Mount Sunflower
Kansas
March 2013
Up the road, a right turn at the hand-painted sign…
MOUNT SUNFLOWER
Bump Ba-Bump! Over the cattle guard.
I don’t recall ever seeing a cattle guard in the eastern U S of A. While it’s true that Kansas has almost four times as many cows as my home state of Pennsylvania, we still have a lot of cows. But no cattle guards.
Cow guards. Cattle guards. Conjures up a picture of an armed soldier standing by a cow, or better, a cow in uniform.
A cattle guard keeps cows over here and doesn’t allow them to go over there, or vice versa. Wherever there is a gate or an opening in the fence, a set of horizontal steel rails is placed in a depression in the ground or road so that the top is level with the road surface. Vehicles can drive over the cattle guard but cows, who are not stupid, take one look at the rails and know that their hooves would get caught if they tried to walk across. So they don’t. Clever cows.
Cows are not stupid, as I say. As confirmation, one dairy farmer told me about cows, “They can smell a hole in the fence from two miles away!” On the other hand, sheep are stupid. Cows are a heck of a lot smarter than sheep. Cows are definitely smarter than turkeys, and when talking about turkeys, we’re begging the definition of smart. The same dairy farmer said, “The four dumbest animals in the world are sheep, turkeys, chickens and tourists.”
Across the cattle guard we go. We drive a short distance in the muddy, snowy pasture, right up to the high point of Kansas. Mount Sunflower, 4039 feet high, in the middle of, apparently, nowhere in particular. Evidence reveals that cows have been here, and I don’t mean cattle guards.