2000 Lbs Of Angry Pot Roast

A Tale Told With Satellite Pictures

The bit about the angry pot roast is Tom Lehrer's, not mine. I'll 'fess up to that right off the bat.

This is a satellite picture of a small part of a medium-sized ranch down on the Gulf Coast of Texas.



It was about 1200 acres overall, and was more or less a hobby ranch for a man I worked for back in the 80's. He made his eatin' money from oil field equipment, and fooled around with cows on the weekends. He ran at least 200 head of cattle, mostly Beefmasters, with a few Brahmans and mongrel Shorthorns here and there. There were also some goats and whatever odd beasts the foreman was raising.

Here's the house and barn/outbuilding areas. That big white-roofed barn was three stories tall, and could easily fit two 18-wheeler trucks & trailers in the center door area, just to give you some perspective.



I worked as a general go-fer and Boy Friday. Some weekends, I'd be tearing apart and repairing the PTO on the brush hog, other weekends, I'd be working the squeeze cage while the vet inoculated and ear-tagged the cows. The owner let corporate clients hunt deer in the fall, and often I'd head out to maintain the assorted blinds and tree stands.

This is the gigantimous pasture at the front of the property. I forget how many acres is was. Bloody huge. Mostly full of grazing cows.



Here's about where I got the Jeep CJ-5 stuck in some serious gumbo mud while out laying saltlick blocks. When you stick a 4 wheel drive Jeep, you're STUCK.



Here's where I needed to walk to in order to get the tractor and a length of chain to haul the Jeep back to the road.



Here's about where I got in that huge pasture when I remembered that the frigging enormous and frequently enraged stud bull was in the pasture that weekend. Damn thing looked like a Suburban with horns and hooves. He usually napped in the shade, when he wasn't boinking the heifers. "X" marks the usual spot.



The bracket marks where I set the new land speed record for the 440 meter dash, and then leapt a 5 foot barbed wire fence into the goat pasture. Physics tells me I must have placed hands and feet on that fence to get over the fence, but I have no memory of that ever happening.



The stick figure is where I collapsed in a boneless heap, completely out of breath. The "X" is about where the bull was standing when I recovered my wits enough to get up and look around. He wasn't in a foul mood that weekend, and had merely ambled over to see why the goats were raising a ruckus. Apparently, boinking a dozen heifers puts a bull in an amiable state of mind.



Moral of the story? Sometimes it's safer to take the long way around. He might have only boinked 11 heifers that day...