Bosselman's Travel Plaza, December twentysomething 2009

I'll bet most of you from outside the midwest have never been to a real travel plaza. Not a rest stop, not a gas station, CERTAINLY not a convenient store, a travel plaza is a place designed to attract truckers, families traveling cross-country, and aliens. Yes, aliens.

I wasn't feeling too hot as we pulled into the Grand Island Bosselman's travel plaza. Or should I say, the I-80 Grand Island Bosselman's Travel Plaza because evidently there are two such businesses operating in this small town. But the thought of Little Caesar's or Subway and water inspired me to enter. To the left, a miniature virtual Wal-Mart offering everything from pornography (which, I agree, should be readily available at any truck stop) to engraved samurai swords to blue cards saying "Happy Chanukah" on the front. I still can't really figure out which of these three things is the most necessary item in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Say, for instance, you're flying from Grand Island airport to Singapore. Both the porn and the samurai sword could conceivably come in handy in this situation (or shall I say "THE SITUATION") either on the airplane or afterwards in the dirty streets. But say you're headed eastbound to Skokie, IL. It's a Jewish hotbed of the midwest, thus the Chanukah card could come up big. And the porn's probably good for the ride. The sword... maybe seppuku. In other words, you have everything you need just on the left of the travel plaza.

On the right are (as advertised) the Little Caesar's and Subway. Subway offers $5 subs and Caesar's offers pizzas for five dollars hot and ready, 4 words which I rarely like to see together in sentence. And it turns out they're not really hot and ready because of a run on sausage pizza and I'm awful disappointed about this. I chastise the customer service manager (read: pizza maker) taking my order but it doesn't speed up the process of getting the pizza hot and ready ASAP, B.

So I take some time to explore. The bathrooms are lit in a sultry manner and involve large stalls and comfortable-width passages, and I can't tell whether this is a good or bad thing. I like the personal space but it is disturbing to think about what some people may do with so much personal space at a truck stop. Toilet paper is amply stocked but there are stange noises coming from the stall next to mine.

So I leave the bathroom and skip the water fountain. To the arcade I go, and on the way I see an encased model of the alien from Independence Day.... there is also an encased shrunken head that I don't recognize immediately. The arcade is well-stocked with stuffed animal grabs, virtual horse racing, and Skee-Ball. There is nothing funny at all about this dark arcade so I leave.

There is also an entire upstairs the size of a football field. I am not sure what's up there but it stretches my imagination to think what else a weary traveler might need that's not available downstairs.

I went for a comment card, and I found the greatest thing of all. It's going to take some explaining because I still can't make heads or tails of it. It was, at its essence, a small advertisement, a veritable mobile/diorama (haven't used that word since 3rd grade) comprised of several index cards and pamphlets advertising three things: a do-it-yourself eyeglass repair kit (not displayed), improved fuel economy (method undescribed), and total consciousness, which obviously comes via the Dalai Lama (twelfth son of the lama). All of these products refer back to the same 800 number. And I'll be damned if I didn't write down the number. So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.

Finally, the pizza was hot and ready, which evidently requires the stars to align and them to pronounce your name correctly (J.....K....?) So we sat and ate and people-watched (which could be a completely seperate blog in its own right) and I wrote my comment card. It went something like this:

"I am a grown man and I have never been so scared in my life. There are aliens here. Really. They are in glass cases. And my pizza was NEITHER hot NOR ready (thus coordinating my conjunctions in CAPITALS for EFFECT). There were suspicious sounds going on in the bathroom. Refills should be free. Sincerely yours."

I went back to sleep in the Mazda afterwards as we neared Denver. But just regular sleep, not sleep in the Sylvia Plath sense of the word.

RetiredJK, Cowboy for a day

Dear readers, it's been a while; I've been in Centennial long enough that new material is getting sparse. But this weekend, I had the opportunity to join some neighbors on a cattle drive. Now, usually a cattle drive involves herding cattle from, say, Texas to Montana. This was a mini-drive, going from one pasture, across the rural highway, to another pasture. But for me any cattle drive is a big deal. Still lacking in a cowboy hat and boots, and chaps, and many other things necessary to herd cattle, I substituted my Harvard rugby T-shirt, cheap sunglasses, and Seven for All Mankind black jeans. I heard plenty of "City Slicker" epithets, but I'm sure they were all in good humor! I didn't bother to tell them that I am military suburban by birthright, urban by obligation, and a born-again normadic country boy by choice.


We started the day fixing a fence through which the neighbors' cattle were entering the hay fields. This is evidently poor form by the neighbors for not tending to their cattle. It's also quite a drain on the hay supply, which I had always thought was infinite. So we rode out to the hay pasture. I know that you're wondering where I learned to ride a horse, but they took pity on me and let me ride an ATV for the day. They're really no comparison to horses as far as mobility, and I still think shooting someone from a horse would be much cooler than shooting them from an ATV. Heck, lancing or slashing someone from a horse would be even cooler and probably contribute to some medieval cachet.

