A deer stares into the camera. An ear-sized tag dangles from her lobe, like the world’s biggest cartilage piercing. It’s dusk. A researcher crashes through the woods after a different doe he’s just darted. He waits for the anesthesia to kick in. For her to fall unconscious. Nearby, a deer is hit by a car on a backroad. Under the darkening foliage, the researcher injects a shot of contraceptive vaccine. He strains to see what he is doing. On the other side of town, a deer chews a tuft of daylilies. The light slips out of the scene, like someone with something to hide. I’m a senior in high school, and this is my town.
I want to explain how they went about injecting the deer with birth control.
The hunters from the Humane Society donned their orange vests, hopped in the car, and drove around in search of deer. Like cops in the suburbs, bored and looking for some action. The deer come out at dusk. The sky is purple. It’s hard to see quite right. People call it the magic hour.
When they’d spot a deer, they’d move into a corner, with intention, concentration. Like they were on a hunt—crosshairs, camo, and all that. They’d formulate their shot, a dart spewing from a tranq gun. Let’s say it hit. The deer exploding forward, as if shot by an arrow, bounding into woods, crashing fast as ground allows. The hunters now on foot, crushing through the brush right after. Because they couldn’t shoot to kill, or even maim. But the woods are dense, and the doe knows better. The humans can’t keep up, in heavy boots, their neon vests asnag on twigs and branches, leaves and trunks.
But let’s say they get lucky. The doe is tired, a bad day for the browse, and the shot got her just right, thwack in the buttock. She begins to slow, an awkward clatter, until she crumples and the hunters, out of breath, gain ground. They inhale deep and gasping, slow their breath until their hands can jolt without a tremor. They reach into their packs, remove the contraceptive, shimmy it inside the deer, a needle spewing liquid into tissue.
An orange tag emerges from their kit, a giant rubber glove. They have to track how well the contraceptive works. They punch the tag right through her ear, like something tethered to a bag in hopes it finds its way back home. And then they leave her there, inhaling shallow breath, her whole body shut down. Almost like she’s just asleep. It’s night now, and the hunters crash their way back through the woods, heartbeats slowing, still.
It feels like an allegory; it feels made up. Why would you do that? Whose idea?
It often comes back to the mayor. There is something about being in power. Something about a small town.
The mayor ran for reelection on a campaign of dealing with the deer. Around the same time there was a literal turf war that tore the town in two. I am talking about whether they should replace my high school’s football field with synthetic turf or regular grass. If you said regular grass, you were a tree hugger and hated the football team and had no town pride and ate tofu for every meal.
People made signs. They stuck them in their lawns, as if the turf were running for mayor. The mayor, meanwhile, was going to do something about the deer. He had gotten Lyme disease from a deer tick, “as did his wife and child, and he has heard of scores of residents treated for Lyme.”
Something had to be done.
There was this time in college I was scared that I was pregnant.
Well, I didn’t think I was pregnant yet, but I thought if I waited long enough to find out then I would be. I walked to the Walgreens in the middle of my college town and let the guy who would have contributed in a fifty-fifty kind of way to me becoming pregnant buy Plan B and then my friend called and asked what I was up to and I was like, um I’m at Walgreens. She was like, why are you at Walgreens, and I told her I was with the guy, who also happened to be her friend, so she asked if we wanted to come to brunch. He said sure, so we walked out into the parking lot, and she drove up in her minivan, and I hid my little paper baggy in my coat like a flask.
The three of us sat around a table in the middle of the diner. The Plan B was still in my coat, which was hanging on the back of my chair like a casual arm. I wasn’t really hungry. I looked at the menu for a while. I couldn’t really think of what would be a normal thing to order. Eventually the waiter came over and it was time to make some sort of decision, so I asked for an omelet.
That’s a weird thing to order, my friend said.
I didn’t think it was a weird thing to order, unless you considered me putting more cracked eggs into my body as I concurrently stopped the eggs inside of me from cracking, or whatever it was they did exactly, weird. But I hadn’t told her about the Plan B yet because there wasn’t time to tell her privately without making it a whole thing in front of this guy I’d just started sleeping with casually and in an extremely chill way. So she didn’t know about the whole egg situation, she was just being a little bit of a bitch. That was normal and her way of showing love.
Okay, I said.
