The Road to Town
- Gael MacLean
- 1 minute ago
- 8 min read
Notes on passing
The road I live on runs beside an old highway, and the highway runs beside a river. On the far side there are cliffs. The deer come down off the mountain to drink, the way they have for thousands of years, and to reach the water they cross the highway. The river is older than the road. The deer are working from the older map.
Roadkill is common here. It is part of the road the way ice is part of the road, and we treat it about the same: something you watch for, something you plan around, something that is nobody’s fault in particular and everybody’s problem in the specific.
Most of us drive trucks with a light bar across the grill, for seeing what steps onto the road before it is too late to matter. That one is for protection, ours and the critters’ both. The gun rides in the console, within easy reach. Not for protection. To end the suffering of animals that have been hit but are not quite dead. Nobody made this a rule. It is a thing the road asks of the people who live on it, and most of us answer, and it does not come up in conversation much.
There is no cell service out here. Whatever happens on this road, you are on your own for it. The truck is equipped accordingly.
One winter night, coming home late, ice on the road, doing forty, which on that ice is respectable, I saw a fresh hit on the shoulder. A doe. I slowed to fifteen as I passed. She raised her head and watched me go by. She was not getting up.
The gun was in the console, where it always is.
I spent the next two miles arguing with myself about turning around. The road was ice. Turning around on that road, at night, in that weather, carries its own risk. That is true. I have never been able to settle whether it was the truth I was using or only the truth that was available, and I have stopped expecting to settle it. There is no court for that question. I have looked.
I drove on.
⁂
We talk about willful ignorance as if it were a hole in a person. A missing part, a gap where the knowledge should be, an emptiness that information could fill if only it could get in. Whole industries run on this theory. Journalism runs on it. If people only knew.
But look at the two miles. The knowing cost me nothing. It came free through the windshield, complete, in about a second and a half: the shape on the shoulder, the head coming up, the gun in the console, the thing the gun is for. What cost me was the not-acting. I had to build that. I built it at road speed in the dark, argument by argument, and every argument needed maintenance the moment I made it, because she kept being back there while I made them.
Willful ignorance is not an absence. It is a product, and somebody has to manufacture it, and the somebody is you. It has hours. Mine took two miles. Other people’s take longer: the subscription cancelled, the conversation steered somewhere safer, the route into the city that avoids the underpass where the tents are. That work is quiet and constant and mostly invisible, even to the person doing it. Especially to the person doing it. A fence looks like it stands on its own. It stands because someone walks it.
I want to be careful here, though, because my night on the ice does not even qualify for the standard definition. I was not ignorant of anything. I knew before I finished slowing down. What I did belongs further along the same road, and it has a name too.
⁂
The sociologist Stanley Cohen spent his career sorting out the ways people manage not to respond to what they know. He found the crude kinds first. Literal denial: it is not happening. Interpretive denial: it is happening, but it is not what you say it is. Those two at least have the decency to argue with the facts.
The third kind he called implicatory denial, and it does not argue with the facts at all. It is happening, it is exactly what you say it is, and it will not be permitted to mean anything. The knowledge gets in the house. It is kept upstairs.
Kari Norgaard, another sociologist, spent the winter of 2000 into 2001 in a Norwegian town she calls Bygdaby. Prosperous, educated, the kind of place where people read the paper and vote and cross-country ski from childhood. That year the snow came two months late. The ice never set hard enough to fish. The resorts ran their machines and made their own snow to cover the shortfall. The papers, local and national, named the cause without hedging: global warming. Nobody in Bygdaby lacked the information. What the town built instead was an etiquette. The knowledge was true, and you did not bring it to the birthday party. You did not raise it at the school meeting. It stayed upstairs, held there by an agreement nobody had signed and everybody kept.
She called the book Living in Denial, but the title undersells the effort. The town was not asleep. The town was working, and the work was not on the facts. The facts were settled. The work was on the feeling the facts would otherwise produce — the helplessness, mostly, the sense of a world coming apart on your watch with no clear idea what one person is meant to do about it. Manage the feeling and the knowledge can stay in the house without ever asking anything of you.
