The deer was standing on the gravel shoulder about 40 yards ahead, just its eyes at first, two green dots low in the dark. I saw it. Garrett didn't. He was watching the white line on the right edge of the road like it owed him money, which is what I'd told him to do with oncoming headlights, and he was doing exactly that.
"Deer, right side," I said, as flat as I could manage. He lifted off the gas, covered the brake, and we rolled past at about 35 while it stood there chewing. Nothing happened. I'm still the one who thought about it all the way home.
Missouri wants 10 of the 40 supervised hours to be at night. In the spring that's tough. The sun doesn't go down until after 8:30, Sunday night is a school night, and nobody in our house was excited about a practice drive at 9:30 on a Tuesday. So the log filled up with daytime hours and the night column stayed mostly empty. When school let out, the green notebook in the van's glovebox said 16 hours total, 1 hour at night.
Summer fixed the calendar problem. It did not fix the dark. In late June, around here, it's properly dark by about 9:15. So that's when we go.
Where we drive at night
We've done four night drives so far this month, a little over an hour each. The plan has been to repeat roads he already knows from daytime, so the only new thing is the dark.
- Neighborhood streets first. Same streets as his first daytime hours. Parked cars are harder to see, kids on bikes with no lights are a real thing, and he learned to use his low beams and not his high beams in town.
- The Belt Highway at 9 p.m. Lots of lights, lots of signs, a lot of people turning into fast food places without signaling. The trick there isn't seeing, it's sorting. Which lights matter, which ones are just a gas station sign.
- Country roads toward Savannah. My dad lives about 15 minutes north, so we drive up, he gets a wave from Dale in his lawn chair on the porch, and we drive back. Two-lane roads, no streetlights, oncoming pickups with their brights on. This is where the real night practice is.
What we practiced on the dark roads
Three things, mostly.
First, high beams on when nobody's coming, off as soon as someone is. He was nervous about the switch at first and tended to leave the low beams on the whole way, which means you're only seeing about as far as you can stop. Now he flicks them on and off without thinking about it.
Second, when an oncoming car won't dim, look down and to the right at the edge line instead of into the lights. That's the advice he was following when he missed the deer, and it's still the right advice. You just can't stare there the whole time.
Third, speed. On a two-lane at night he's allowed to drive under the limit, and I'd rather he did. If your headlights reach a certain distance and you're going fast enough that you can't stop inside it, you're driving on faith.
The part that scared me more than him
The deer. Late fall is the real deer season around here, but they're out in summer too, and they love the edges of those country roads at dusk. What got me was not that he didn't see it. It's that he didn't know he hadn't seen it. From his seat, it was a normal drive with a deer that happened to be standing there. From mine, it was a reminder that a careful kid watching the right thing can still miss the thing that matters.
So now we've added a habit. On dark roads he says out loud what he sees. "Mailbox, right. Car coming. Something on the left, probably a reflector." It sounds silly. It works. It makes him sweep the whole windshield instead of locking onto one line, and it tells me where his eyes are without me having to ask.
He wasn't scared at all, for the record. He said the dark drives were "kind of relaxing." I'll take that as a good sign, and I'll keep my eyes on the shoulder anyway.
Current log: 21 hours total, just under 6 at night. Four more night hours, and the hardest column on the page is done.