Cows, I Win!

Ashleigh and I play a road-tirp game called, "Cows, I Win". It is a game I learned a number of years ago, and I like it becuase it can be played anywhere in America, and the name of the game perfectly captures the rules. If you see a cow, or many cows, you say "Cows, I Win!", and you have won the game. The game is over, and you won, because you saw cows, and you said the words before anybody else. At that point, the game begins again.

The United States of America has a stunning number of cows in every state and along every stretch of road. We saw cows in the low lands, in the high altitudes, in the lush river valleys and in the sparse grassy desert. We saw brown cows, white cows, black cows, black and white cows. We saw cows grazing, cows resting in the shade, and... well actually that's about all the cows ever do.

We saw a lot of cows leaving Seattle, in Idaho, in Montana, in Wyoming and Utah; we saw many cows in Arizona and New Mexico. But nowhere did we see so many cows as in Bovina, on route 60 in northern Texas, where the welcome sign claimed it to be the cattle capital of the world. Driving along, we saw huge lot after huge lot stuffed shoulder to shoulder with cows, hudreds of thousands of cows, more than half a million, maybe more than a million. There were more cows in Bovina than in all other places combined, no doubt.

Bovina in the kind of place that strains the rules of "Cows, I Win". Usually all the cows in a single field are only good for one victory, but what about a million cows altogether? In the countryside, when fields of dispersed cows stretch for miles, fences are used to distinguish separate groups of cows; but what to do when the cows are pressed so close together that you can't even see the pens dividing them?

As we drove past this incredible ocean of cattle, we forgot about the game and marveled at the quantity. I tried to take a picture but like so many other pictures on this trip it was just impossible to capture the expanse of the image. Truly, Bovina is the cattle capital of the world, and truly it smelled like it. Ashleigh warned me not to light a match.