I ate half of the omelet. I pushed the rest around on my plate. After we paid, we went out into the parking lot, and the guy was like, take the pill, don’t forget! and I was like, I know I know I will, and then we kissed goodbye and my friend was like ewwww in an exaggerated ironic way for comedic effect, and then I walked straight back to my dorm room and called my mom and told her I wanted to come home the next weekend and get an IUD.
Before the birth control injections came the town hall deer meetings. I didn’t know it at the time, but these were meetings of high drama. Because before embarking on the birth control approach, the mayor secretly obtained a special permit to eliminate the deer by net and bolt—a grotesquely brutal strategy by which to cull an animal. And once the village found out, the town hall meetings went bonkers.
“I will say as a green home–owning, hybrid-driving, one car–owning vegetarian, that they don’t come earthier and crunchier than me . . . ,” the mayor defended himself, in a 2010 meeting that is captured on YouTube, under the title “Peter Swiderski Swings His Flaccid Slaughter Bolt.”
And it is very hard for me to listen to him say this without imagining it as a line from a children’s book, as a chant that furls out, building upon itself, tacking on identifiers by the verse, until the mayor collapses under its weight. Each time I watch the video I giggle a little bit. As a father of daughters, I think. As a father of a green-home-owning prius. As a hybrid of a vegetarian. As the proud purveyor of a handful of GORP. . . .
This drama wasn’t kept within town limits, either. The New York Times published an article—“A Kinder, Gentler Way to Thin the Herd”—framed by two photos, one of the mayor gazing off and up into the woods, as if imagining the muscling heft of change, and another of a deer, mirroring his hopeful expression. This performance went out into the world, like Shakespeare in the Park. Deer in the Backyard.
In the beginning, they gave sixty-nine deer birth control. It’s right there on the local news site. “Sixty-nine does have been captured and immunized.” That’s the mayor talking. It’s hard to understand what he’s saying at first. Seeing as does is spelled the same as does. As in, an action. Emphatic insistence on a fact.
I lied when I said I took Plan B. I actually took the generic version, which was called My Way and was twenty dollars cheaper. Even at the time I thought that was funny. I kept thinking, things are not going my way. And what is my way even supposed to be? I kept thinking, it’s my way or the highway.
People said the deer in the road were a hazard to drivers. The deer kept getting hit. We have to coexist, people blared from the bumpers of their hybrid vehicles. And we can’t all get it our way. We can mostly just achieve the illusion of things going our way.
When I think about it now, I am intrigued by this concept of protection. And the idea that the sex we were having was protected or unprotected.
When I put in the IUD, I was protecting myself from an unwanted pregnancy, but that’s not what I was protecting the sex from. If anything, I was protecting the sex from meaning something. From causing something. The sex got to have less meaning. The sex got to be what we called meaningless. Because the purpose of sex was pursuit of some untethered pleasure. Strings unattached, just in the body, no meaningful feelings beyond. I believed this; I accepted it as the way things were.
But when I think about sex during this time of my life, most often it was not about pleasure. There was adjacent enjoyment, but it rarely erupted from the act of sex itself. The pleasure came from being chased after, or from chasing after someone and catching them. Or the pleasure came from gossiping the next day over brunch with my best friends. There was a thrill in having something new to share: a crush, a kiss, a slumber party. I had to have some funny facts.
There was a hot though slightly grime-encrusted guy who made sculptures in the year above, who brought me back to what I generously later thought of as his closet of a room. The room featured a mattress on the floor and one long wooden table which he announced, proudly, upon entering, like a master of ceremonies introducing the main attraction, he had made himself. An open Mac perched atop it, a delicate bird on a finger of branch. We got high and he turned on his favorite show for me: a livestream of goldfish swimming around a fishbowl. A man performed voices over the top of the feed, as if the goldfish were speaking. That one’s my favorite, the guy said, pointing to one of the fish, whose voice was done high pitched, because she was a girl goldfish.
There was a different guy who asked me to choke him and I was tentative and he was like no harder and then he was like too hard!
Yikes, sorry! I whispered, peeling my hands off his neck, face red in my pitch-black cinder block room, lit by the streetlamp outside my window, toward which I gazed, over his head, imagining myself in the barren freedom of its pooling gloom.
It’s fine, he said, choking a little, his face red too.
