Paul Richardson: Counting the cows

Often, I prefer to take the roads less traveled. Secondary lettered routes that wind through the countryside, often separating the residence and the surrounding lawn from the barnyard that lies just across the road. Roads that wind through the rolling meadows and alongside fields filled with row crops. Pasturelands that are either grazed by cattle or harvested for hay but bordered by a narrow two-lane road that is silent except for the sound of my motorcycle engine.

The safety of not competing with other traffic for that domain is an added bonus, but the real value is the enjoyment of being exposed to the surrounding nature without being inhibited by the walls of the cabin where most drivers are contained. 

If I am held in one of those environments, I often reach for that knob that controls the multitude of devices which deliver sounds that fill the space inside and turn the driving experience from any type of experience into simply passing time from the departure to the arrival at a different location.

The good wife is from a small town that is closer to the Mississippi River than to the Kansas border. Years ago, when we would plan on travelling to spend the holidays with her family, she would often leave a day or two ahead of me. This would permit me to finish my work and then ride to meet up with her at a predetermined location, usually the home of a family member. 

At some point I decided that instead of traveling the normal routes along the interstate or other high traffic thoroughfares, I would find a way to take the lesser roads and count the cows. 

It was then that I discovered with a little planning that I could cross the lower portion of the state on secondary lettered routes, for the most part that is. Occasionally, I would be forced to travel short distances on a primary route in order to connect with another secondary route going in the right direction, but this ranged from a few hundred yards to distances that were normally less than one mile. Once the connection to the next lettered route was made, I could take off again on my journey, just counting the cows.

During my formative years, it was often the highlight of the week to take a Sunday afternoon sightseeing drive. Sometimes that would be accompanied with a picnic lunch, but often it would follow a Sunday dinner when we would all pile into the car and just go for a drive. The destination was usually dependent upon a location that one of my parents wanted to see, for whatever reason. The reason didn’t really matter to me, it was the journey and not the destination that held the value. 

This was the southwest Missouri version of a “walk-about” and could only be jeopardized if on the return trip we passed through Sulfur Springs, Arkansas. It was inevitable that if we stopped at the city park in Sulphur Springs, counting the cows would be forgotten and my sister and I would insist on sampling the water from the hand pumps located there. 

It was a long way from Sulphur Springs to any location that had clear, fresh water. It is hard to count the cows if one thinks they are actually dying from having consumed the liquid that came out of those pumps!