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Heh, “Chasing Vicky” made me grin...:) It made me think of how much I like cows. (I am going to guess it is quite different when you own them, but...perhaps not-what was it like for you?)

I have three cow-related stories, but my favorite took place back in the early 1980’s in Western Massachusetts.

I was driving west to meet some friends to do some hiking and camping, so I had to get going early, and it was perhaps four or five AM on a Sunday morning early in September.

I was driving a yellow 1976 MG Midget, and although I was hardcore about driving it with the top down because I really liked it, it was too misty. Heavy wet fog.

The sun wasn’t up yet, but what early light there was got completely stifled by the sticky gray fog. You couldn’t see too far off.

I was in Western Massachusetts approaching Belchertown, where my oldest brother stayed to live after he graduated from UMass. It is a pretty rural area. On an early Sunday morning, there was nobody on the roads at that hour.

I approached a T in the road where I was going to go left, I think it was on Route 202, which was far busier than the road I was on.

The intersection where I had to stop was at the top of a small upward grade. I had traveled that road before, so even though I couldn’t see what was off the road on either side due to the dim light and thick fog, I remembered it was largely fields.

At the intersection, there was an old style street light with a wide, green shade that lit the entire intersection, and dangling suspended in the air over the road was a blinking red light.

In that fog, that old-style light cast a pale cone of sharply defined illumination that covered a few feet out of the roads that came in, as well as the entire area in the middle of that intersection.

It remembered thinking that is exactly what it would look like with a helicopter or alien spaceship up there looking down.

I slowed down, top up and driver side window open in the cold morning, and approached just below where the cone of light started on my road. As I sat there, trying to determine if it was safe to pull onto the road in that soupy visibility, I heard a sound.

This was just before dawn, in a rural part of the state, on Sunday. So, it was quiet. Even my MG Midget with its twin exhausts was muffled in the fog. But I heard something.

My brain for a split second recognized it as the sound of coconuts being banged together by mischievous boys who had been out of doors all night. Very faint.

Then, as my mind unscrambled it and the sound became louder, you could really tell it was an animal, a large one, not a deer in size, but instead, a moose in stature, with the larger weight and bigger hooves.

And it was getting louder. And closer.

It made me just a bit nervous. I loved driving that little MG Midget with that piss green-yellow color, but getting in a wreck or hitting an animal in that thing would have taken on a different dimension than, say, it would if you were driving a big beefy vehicle, up off the road just a bit!

So, whatever was out there galloping unseen towards me in the mist, it was bigger and faster than me.

As I peered out at the murky intersection in tense anticipation...I heard another sound. A different one.

At the second I heard that metallic sound it resolved visually into a ghostly cow cantering into the cone of light, a big metal bell on its neck flopping from side to side as it ran.

In its surprisingly graceful trot on a paved road, it turned onto the road I was on, and came towards me, the hoves making a clopping cow noise that sounded very powerful. (Even more so, because I couldn’t see what it was.

Total Unconcernedness with me and my little car.

It just looked fixedly in front of it, past me with an absolute studied disinterest, as if I were a telephone color or a tree. She had somewhere to go.

As my head whipped around, I saw the galloping rear end lit by the cone of light dissolve into the dim fog and disappear into the mist behind me.

The whole affair from the first faint sound of hooves to the receding hindquarters into the dark could have only taken about 10-15 seconds at most. But for some reason, some forty years later, it seems like a little clip of film inserted into my head that I can play over and over. Very dreamlike in its appearance now.

And in all of it, I remember thinking “A cow? What is a cow doing here? Coming out of the fog and disappearing like that?”

All I know is: there was something just abjectly beautiful and patently absurd about that cow just materializing out of the dark. Kind of like life itself...:)

“A Cow?”