Fear of Cattle
The weather having softened somewhat today, I fired up the R100 and took it out on the road to make sure my driving skills hadn’t deteriorated. I pulled out into the correct lane – that would be the right one this side of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth, I think. The shift from a 225cc buzzing insect to a 1 liter airplane also didn’t throw me.
The lack of horns was a little unnerving, however. How are you supposed to know where people are, if they are not constantly honking their location? After a few miles I realized that there were no other cars – or trucks or bicycles or motorcycles or mopeds or ox-carts or pedestrians or anything whatsoever on this excellently paved road – so I settled down into a pleasant late-season cruise.
Until I came to the first blind curve.
No, you can’t take a blind curve at speed. You simply don’t know what is going to be on the other end. Twice in India there was a bus taking the corner inside – that is to say, in my lane – and once there were two trucks, side by side, just like in the movies, but without that element of unreality that gives you a feeling of secure exhilaration. It is true that travel is an art, and drivers in India, for sheer force of self-preservation, have become a sea of Fred Astaires or Ginger Rogerses, and the beauty of their non-confrontational dance is something to behold. The trucks resolved their blockade moments before I had to pass, Manny brought his knee in tight so it wasn’t left behind, and there… There! What was there to worry about? We cruised onto the straightaway and clear sailing.
The real problem came when we rounded the corner to find those who weren’t so practiced at dancing… or who hadn’t been fed self-preservation for breakfast. Twenty-five miles an hour and rolling sweetly round the bend… only to find an entire herd of cattle clotting the road. Brake and downshift! Honk many times – they pretty much take note of the sound, but don’t act on it. Finally we weave our way between the shoulders and horns – this is the sharp and pointed kind, by the way – and out the other end into… temporarily clear sailing!
That was not the first, nor would it be the last encounter with highway cattle. Nearing dusk, a dark steer broadside in my lane, on a curve. I must honk and edge around it… but look! A bus is coming around as well! I stop and watch the cow, as it watches me, as the bus rolls on by.
I wonder – and there is reason to wonder – what would happen if you hit a cow-pie on a turn? There are sufficient cow-pies to unwittingly perform this experiment. When you approach a cow, and it is walking in the very middle of the road, what is protocol? Generally speaking, as you approach, it gets a bit nervous, lowers its head, and shakes its horns at you – changing their location enough that evasive maneuvering can be required.
The calves are worse, because they are still skittish.
Worse than that, the dogs, which were born skittish, and who move quickly and far less predictably than cows. They do value their lives, however, and make an effort to stay clear; one that is not always entirely successful.
Then there are the wild pigs – or maybe they are domesticated, running free doesn’t seem to mean much. Wild pigs are far worse than dogs, because they haven’t hung out with people enough, and don’t quite get what’s going down. They value their skins, but don’t quite know what to do with them, zigzagging left and right like little squealing bullets, aiming for your tires.
Whew.
Here I am on the seamless, traffic-less roads of northern Massachusetts, flashing back to the nervous energy required to pilot a motorcycle on the other side of the planet. Don’t tell me that memory is not physical! The hands and feet know better.