Hey tell us about the christmas cows
Last stinkie 10/15/2013
The Christmas Cow...
Our farm was right on the highway. Still is, but it's s different highway. Ad such, we were used to trucks barreling past at obscene speeds.
It was December 20 as I recall, and we had a bit of a blizzard. Nothing out of the norm. However, the next day things warmed up a good bit. There was a lot of melt followed by another freeze. December 23 rolled around and warmed things up again.
That highway now had about 3 inches of slush sitting on top of a sheet of freeze. Treacherous!
The Wife and I had gone into work, put-putting the 10 miles to the office. No sooner had we arrived and settled in, the phone rang. Stepdot said we needed to get home as there had been an accident.
We made it back home at a bit more than put-putt.
What awaited us there was pretty gruesome.
Seems a local rancher was hauling a small load of cattle to market to fund his Christmas when he hit that spot of treacherous I mentioned earlier. He lost control of his rig - an old Dodge Cummins pulling a 25 foot cattle trailer - and managed to somehow wrap the hitch between truck and trailer just right on the old cottonwood in our front yard.
The result of the impact created enough centrifugal force that all of the cattle in the trailer were thrown out - cattlepulted, if you will - with great force.
At the corners of our property there were some serious fence posts. These were 4 inch steel pipes welded and cross-braced, set 3-foot in the ground, and finally filled with cement. Somehow, the cows hit that post hard enough to uproot the entire corner section and then shear through it. There were cow bits scattered across the length of a football field.
To complicate matters, when he came off the road the driver also managed to take out our gas meter and a telephone/power pole. There were first responders of every stripe, and none of 'em could get close enough to check on things due to the cloud of natural gas still streaming from the severed meter.
Finally, the gas was cut off and repaired, and the cow bits cleaned up. We even managed to set the corner fence section back up to keep our horses in. Not that any of the horses wanted anything to do with that particular corner right about now.
Surprisingly enough, no person was injured. The tree wasn't even terribly damaged and is still standing (if Google Earth is the be believed).
Life seemed to return to normal for Christmas Eve. You know the drill... snuggled and sugar plums, when put on the lawn there arose such a clatter...
One of the cows had managed to bounce off of every other cow and, with the other cows being a bit hard to identify, been missed in the clean up. Finally, she had shaken off the shockiness and was bellowing to be fed.
Yes, I'll ever forget that Christmas Cow. Nor will I forget the roast we had for New Years dinner...
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