There was another guy who came like the gentle tapping of two fingers on a thigh, like a tap bursting a surprise spurt, and I watched something in his face break a little bit and I said it’s fine, it’s fine—and it was fine, but I didn’t have the words to explain that any better, so it wasn’t—and then we kept seeing each other for the rest of the semester, but we never really had sex again, and we never really discussed it, and I didn’t actually tell people because it wasn’t really a funny story, and it wasn’t something I had the means to narrativize.
The thing was, at that time, early on in college, sex didn’t really feel that good until I was comfortable enough with someone to relax. And I wasn’t comfortable enough with them to relax until we’d hooked up multiple times. Until there was maybe an emotional element. But you weren’t supposed to have that emotional element. You were supposed to be all whatever, even though you both clearly cared, you cared a fucking lot, like we were fucking, a lot, and we were supposed to keep fucking around because none of us believed in commitment and nothing really mattered.
I keep thinking about the deer fucking, endlessly, over and over, because they weren’t getting pregnant. Fucking to the point of pain, of bleeding, desperation. How imposing a human concept of contraception upon deer eliminated their access to pleasure. How it introduced an element of meaninglessness—one they never wanted. How in some ways this may have felt worse than dying. I wonder whether they missed the pleasure.
And I wonder about contra, as in against. As in opposed to, as in contrasted with.
I wonder about contra, as in, pitched down, as in an octave lower than usual. The low sounds the deer made as they tried to mate. As they desperately tried to contradict the contraception.
My mom did a photography project about the birth-controlled deer in 2014. While I was a senior in high school, sneaking into the woods to drink with my friends, she was driving around town with the Humane Society deer hunters, watching them look for deer to dart.
At the time she wrote, “This portfolio aims to portray the excitement that I experience when I see these wild animals on a daily basis, while exploring human geography and land use.”
After she sent me her notes from the project, I read this statement over and over. I was struck by her use of the word “excitement” to describe the thrill that leaps between human and deer as they stand on the same patch of grass. I was struck by the impact of dart hitting deer, and deer hitting ground.
My mom said, “On top of everything else, they had to walk around with these huge tags.” She said, “I mean, clearly they were uncomfortable.” She said, “They were constantly waving their ears.”
And I was thinking about the ears. Waving, like flags. Waving, like “over here.” Waving, like “help.”
I used to be blasé about deer. Someone from the city would come visit my house and totally flip about a deer in the yard. They’d grow quiet, trying not to scare the deer away. I’d roll my eyes at their naïveté, laugh loudly. “You’re more scared of them than they are of you. I barely even see them.” The deer still, abreast my backyard’s hammock, twitching its amber limb to flick a fly skyward. Its eyes like the magic eight balls we shook down for answers. A smooth sheath of fur, a silken nose, a pouf of tail, a stare I broke off first.
Why was it cool? To not care about the deer? It was cool to not care, in general. It was very cool to be chill during that time. And having an IUD allowed me to be exceptionally chill. Immaculately chill. This would allow me, finally, to obtain something. Some power. Chill the shield, IUD its mechanism. I only had to recede a little bit, from my emotions, from the world, from other people. I only had to become pure armor, so hard.
An unsocked cock; a buck in rut. Pixels drifted across the scrim of my life, like a screensaver that would never land exactly in the corner, however much I wanted it to.
Deer antlers regenerate from dust each year. They regrow fastest of all tissue that we know of on the planet. Experts think if we could learn exactly how the antler grows so quickly, we could figure out a way to reform body tissue too—an arm, a leg, a spine. They think that compounds from deer antlers might also possess the means to speed up healing in the bodies of humans.
Because of the IUD, I stopped getting my period. My secondary symptoms grew stronger—worse cramps, worse cravings, worse breakouts, worse bloating, worse mood swings. For a while my skin flaked. I was tired all the time. My hair fell out. This endured for an extended stretch of time. My immune system was faulty. Doctors couldn’t explain it. We don’t have the research, they said, hands flung to the universe.
And that’s when I began to wonder if it was the fault of the thing I’d placed inside me, tricking my body into forgetting a part of itself.
Antlers can remember wounds, like longtime enemies. If a deer is in the process of growing antlers, soft and velvet, while in pain, the horn on the half of the body where the deer sustained the injury will reflect the wound, growing slanted, bruised. But it’s more extreme than that. Antlers can recall an injury, experts say, for as long as ten years, at least, succeeding the first wound. One expert writes, “The effect is also present even if the injury does not result in a fracture. It seems that the stimulus is most probably long-standing pain.”
