I See Dead Cows

Most people probably know that a not entirely uncommon design touch in western front yards is the cow skull. I don't know where the tradition originally started, but now and then in a desert-landscaped front yard you'll see a cow skull, preferably with horns. I guess it's a reminder of the harshness of the environment, or the economic impact of ranching, or the deep marks that cattle ranching left on the culture of the southwest (not so much these days, but powerfully so when I was a kid growing up in Flagstaff).

Heck, even my dad had a cow skull in his yard, but his life was complicated by the fact that neighborhood dogs used to steal his cow skull. He'd find it upside-down and gnawed in some other yard and he'd bring it home, only to have dogs drag if off again (I can only imagine that the dogs in question thought it was the coolest Milk-Bone they'd ever seen). He eventually attached it to a stake with baling wire to confound the pooches.

The point is that though cow skulls are not very common in front yards these days, they aren't entirely unheard-of. But give someone a little slack and they go mad. It's like the people to start out with a single garden gnome and next thing you know they're installing a twenty-foot-tall sheet metal giraffe sculpture in their yard (don't laugh, I know where two such sheet metal giraffes can be had). Give someone a cow skull and a free hand, and next think you know, they build something grisly and weird.

There is a house down the road a piece (about a mile, which qualifies as "a piece"). It's sort of a McMansion thing, much bigger than the other custom homes in the area, and considerably more ornate. And its owner, a man who I imagine has a reputation for stretching questionable ideas painfully out of shape, decided to put cow skulls in his yard. Yes, skulls. And not content with mere skulls, he put whole dead cows in his yard. There's a scatter of spinal columns, ribcages, leg bones and the like; it looks almost exactly like four cows wandered for miles across the parched desert before finally dying in that spot of thirst and hopelessness. It's what Stephen King would come up with if he were a landscaping contractor, except he'd probably drill faux bullets holes in the skulls just for kicks. It's grisy, and it's depressing, like photographs of a dried-up waterhole in some drought-stricken part of Africa.

Unanswered (and, really, unasked) is the question of where one gets that many cow parts. Unanswered (and, again, unasked) is the question of why. But this is America; bad taste is never asked why.