Amazingly, Kid Rock doesn't just blare from every ATV when it leaves the factory; you actually have to have a CD. So we rode our ATV's out to the affected section of fence, and the cows were so scared of me they actually left the hay and ran back through the fence. We used an incredibly low-tech but highly effective (which, by the way, is also how I would describe the intrauterine device as a method of contraception or the skyhook as a way to score baskets) tool to repair the fence; it grabbed the two broken ends, racheted them together, and allowed enough slack to twist the broken ends of wire together. And by "we used" I mean "I rode around in circles on the ATV chasing rabbits". Helluva ranch hand I am.

After fence-mending, we got to the exciting part: herding cattle. Unfortunately, it doesn't require any roping, calf-tying, or bull riding. I was really hoping to jump off my ATV and tackle a calf but that would have been totally out of line. Anyway, there's a reason you "herd" cattle-- they love being in a herd. In fact, it's alot harder to remove one cow from the herd than it is to move an entire herd of cattle. There's also a reason that the dogs they use are called "herding" dogs; they love harassing cows more than that bestiality site on the Internet... or so I "heard". So in short, we were pretty much along for the ride, as the lead cows and the dogs do all the work. I attempted to high-center or flip my ATV (disability, here I come!) going as fast as possible but they ACTIVELY RESIST flipping and high-centering likely due to some feat of engineering or perhaps an act of Jesus (thanks for saving me, big man! Pay off my credit cards now.)

I actually found a sweet picture of Sarah Palin (I still think she's gorgeous) riding an ATV with a child, and there would be nothing better than a picture of her shooting wolves from an ATV, but alas my uploading ability is curtailed.

So we herded the cows, bulls and calves all into the pens for sorting, which is easy because they don't even resist entering a closed space. Then, we culled out the bulls to put them in their own pasture. This was probably the scariest part because bulls have horns. And they still weight 3/4 ton or more. Their lack of sensitivity for my safety was shocking and I had to pull a move straight out of a rodeo and hop a fence to avoid an oncoming bull several times. But pretty much, you let the bull out of the pen with minimal others, then try to isolate the bull and get it into the chute. One bull got an injection of antibiotics (good old DURA-PEN, penicillin for hoof rot) which involved immobilizing the bull from the neck up in the chute and injecting him IM on both sides. He enjoyed it slightly more than a child might.

Next, we got to weigh the calves. They're pretty damn cute, but they will bite your finger off. They also weigh 300 pounds apiece and can kick you like a ninja. This part consisted of us letting a bunch of calves out of each pen and then trying to block their moms from following them; the calves get pretty lonely when seperated from their mothers. But weighing the calves is fun, I actually learned what a cattle prod was, and that is no metaphor! It actually is a cattle prod that you use to shock the calves on the buttocks. I didn't try it even though I usually try to shock myself with anything available (e.g. electric fly swatters, dog collars). But you pretty much push one into the chute, close the second gate (at the end of the scale), and when the calf steps on the scale you close the gate behind it.

This part added some excitement. We got to castrate a male, which is not nearly quite as exciting as it sounds. You actually just tie a couple bands around its scrotom and it withers up and dies (what a sad idea, I would not go quietly if someone tried this on me). Imagine if all the cows figured this out and rebelled, and pulled each others bands off. You would have half a herd of bulls! It's like something from Animal Farm that's not a metaphor for communism. So anyway, one of the calves had not been castrated during their drive earlier this fall. Since I had gloves (the only necessary equipment I actually managed to bring), I got to rope the calf around the neck and hold it back while they wrestled it down. Main job hazard: rope burns, kick injuries, jealousy that I couldn't wrestle the calf. So I slipped the rope (aka lasso) around its neck in the chute, they opened the chute and wrestled the calf to the ground, and, lo and behold, no balls. For some reason it was marked as uncastrated but it indeed what. So I slapped it in the nose for good measure.

Then we let all the calfs and their mothers reunite, and led them out to pasture. This was, as usual, very unremarkable because the cows lead themselves out to pasture. For me it was another excuse to ride the ATV recklessly. After we let the cows out, we took the back way home, did some sweet jumps, and had lunch. What do cowboys eat for lunch. Evidently they eat Subway because that's what we had. And plenty of full-flavor American lagers, although as we discussed that day there's really only one that remains American in mass production, and that's PBR. PBR ME ASAP, brosef.

Also, contact me via text message for an interesting three-way trade I made the other day involving a freshly killed blue grouse (it's like a chicken.)