TALES OF THE SOUTHWEST: I See Dead Things

   Cow head.

            There was a cow head up against the chain link fence by the side of the road.

            I took a picture of it.

            It seemed surreal.

While bicycling along the country lanes of the High Plains of eastern New Mexico I’ve seen a lot of dead bovines by the side of the road.  If I was one of those high-dollar writers who authored books and attended soirees in Santa Fe and Sedona I suppose I could write florid “purple prose” about the dead calf I saw by the side of the road a few months back.  Something like, “I stared at the dried, empty husk that once held a living spirit.  The tender mouth that took sustenance from its mother’s milk now lifeless and bone dry in the New Mexico sun.”

Yeef.  Too...too...

I’m glad I don’t write “purple prose” and live in Santa Fe.

Nope.

I’m just a bicycle riding, working dude, so I’ll just tell you that the calf carcass dried up and blew away with one of our 50 mile-per-hour “spring breezes.”

That calf, and other ones like it I see from time to time, isn’t the biggest dead thing I’ve noticed while bicycling.  There was a whole cow that someone left by the side of the road a couple of years ago.  I remember it because I rode past the carcass every day for about a month-and-a-half, holding my breath for a few ticks. 

There are businesses in the area that drop by dairies, feedlots and ranches, pick up those cattle that have gone to that “Great Pasture in the Sky” and haul them away.  This one didn’t get on the truck.  I found out that the cow carcass collectors only pick them up within 48 hours after they die.  How they can tell they’ve been dead for over 48 hours I have no idea, but that’s why they work their gig and I work mine.

            I found it tough to believe that someone would dump a full-grown cow by the side of the road.  I’d seen this a few times in Mexico, I didn’t expect such a sight in my own town.  The “south of the border” bovine I remember most was this huge dead rotting bull, legs sticking straight out from the bloated carcass, this by the side of Mexican Highway 2 just outside the town of Agua Prieta, Sonora.  Folks were just walking by it as if it were a parked pickup.  And that’s about how big this bloated thing was…I mean it seemed as big as an F-150 pickup with a camper on the back.  Even inside a closed up, air-conditioned car my nose caught its wonderful fragrance.

            Anyway, back that dead cow I had to bicycle by...So I called the sheriff’s department only to find out that if the dead cow truck had no interest in the carcass by the road it would stay.  Bottom line:  No one could or would do anything about the dead cow by the side of the road.

            So day after day I rode by the thing.  The boy within me began to see it as kind of a science experiment.  While the adult in me thought how inconsiderate it was of someone to just leave this rotting hulk by the side of the road, the kid in me wanted to go over and poke it with a stick.  I imagined that its great bloatedness would deflate with a long farting noise accompanied by a nasty stench.  But I did not stop and poke it.

            I’m not going to go into great detail about how nature took care of this thing, but in the space of about 45 days it went from a decomposing mass to nothing but bones and hide.  What was left got mulched up by a passing county mower.

            While there are better places to take dead cattle, it was pretty neat to see how New Mexico’s sun and wind took care of things.  I’m sure a lot of happy, skittering, crawling critters enjoyed having the carcass around too.

            And then there’s that cow head up against the chain link fence.

            It’s still there.

            It looks like it’s not going to go away anytime soon.

Of course dead cows aren't the only dead critters one sees whilst pedaling the roads of the region.  

I see rabbits, skunks, snakes, the occasional turtle, cats and dogs.  

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