Traffic

Day 1.  Moving right along.

 If you're hankering to go and check out bucks in their velvet or collect empty beer cans, you could do worse than driving Eastside Road.  It starts in Ft Jones, changes its name to East Callahan somewhere in the middle, and ends up in the city of Callahan.  It's usually the road less travelled.  With exceptions.  Funeral processions, slow tractors, and cattle drives all force the normally slow Eastside drivers to an even slower crawl.

Day 2.  All balled up.

We've driven one of our cattle herds down this road twice in the last week.  The first day was on a Sunday and it was cold and raining and we had a crew of 10 horseback cowboys and cowboygirls.  The cows probably thought they were heading for greener pastures and made it the 5 miles in record time.  The only slowpokes in the bunch were the bulls who were on the last days of their breeding season.  You can guess why they moved slowly.  The next day the herd was vaccinated and dewormed and then on Tuesday we saddled back up with 6 riders and took them another 6 miles to pasture.  By now the cows were skeptical and sore and moved at a turtle's pace.  Even my out-of-shape horse was sulky.  The cows tried to eat every blade of ditch grass along the way and became a mass of several hundred balled up bovines.  There was no driving through them without serious risk of a new cow poo paint job on your rig.  When we finally made it to the pasture the line of cars piled up behind the drive rivaled rush hour on the 405 in LA.

Most people around here accept cattle drives as a minor inconvenience.  I saw a lot of folks driving through with their smart phones out, videoing the progress.  And (at least on this drive) everyone waved, smiled, and gave us an encouraging word.  Life in Scott Valley generally moves at a slow pace, but, especially in the spring, things start to speed up.  We just add a few cows now and then to remind everyone to take a breath, slow down, and smell the manure.