Canzano: A trip into the wild with Joe Lorig
A candid talk with the Oregon assistant.
I was driving on a two-lane road the other night, maybe a half mile from my house. It was dark. The street lights are sporadic. My SUV was traveling, maybe 25 miles an hour, when something darted from the opposite side of the road.
A deer flashed in front of my left front headlight.
“What th—”
I hit it.
The collision made an awful noise. The deer’s head and neck whipped over the top of the hood. I braked, but it was already done. When I turned my vehicle around, I saw a beautiful deer lying in the middle of the lane, gasping for air and struggling to lift its head off the pavement.
I’ve encountered lots of deer over the years. Whenever I see one in the wild, I always slow my car, point it out to my daughters, and we marvel at the serenity of the scene for a few seconds. On this night, I was certain I’d killed it.
I told Joe Lorig this story on Thursday. The University of Oregon special teams coach is an avid outdoorsman. He keeps a fly rod in his truck.
A couple of years ago, Lorig was floating in a drift boat in Katmai National Park when a grizzly bear wandered up and started fishing for salmon beside him. The bear and the football coach looked at each other, then turned and went back to their own business. Both kept fishing.
“A lot of people think fishing is for fishing,” Lorig told me. “For me, the fishing is secondary. It’s about unplugging from the world.”