CATEGORY: MRS. ANDERSON
PHOTO: THE BIG COW

Bob and I were driving back to Minneapolis to visit his family.  We were tootling along through North Dakota when up ahead in the distance we saw a black and white Holstein cow standing on the top of a hill.  I got a dizzy feeling.  It must be an optical illusion: either the cow was oversize, or the hill was not as large as I had at first thought.  I decided it must be the hill, because whoever heard of hills on the Great Plains?  This one must actually be quite low and small.  It was the logical conclusion since another “whoever heard” was: who ever heard of a cow being as big as this one seemed.

One thing we had gotten used to in the mid west was giant statues.  We had seen a gigantic Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe.  We had seen a huge dinosaur and a hot dog that consisted of a ten foot long wiener dog in a bun. We had seen a humongous long-horn steer.  It was as if the flatness of the plains needed to be compensated for by the creation of colossal monuments.  But whenever we saw such a leviathan, it was near a shopping center or a truck stop or some other man-made structure.  This cow was just standing there all by itself quietly chewing its cud. (Well, it must have been chewing its cud.  That is what cows do when they stand still, after all).  There was nothing else in sight except farm land and the grassy knoll upon which it stood.  There were not even any other cows.

But as we got closer we realized it actually was the cow that was big, not a tiny hill.  The cow must have been left on that hill by extraterrestrials from the giant cow planet.  It was immense!  It was not chewing its cud; it was just staring straight ahead.  It was not moving at all, not even to twitch a fly off its flank.  There were no flies.  A fly, to be in proportion to the cow would have to have been as large as an eagle.

There was a dirt road leading up the hill from the highway.  We drove up and examined this beast.  It sounded hollow when we thunked it, so it must have been made of fiberglass.  Its black and white spots were painted on; it had white clouds in a black sky all over its back.

After we were back on the highway, we discovered that there actually was a small shopping center hiding behind the hill.  We stopped there and were told that the cow was 50 ft. Long, 38 ft. high and had been built by the local dairymen’s association.  You never can tell what you will find in the mid west!