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5 at home in the ’burbs It was the reference to “Mad Dog,” I remember, that surprised me. Michele Clarke is a middle-aged mother of two who stands a hair shy of five feet, I’d guess. Dressed in business-casual clothes and the kind of shoes that I think my wife refers to as “flats,” she had led me down a carpeted hall flanked by clean white walls to her office. It’s one room in a nice building with big glass doors, a woodlot to its rear, and a perfectly manicured golf course across the street. Now we were sitting on opposite sides of the desk where she works as director of parks and recreation for the municipality of Murrysville. A community of 18,872 located on the western edge of Westmoreland County, just twenty miles from Pittsburgh, Murrysville is close enough to make working in the city convenient , but far enough away to offer lower property taxes and a quieter lifestyle. As such, it is a community of two worlds. Home to transplanted city dwellers, homegrown suburbanites, and farmers, Murrysville is about 50 percent rural and 50 percent developed. The developed half of the community is cut by one major highway, Route 22, which is destined to go from four lanes to six in some areas. Strip malls, sixteenpump gas stations, and chain restaurants are its hallmarks. The other half of the community is made up of woodlots interspersed among housing plans and golf courses and twelve hundred acres of parks. Clarke spends her days making sure that Murrysville’s residents have something to do with their time. She coordinates a spring egg hunt and playground activities for children, a swimming program for families, and yoga and fitness classes for seniors. There’s even a winter snowman contest. In that role, you wouldn’t think she’d have much need for a man like Michael “Mad Dog” Maddy. Yet on this day, that was the name that came to her lips. She didn’t call him Michael, or Mike, or Mr. Maddy. Just Mad Dog. Hearing her say it—particularly in such an offhand way, like someone might talk about Harry or Fred or John—struck me as funny. But having to deal with an overpopulation of white-tailed deer like Murrysville’s can forge some strange partnerships , I suppose, like this one between a public servant and a deer hunter. “I’ve lived here twenty-five or twenty-six years and I’ve never seen so many deer,” Clarke says. “You drive along and they’re just standing there.” There’s a price to be paid for having all of those lovely deer, and Murrysville has been paying it. Two of the four drivers in the Clarke household, for example, have hit deer with their vehicles. Michele’s husband has contracted Lyme disease, an illness that’s carried by ticks that in turn spread by parasitically attaching themselves to deer. Bob Schlemmer, chairman of Governor Ed Rendell’s Advisory Council on Hunting, Fishing, and Conservation and a Murrysville resident, can also attest to just how many deer live in Murrysville, albeit using another kind of proof. Schlemmer , who has seen as many as eighteen deer in his yard at one time, needs only to walk up his driveway to see evidence of the overpopulation of deer. “I’ve got a browse line on my house,” Schlemmer says. “I’ve got ivy growing up the walls, but there are no leaves from about five feet down to the ground. And I haven’t had to trim my shrubs in ten years. The deer take care of that for me. We’ve got a lot of deer in Murrysville.” Murrysville councilman Ted Mallick once hit two deer at the same time with his vehicle as he was coming home from work. He regularly sees other deer—basking in the glow of the security light he installed, thinking it might scare them away— doing their part to keep his lawn clean. “They like apples, I can tell you that. When they fall from my tree, I don’t need to worry about them being on the ground too long,” Mallick said. If some Murrysville residents like living among all those whitetails, there are others who do not. In his role as councilman, Mallick hears from the people who have just had enough of deer. It’s anger induced by frustration that boils over the phone lines from their...

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