Ghost Dogs!

I hope everyone had safe travels over Thanksgiving! As I drove back to Chicago from Iowa on Thursday evening, I had a strange feeling that a doe or a thirty-pointer was lurking behind every bend on Highway 20 around Galena. I give thanks that I did not see a single animal on the road that night. However, almost exactly three years ago, I wasn't so lucky...

Trust me- this is a true story.

Back in early December of 2006, I had driven my forest green Dodge Stratus to Chicago to scope out apartments and audition for Mission:Improvable. On the trip home to Cedar Falls, IA, around 1:00 in the morning, I was cruising at 70mph in the right lane on the I-380 straightaway north of Cedar Rapids (Please note that not all Iowa towns start with "Cedar"). It was well below freezing, the ground had just a trace of snow, but the roads were fine. I was belting out shuffled songs on my Nano, which I tend to do when driving alone.

Then, as if out of thin air, I see something white moving onto the highway from the right ditch about fifty feet in front of me! What happened next only took a few seconds, but everything seemed to be in slow motion and I don't remember the music being on in those moments. At about 40 feet, I realized what this thing was. It was a huge yellow Labrador retriever! (Seriously, it looked like a mix between that and a St. Bernard or something.) The headlights gave its coat the appearance of polar bear fur. Then, another white fluffy thing emerged behind it! Then another! That's right. I'm telling you that not one, not two, but three very large dogs were about to step out in front of my Dodge Stratus! Do you remember those old-time shooting games with the ducks that come in, one right after the other, from the side? Well, it kind of looked like that as all three dogs made a break for it across ol' I-380. At 30 feet, I slammed on my breaks, but I still hit TWO OF THE THREE DOGS! The second of the three went under my right tires, as the leader of the pack hit my bumper and grill directly in front of me. After the enormous THUD-THUD, I don't remember music- just dead silence*. I was mortified! Maybe it was because the dog was so tall, or perhaps it was because the impact was right before the screeching halt, but somehow the first Lab became airborne! In what had to have been a ten-foot high arc, this poor animal literally went end over end until it hit the twenty degree pavement. Rigor mortis could not have possibly set in yet, but it looked frozen solid in the air and on impact. This thing spun like a Coke bottle to the left and off the asphalt, looking as if it had already been to a taxidermist. To make it even more macabre, the head ended up facing me when it stopped rotating on the frozen gravel shoulder. In my rear-view mirror I could see the second retriever motionless on the right side of the road. The last of the three must have run off into the darkness unscathed. It was nowhere in sight.

For a few moments, I thought this couldn't have been real. How could three dogs just magically appear like that? My overactive imagination gave me an answer: GHOST DOGS! They must have been ghosts! My hands were shaking uncontrollably as I peeled my white knuckles off the steering wheel. I put my Dodge in park, threw on the hazards, and got out to see if I would need a new front fender. There was no visible damage to my car; just some pale yellow hairs stuck around the intake and a small smear of blood on the driver's-side headlight. I still had frightened adrenaline coursing through my enitre body. I honestly asked myself out loud, "Do ghosts have hair?".

I felt absolutely awful about the whole thing. What had I done?! I had never killed more than the occasional bug in the house. Sometimes I'd even scoop up a spider with a piece of paper and set it free outside. Now there were two counts of "caninicide" looming over me. I felt incredibly guilty, even though there was nothing I could have done. Since both victims were completely off the road, I figured there was nothing else I could do. If they weren't ghost dogs before, they were now. I buckled myself back in the Stratus and slowly put my quivering foot on the gas pedal. I was still so out of it that I hadn't even put the car in drive yet. For the rest of the way to Cedar Falls, I drove about 45mph, all the while vigilantly watching for more ghost dogs.

*When I told my friend Dan this story, he asked me what song was playing when this all went down. To this day I still can't remember. I must tip my "zinger cap" to him, because he thought of a pretty appropriate tune: "One is the Loneliest Number" by Three Dog Night.