Picnic of the Dead

Dad has spoken: This is the Ultimate Picnic Spot.

Dad was always tops at picking out the most incredible sites for picnic lunches while we were on family vacations.

One of my favorite memories was when we packed up the gigantic green Ford LTD and headed west from Colorado to the deserts of Utah. It was somewhere just outside of Hanksville, I think, when Dad announced that it was time for lunch.

Unlike many family vacations I've heard rumors of, in my little tribe we actually ate worse on our holidays than we did at home. This was because in Dad's Big Book of Conduct, the idea of eating at someplace even as budget-minded as a Denny's would have been utterly fiscally irresponsible.

Restaurants were a waste of money, and we needed to save our dollars for admission to see The House Where Brooms Stand Up On Their Own, or The Largest Water Faucet On Earth, or whatever.

So we travelled with our own food, which always included this weird bread my Mom baked in a coffee can, a seemingly endless supply of Deviled Ham, and dozens of cans of something called "Beanee Weenee." Also, we had a styrofoam cooler full of hard-boiled eggs and Lawry's Seasoning Salt. The hardboiled eggs were important, because they could be used for for both breakfast and lunch.

But I digress.

A staple on our family vacations.

It was along that desolate stretch of Utah roadway that Dad's keen eye, ever-alert for likely pullouts, spotted a huge cottonwood tree with a dusty parking area and a single decrepit picnic table. 

Within moments of setting up our lunchtime gourmet spread, we were beset by hordes of bees, wasps, and flies. No surprise there, really, considering that the picnic table was flanked by two 50-gallon oil drums serving as trashcans and overflowing with cascading mounds of garbage.

We fled with our food to the confines of the LTD where we sat with the windows rolled up, in August, in the desert, eating our sandwiches and hardboiled eggs while flying insects swarmed around our vehicle like something out of a bad movie on The Sci-Fi Channel.

As luck would have it though, more entertainment was on the way.

I'd guess we were about ten minutes into our meal when a pickup truck from the Utah Department of Transportation pulled in and backed up to what appeared to be a pile of tumbleweeds, dry brush, and some downed tree branches just a few feet in front of our car.

As we ate, we watched the UDOT employee attach a rope to something in the pile of debris, hook the other end to the truck's bumper, then drive slowly forward with something large in tow.

Dragging Away The Cow. A young artist's conception.

I think even Dad paused in his chewing when what we had at first thought were some branches sticking up from a fallen tree in fact proved to be the rigid limbs of the stiff and bloated corpse of a cow.

The truck drove up and over a hill on a dirt trail disappearing deeper into the desert, the cow sort of bouncing along behind like a hideous pull-toy in a cloud of dust. A short time later the truck returned, minus the cow.

Not yet done with his roadside cleanup, the UDOT employee pulled over on the shoulder of the road directly across from us, and giving us an odd look, bent to pick up the remains of another road-kill less than six feet from our car. This time it was a dog, or perhaps a coyote, that we had failed to notice earlier.

The animal's body was flung unceremoniously into the back of the pickup truck, which then pulled away, vanishing into the heat waves rising like specters from the asphalt and leaving us to contemplate the fleeting nature of life over our cans of cold cocktail franks and baked beans.