the car as we continued on to our destination. Soon I would be saying goodbye to the people closest to me. As I settled back into my seat, I sat in wonder at what had just happened. I had worn myself out for weeks looking for a deer just like that. And, he shows up on this day to wish me off on the greatest and scariest adventure of my life.
The anxiety attack was gone. The fear I had felt was gone. My Native American ancestors would have said that it was a good omen. The deer seemed to be showing me respect and wishing me well. Somehow I knew that I would be able to face all that I had before me, good or bad. And that somehow, sometime, I would be back here, to the greatest place on earth, my home.
