Somewhere between Soda Springs and Tin Cup

Each year my folks rent a big ol' four bedroom condo in Teton Village and take their three kids, of which I am one, and our families up there for five days. It is more fabulous than I can describe. They've been doing it for years. We've even had the same condo every year, until this year, when we got the one next door. It's even more fashionably furnished. But I digress.

This year on his way up to Jackson in their suburban, my brother hit a cow. The first we heard about it was an hour ago when my oldest niece texted a rather brief announcement. Something like "... we just hit a cow." Hearing this freaked out my mother, who is a professional worrier anyway. Despite it being past her bedtime, she can't make herself go to bed. She is knitting furiously, occasionally asking those of us with phones if we've heard anything. My niece finally responded that everything was okay and they were back on the road.

- I came back to finish the story - They got in sometime after midnight, but gave the full story the next morning. Everyone is okay, the suburban is okay, and they actually hit two cows, who both ran away. My SIL, who knows cows, assured us one will probably die, if not both. She says they hit them pretty hard, probably broke one's hip, and gave the other one a really nasty headache. There were lots of jokes, of course, about "Are we having steak tonight?"

The story that emerged the next morning was that the cows were laying in an alternating pattern on the road, creating a slalom course of sorts. My SIL saw the cow first, yelled "DEER!" about the time my brother saw it.(She's used to driving in the canyon.) The black hide of the cows blended in perfectly with the dark night. My brother swerved to avoid the first cow, and would have just bounced into the ditch except for the 2nd cow that loomed up in their headlight. (They had just found out at the previous stop that they only had one.) No one painted me a picture, but from my understanding they ended up going between the cows, sort of bumping both of them, instead of T-Boning (ha ha) one or the other. The braking, swerving, bumping, and the cascade of luggage from the back of the suburban woke up their four daughters and added the element of wildly screaming girls to the excitement.



Those black cows are mean, how they lay in wait on the road for you like that... Just look at her... She's challenging you to a duel with her eyes.


Hubby suggested they get a couple of little vinyl cow silhouettes to put on the side of the suburban. My sister tells me that one more and they qualify as cow aces.