A Car, A Cow, A Catastrophe

Glen took an excursion with Kenny,
like they always do,
to Oregon for the BYU game this weekend.

He never made it.

He came in contact with a large object.

This is what our new Avalon now looks like:

These are Glen's words as I was trying to write them down as he was talking to his kids on the phone when he got home:

The GPS said to take this 2-lane and Kenny said he'd looked on Google Maps and this was the most direct route and so we went with it. I was going on 2-lane roads that was supposed to be a straight shot. It's a 2-lane road for 350 miles! Well, 240 miles into a 2-lane road, we're coming into a city and I'm slowing down and all of a sudden there is a black blob in front of the car. I hit the brakes and smack this black cow standing broadside on the road. It's pitch black and 11:30 at night.

I hit this cow, my car is still running, the front is badly damaged. I pull the car to the side. I'm worried about cars behind me and that they will hit the cow because it's in the middle of the road flailing. I called 911 and said I just hit a cow and they ask me where I am and I don't know where I am.

A car is coming. I go out and stand in front of the cow so the car won't hit it. That guy pulls over and it's a kid who lives there and so I can get him to tell the sheriff where I am. I hear the sirens coming. I guide a few cars by and here comes a truck with a trailer barreling down the road, swerves to miss me and he hits the cow. That put the cow out of its misery. I thought the trailer was going to flip over. He pulls off. The sheriff gets there. I'm still trying to stop cars from hitting the cow. I mean, it's going to kill somebody.

The sheriff calls in reinforcements so we can get the cow off the road. He asks if I hit the dead cow down in the gully. I said I only hit the black one, not the brown one. So then they take all our information. The guy in the truck comes up and says we need to find out whose cows these are so the farmer can fix these vehicles.

The police says it's open range down here and you'll have to pay for the cow. What a nightmare. They call a tow truck cause my front end is bashed in. The tow truck gets there and gets the car on the tow truck. I'm asking them if there's a car rental in the city. No! The choices are 120 miles forward or 200 miles back. We ask if they can give us a ride into the city and we'll deal with it tomorrow.

The hotel is a fleabag as you can well imagine in a city of about 2,000. So every time I try to fall asleep, I see a cow crashing through my windshield. It came up onto the hood and it's a miracle it didn't come through the windshield. It's a miracle Kenny and I didn't get hurt. Kenny got a bruise on his knee and that's it.

I can't sleep all night. I finally get up and turn on my computer. I went to Google Maps for my own curiosity's sake and had we stayed on the Interstate to Portland and gone south then to Corvalis, it would have added 55 miles and 5 minutes to my travel time and it would have been a car and a cow cheaper.

So we're trying to figure out what to do. A bus goes through at 5:20 tonight going to Boise. Kenny calls a taxi. Roy's Taxi Cab shows up and is going to charge us $200 to take us to Boise and the driver appears drunk. The guy leaves and says he's going to get another car because that car won't make it to Boise. We walk by a couple coming from out of the hotel and I asked them if they were going to Boise and I said it would be worth $100 to them if we could hitch a ride with them. They said sure after we told them what happened.

They gave us a ride to Boise. They get us to the airport and now I have a little rental car that I drove back home. That's the story. I don't know what's going to become of it.

The car's in a lot with the front end bashed in. No pictures of the cow. When we were leaving the city, they'd already picked the cow up--picked both the cows up.

Rebecca asked: At what point did you realize you were going to miss the BYU game? Which are you mourning more, the loss of the car, the loss of not seeing the game or the loss of the cow?

Glen said: The rental car had Sirius XM radio and so we got to hear the game as we were driving home.

Abe's parting words to his father were: MOOOOOOOOOOO!!!