No Stranger to Danger

We had a little incident in my barn. And when I say barn, I really mean … I’m not sure what. It’s a rustic collection of wood planks, tree stumps, tin and chain-link fence. When you look at it from the front, it looks like someone set up a street-taco joint in the middle of a petting zoo. But petting isn’t encouraged; I’m definitely not a fan.

That’s what it looked like. It looks different now.

Here’s what happened. Rachel, Leah and I were relaxing in the "barn." We had eaten the nightly ration of hay and were preparing to dive into the main course, a feed mixture of sweet corn, meat that I assume is something other than beef (it better not be beef!) and a variety of chopped grasses. This savory delight goes down smooth, delivering a slight aftertaste of rye and sorghum. And every now and then you note a tint of bluegrass — it’s quite sublime.

On that night, though, the flavor fest was not to be. It started raining.

Hard.

To get a sense of how hard, imagine a massive water trough covering the entire sky, and near it, a bunch of super-cool zebu minding their own business. Now imagine a Longhorn crashing the party. He’s bumping into everybody and blathering his usual nonsense about brands and bloodlines … typical big-cow behavior. He pays no attention to the huge trough that’s right behind his fat, dumb butt, backs into it and knocks it over. The resulting deluge of water is the kind of rain we were getting. And it quickly turned the ground in our living quarters into cold soft goo.

But that was only the beginning. The creek that runs behind our property breached its banks and rushed on our barn; in a matter of minutes the water level was knock-knee high. Rachel and Leah had panic in their eyes, so I ran in small circles as fast as I could. This is my go-to technique in the face of danger —it usually freaks out anyone nearby because they can tell that I’m super stoked and not going to take any guff from anyone. I don’t know if it was me or the flood (I’m thinking it was me), but as soon as I belted out a thunderous “mooooooooo,” the wall blew off of the rear of the building and the fencing for the pen dislodged and started floating downstream. The girls looked at me in awe! I suggested that there’d be plenty of time for adoration later; first I had to get them to safety. I nudged the girls to where the fence used to be and we high-tailed it to higher ground. There, we enjoyed snacking on the ripe, fruitful earth and watching the river that was now flowing in our grazing pasture.

Over the course of a few hours, we saw our compost stations float by as well as various sporting goods, building materials and about a thousand logs. We even saw a couch float into our pasture and lodge into the fence — that really cracked us up!

The two leggers came out once the waters receded and worked the rest of the day trying to fix things up. They did the best they could but the “barn” was beyond repair. Fortunately, our neighbor has a place for us to lodge at night, so we’re definitely counting our blessings.

The two-leggers are looking into new barn constructions. I hope they get one that’s heavily reinforced. Though I can try to keep my cow powers in better check, I can’t make any promises, especially when looking danger square in the face.

‘Til next time,

Jake the Zebu