ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Last weekend we drove up to Des Moines to visit my boyfriend’s mom and sister, and also to see his aunt and uncle, who live about a block away from his mom.  There is this one particular rest stop on I-35 on our way up there, which has an Iowa visitor center and a dog trail and other nice things and it is very fancy and we always stop there.  We don’t stop at the Missouri one just past the state line.  It really isn’t nearly as good.

On our way back this weekend, we did pass the Missouri one and my boyfriend commented, “Hey, I guess that rest stop has buffaloes going for it.”  Thinking he meant real buffalo were over there near the rest stop, I turned, shocked. It was a series of flat metal buffalo shaped cutouts.  So people going by on the highway can see buffalo silhouettes, but there aren’t actually any real bison hanging out.

I told him I thought at first he meant real ones and that it kind of freaked me out because buffalo aren’t safe.  It spawned this kind of interesting conversation.  Now, I-35 is a north/south bound highway, so in general it probably doesn’t have that much traffic from people who aren’t at least vaguely familiar with the buffalo.  If we’d been on I-70 or I-80 I might think it was more likely we’d get some furrners who weren’t from our parts.  But regardless, there are probably at least some people who go to the rest stop who don’t know that buffalo aren’t just unusually big cows.  People who don’t know that buffalo have to be kept behind eight inch steel barriers because of their horrific brute strength.  People who don’t know that they cannot be killed by conventional means.

And if people like that saw buffalo at a rest stop, they might just go up to them all playful like and then wind up being killed by a rampaging animal.  That’s why they have to keep silhouettes there and people just have to imagine the buffalo instead of actually seeing them for real.