You can see what the work bought. Nobody in Bygdaby wrote to the paper. Nobody pressed a politician or drove any less. What the etiquette protected was the plain daily conviction that things were fine and they were good people, and it protected it well. The denial did not fail them. It performed exactly as built. It cost them the capacity to respond.
My drive home was that town doing forty on ice. Every fact present and accounted for. Every fact kept upstairs for two miles, which was as long as they needed keeping.
⁂
There is one room in the culture where none of this works, and it has a judge in it.
The law has a doctrine for people who arrange not to know things. It goes by a few names: willful blindness, conscious avoidance, deliberate ignorance. The doctrine is older than the automobile, and it says something the rest of the culture has never been willing to say. If you deliberately avoided learning a fact, the law treats you as if you knew it. The arrangement of your ignorance is not a defense. The arrangement is the offense.
American jurors sometimes hear this as the ostrich instruction: you may not bury your head in the sand and then plead the sand. One federal appeals judge objected to the metaphor, on behalf of ostriches, who apparently do no such thing and have been slandered for centuries. The birds’ lawyers have a point. The legal one stands anyway. In that one room, “I didn’t know” gets examined like any other claim, and if you built the not-knowing yourself, it is worth nothing.
Outside the room, the old alibi works fine. Socially, “I didn’t know” still functions as absolution, no questions asked about how the not-knowing was achieved or what it cost to maintain. The law closed this loophole in 1899. The culture has never gotten around to it.
Not that the doctrine would help me. I cannot even claim the ostrich’s defense. I saw her see me. On the facts, the bird has a better file than I do.
⁂
There is no removal crew on my road. What the road kills, the road keeps.
She lay where she died, on the shoulder, and the road to town runs past that spot, and it is the only road. The magpies were on her early. The bald eagles came in their season; they winter along the river here and carrion is a large part of what winter offers them. People here call what happens next the recycling process, and that is the right temperature for it. The birds were not mourning her. They were working.
Whatever came at night, I never saw. Coyotes, almost certainly. I knew the night shift only by the mornings, by what was gone since the last time I passed. Which is its own small lesson, tucked inside the larger one: the most thorough work on that carcass was done entirely outside my witnessing, and I could not deny it happened, because I could count.
Every ten days or so I go to town, for groceries and gas and sheep feed, and the road goes past her, because it is the only road. Each trip the winter had subtracted more, and I was there for the accounting, whether I chose to look or not. Mostly I looked. By then not looking would have been more work than looking. That is the part I did not expect. The labor runs out. You can manufacture two miles of it on an icy night. You cannot manufacture a winter of it on the road to the feed store.
By spring there was skin and a few bones.
⁂
In town, a deer hit on the road is a phone call. A crew comes, usually by morning, and the animal goes wherever such animals go, and the road is clean, and the driver who hit her, if the driver even stopped, never sees the spot again except as a spot. The service is efficient and nobody thinks of it as a service. That is what makes it one.
This, I have come to think, is most of what we call ignorance now. It is not a hole in anyone. It is infrastructure. The crew that comes in the night. The rendering truck. The packaging between the eater and the animal, the distance between the purchase and the mine, the screen feed that refreshes before anything can settle. Civilization’s largest product may be the disposal of implication, and the product is excellent, and the customer is every one of us, and the bill is itemized somewhere we have arranged not to look.
I do not know if this is changeable. I know what does not change it. Information does not; I had the information on the seat beside me. Proximity is supposed to do it, and I am the counterexample, because she was close enough to raise her head into my headlights and I drove on anyway. Proximity did not make me act.
What proximity did was refuse to close the account. Town shreds its receipts by morning. My road kept mine on the shoulder all winter, in weather, ten days at a time, where I could check the balance whether I wanted to or not. If anything changes people, I think it is that. Nothing so quick as a reckoning. Just the refusal of the erasure, the thing still lying where it fell, the account held open past the point where the labor of not-knowing can be sustained.
By summer it was just the place where she had been.
I still slow down there.
Music for The Road - ©Gael MacLean
A note on sources: the three kinds of denial come from Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial (2001). The Norwegian town is from Kari Norgaard’s Living in Denial (2011); Bygdaby is her name for it, not mine. The legal doctrine goes by “willful blindness” in the American courts, and the judge who rose to the defense of the ostrich was Richard Posner.
©2026 Gael MacLean