Mooooooo!

May 14, 2011 at 6:22 pm · Filed under Crazy stuff, Mostly true, Stories, the good old days, Weird stuff ·Tagged Arlington Arizona, Charles L. Mashburn, cows, dry washes, EPNG, evil, laughter, moo, story, writer

One more story (for today) about the car from hell then I’ll leave y’all be. This one happened before the car became demon possessed, by the way.

For those who don’t know, in the desert of Arizona there are many dry washes that only have water in them when a good rain occurs. Most of the time they are dry, and in rural areas roads go right down into them, pavement and all. It would not be economically possible to build a bridge over every dry wash in southern Arizona.

One evening, we were on our way home to the EPNG gas plant where we lived, having been in Buckeye for one reason or the other. (For more about the gas plant and the demon possessed car, see my stories, Hot-Diggity Hot Rods, The Car Was Evil, Looking On The Bright Side.) Just before the turn that would take us to the gas plant, there is a wide dry wash. I’m going to guess it is (or was) a hundred yards across, and the bottom of it was three to four feet below the elevation of the road on either side of it. When approaching, you could not see if another car—or anything, for that matter—was in the wash.

We were blasting down the narrow paved road in my hot-rod 442, going about 75 mph (way too fast for that road) when we came to the wash. I loved to hit it going fast, because it made your stomach do that little flip-flop thing. The thing is, if anything was in the wash, you were probably going to hit it if you were going that fast. On this particular day, there was something in the wash; a herd of cattle.

I hit the brakes, the cows began to scatter, and I began to curse. Cows were flying by me in a blur of brown and white, and the car would be sideways for a few seconds then going forward; I’d stomp the brakes and swerve; let off the brake, and steer around some of the cows, all the while thinking I was about to demolish my beautiful car.

It was a miracle! We missed them all…. but one. There was one big cow in the middle of the road, several on either side of it, and we had nowhere to go to miss them.  I braced for impact, and then the front of the Oldsmobile met the rear end of the cow with a solid, THUNK.

My heart was going ninety miles an hour, and I had a death grip on the steering wheel. When we bumped the cow, it moved a step or two ahead, looked back over its shoulder at me and said, “Mooooooo!” Then it ambled off to the side of the road. I think it was mad, because when it got off the pavement it turned and glared at me.

The damage was minimal, and I was able to fix it myself. I had body repair tools, remember. (See my stories, 22 Holes-In One Tire?, and 22 Holes! – And One Big Dent!)

I was a bit more cautious when approaching dry washes after that little episode.

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