Sometimes I imagine my body wears pain this way. Sometimes it seems unimaginable that my body, when ill, looks fine. So regular. Just a corpse.
At times I wonder what it means to control something, in this way, so automatic, so forever. And sometimes I wonder whether this object’s affordance of a sort of disembodiment ruptured my instincts for feeling and fervor, for recalling how to just go after what I want.
When it’s time for male deer to mate they “come into rut.” This usually happens in October, though sometimes the younger weaker bucks rut in December. When I first read that I thought, relatable. . . . Female deer become fertile between October and December too, because it gets dark. If they don’t get pregnant, they keep ovulating into March. This is not good news for their fawns because they need to be born while it’s warm out to survive.
On a Friday in February 2016, my mom held me as I walked at a ninety-degree angle hunched over my uterus, moaning the few dozen steps from the OB/GYN to her Prius. Then she drove me to the train, and I rode two hours to the station, and then I took a half an hour Uber back to campus. And when I got there, the first person I ran into was this guy I’d just stopped seeing because I’d started sleeping with the new guy who had accidentally spilled the condom taking it off so that it got onto the mattress and maybe onto the inside of my body and the whole thing resulted in me getting the IUD.
Because things with the first guy were sort of unclear and I was sick of waiting around for him to figure out whether he wanted to be in a thing with me, or just have sex, or date, or some combination, or none of the above, and because he was also my friend, now things were a little awkward. And the first thing he asked me was why I’d gone home for the weekend, and I didn’t know what to say so I said I got an IUD put in. He asked if I was feeling okay and I said not really, my stomach hurt pretty fucking bad.
And then I thought that there was no way he was ever going to accidentally get me pregnant because we weren’t sleeping together and now I had my IUD. And I thought that I felt nothing about that fact. I thought about how my stomach hurt and I wanted to go lie in bed. And I wanted to text the new guy, but I knew I shouldn’t. Because that would go against the rules of our very chill relationship.
And so I didn’t. I just tucked the feeling a little deeper inside me and convinced myself it was gone for a long, long time.
For a long time, I thought the birth control experiment was normal.
In my town, they dealt with deer overpopulation by injecting the deer with contraceptives, I told a group of new acquaintances. I said this in a very chill way. It was just a fun fact.
What, said someone, why didn’t they just shoot them?
Light landed on her like a curtain as she said it, romping through the windows, tall and open. I laughed, crackly.
Hahaha! Oh no, you don’t understand. My town wouldn’t do something like that.
As I said it, I realized this possibly wasn’t normal. You don’t think about things like this when you’re just growing up somewhere. Your town is torn to bits over whether to replace the football field with real grass or synthetic turf, ok. They’re injecting deer with birth control, ok. You say ok to things.
For a long time I said ok to things. I accepted meaninglessness and I accepted chillness, and I accepted story taking precedence over pleasure.
In a 2013 SNL Weekend Update, Seth Meyers says, “a town in New York State is considering a method to control the rising deer population in the area by injecting them with contraceptives.” A picture of the state of New York appears behind him with an outline of a deer head framed against it. “And no one is more upset about the plan,” he goes on, “than the deer pope.” A rain of cackles piles about him; the image is replaced by a deer in a miter.
Access to birth control is under threat now, in many states, nationally, perhaps, depending who is next elected. Access to abortion, even more so. There’s a different current running through this little plastic device that has lived in me in different iterations for nearly eight years. It is protecting me from something. It is allowing me to offload an element of worry on an object, and I’ve found it quite competent in its enlisted task. It allows me to do what I want, to engage my mind in more engrossing matters. But it is only my best option, in an arena of the mediocre choices I’m provided, about whose side effects I can only ever know so much.
It felt so essential to not care about things during that patch of the 2010s—ruled by neoliberalism and irony and disillusionment and approaching the brink of a certain crisis of feminism. To not worry, to make anything we cared about a joke. I don’t feel that way about much anymore. I care about the things I do so much I sometimes think I’ll cry from the pure crush of feeling.
I think about the deer sprinting through the woods, crashing and crushing foliage underfoot. I imagine they’re running toward something. And now I reframe it, and it’s me, and I’m running, and I’m the one crashing and crushing. The chase of a feeling, like a dart, like a want, like the hot risk of unmistakable pursuit.
***
Artwork from Public Work by Cosmos
