The deer came out of nowhere, scared and running, bounding and wide-eyed.
I spotted them early, out of the corner of my eye, and then put what driving skills I have to work, steering and braking — carefully but quickly — through leaping, furry chicanes.
I missed four of them, treating them like gigantic cones in a high-speed slalom. A fifth tucked in behind my brand-new 2008 BMW X6 sport wagon.
Bad move. The fifth sadly met his end on the right front fender of a trailing X6 driven by a former driving instructor who now chats about cars on a breakfast television show.
Like me, he was scooting down a straightaway at a healthy rate of speed on Michelin's test track in Laurens, South Carolina. Laurens? It is a woodsy spot about an hour's drive from the plant in Spartanburg where BMW assembles the X6.
This is rural Carolina in every sense, right down to the Civil War monuments to the Southern Grays who, flying the Stars and Bars, fought the Northern Blues and their Stars and Stripes. The Grays lost and, from the look of it in Laurens, some parts of the South still have not forgotten.
(In Laurens itself, a sleepy little village with an antebellum courthouse dotted with posters for the re-election of Sheriff Ricky Chastain, I found the World's Greatest Redneck Store. There, I sifted through Civil War mementos — Confederate flags and trinkets likely manufactured in China — suggesting that someone believes the South may well rise again.) Spartanburg may be booming, with the new and expanding BMW plant — production is jumping from 160,000 cars a year to 240,000 — not to mention Michelin's North American headquarters and a growing high-tech industry, but prosperity and at least parts of the 21st century have not yet found their way to Laurens.
The country life in Laurens explains why wildlife somehow managed to find themselves roaming about a high-speed driving circuit. For the record, the fellow trailing me was unhurt, but the right side of the X6 was reduced to twisted sheet metal and broken glass. The deer, oh, the poor deer — you get the picture.
One thing we all learned from this is that the X6 is fantastically nimble for a huge sorta-SUV. This is noteworthy.
Remember, despite its sexy silhouette, cat-eye headlamps and discreet fender jewellery, the X6 is big, bigger than it looks at a distance or in pictures, and bigger than you'd expect in a vehicle BMW labels a sport activity coupe or SAC.
Honestly, the beltline — the line below the windows — is nearly at my shoulder height and, at six feet, I'm a guy in the 90th percentile. That's tall.
Yet inside, there is seating for just four. What we have here is a new car that BMW says fits a niche in the market that did not exist until now. Really?
We'll see. The latest sales figures would suggest the pool of buyers who covet big rigs like this is shrinking in the wake of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown in the United States.
All those people who were refinancing their homes at 125 per cent to buy fancy cars, boats and vacation cruises are obviously in trouble. Perhaps that is why rumours persist that BMW might just end up exporting 40, 50, even 60 per cent of X6 production to Russia, China and the Middle East.
Whoever buys the X6 in Canada or elsewhere will get a huge, 2,220 kg (with the base inline-six-cylinder engine), technologically competent four-seater with a roof that slopes steeply to the rear.
BMW types concede that the design is polarizing, that it is a "love-it-or-hate-it shape," and I am here to state emphatically that I like everything about this look except the big gap in the wheel wells between the sheet metal and the tires.
And, boy, does this thing handle.
