Road Kill
I drive almost 40 miles on I-96 every day to and from work each way. I see a fair amount of road kill. I’ve become quite adept at identifying the deceased animal, though I have problems with the ones that are mostly red. I’ve seen woodchucks, opossums, racoons, deer, foxes, cats and dogs. Most of the time they’re killed by the vehicles travelling on I-96.
However, today I noticed an instance where this appears to not be the case. First I should give background on the traffic situation. West bound traffic was merged into one lane. They are re-doing a long stretch of the highway and I guess they’re doing the west bound first. So we were traveling in one lane, and on our immediate left was those cement barricades, and on the other side of those were 2 lanes of east bound traffic. It is here that I see my first road-shock-kill. Standing between the west bound traffic and the cement barriers is an opossum! That’s right. It was not moving, but it was just standing there looking pretty normal (no missing legs or any other body parts that I noticed). I’m quite sure it was dead. COD -> heart attack. It appears it was shocked by the horror of traffic just a foot behind it and a cement barricade a few inches in front of it. Crazy.