Bull Tales

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This past Wednesday morning the police department in Norfolk, Nebraska (population approx. 25,000), received a call alerting them to the fact that there was a car cruising their downtown area which had a "cow" as a passenger.  The responding officers expected to find that the vehicle and its driver were actually transporting some small bovine, such as a calf, but what they found was something far more substantial.

The driver,  Lee Meyer of Neligh, Nebraska, was navigating his specially modified mid-sized sedan through downtown Norfolk where he and his passenger were enjoying the sights.  The passenger was Mr. Meyer's full-grown Watusi bull, a creature named "Howdy Doody" who appears with Meyer in parades and at special events.  Part of the car's roof and half of its windshield had been removed in order to accommodate the bull, a member of a breed which is known for its very large and long horns.

Police gave Mr. Meyer several warning tickets and sent him his passenger home.

News photos taken of the front of the car showed a definite tilt toward the passenger side, but none of the articles that I came across gave a weight for the bull.   So I asked ChatGPT and quickly learned that Howdy Doody could weigh between one and two thousand pounds, and possibly even more depending on his genetics, diet, and overall health.

And he definitely looked healthy.

That story reminded me of two close encounters that I have had with bulls.  

The first occurred in the fall of 2005 when I was living in Leavenworth, Kansas, and working at historic Ft. Leavenworth.  During the year that I was there, my youngest son, Tim was working on a Masters in Fine Arts just down the road at the University of Kansas in Lawrence where he maintained his own residence.  One evening my oldest son, Nick, and my grandson, Boone, were visiting and we drove to Lawrence to see a play performed which Tim had written as a part of his MFA program.  As we pulled back into Leavenworth later that evening - sometime around midnight - and were driving down the quiet main drag, we encountered a longhorn steer galloping along the other side of the roadway heading out of town - and he was being chased by a frantic city policeman on foot with another following along in a car.

I never learned the back story on that incident, nor did I have any idea what those cops would have done with the steer if they had somehow manage to corner him - but my sympathies were with the long-horned creature and I hope that he had a really great run!

Several years later a friend and I went on a holiday tour of Vietnam.  We landed in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) on Christmas Eve of 2011 and slowly proceeded north with a pair of local tour guides over the next few days until we arrived in Hanoi on New Year's Eve -  and ultimately flew out of the country on the first day of 2012.

The most ubiquitous sight in Vietnam at that time was people riding small motorcycles, all of which, regardless of their actual manufacturers, were referred to as "Hondas."  It was not unusual to see entire families - a father, mother, and several small children, riding on one "Honda," and at stoplights on many of the large streets of Ho Chi Minh City literally thousands of these small vehicles would bunch up waiting on the light to change.   They resembles swarms of locusts on wheels.

One of the popular tourist postcards showed an old man on his Honda driving along a busy highway and transporting what appeared to be a full-grown water buffalo strapped across the back portion of the bike's seat.  "Interesting," I thought, knowing that getting ready to take that picture had probably required the work of several people and some heavy duty drugs for the water buffalo.

But one day as we were riding north with the guides in the front seat navigating and driving, and my friend and I in the back watching the scenery go by, we suddenly passed two Vietnamese men on an old Honda, and strapped across the seat between them was a full grown male water buffalo.  The buffalo was bawling and defecating as we passed, and the old man who was on the rear of the bike was laughing.  It all happened so quickly that neither of us were able to get a picture - but it was a scene fit for a postcard - and one I will never forget.

The fellows in Vietnam were probably taking their bull to market.  I hope that Howdy Doody is able to escape that cruel fate and can spend his retirement roaming endless green pastures, or, at the very least, exploring America from a roomy RV!

And that's no bull!