By Tim Sanders

Oh, writing a humor column is easy," you say. Well, if you think it’s so easy, try this:

Let’s imagine that you are writing a column about Charles Everson and his wife, Linda. Let’s say you make them an average, God-fearing couple living in Westland, Michigan. Let’s say that to celebrate their first wedding anniversary you send your happy couple to visit the Great Northwest because, among other things, it is always capitalized. They’ve just left a church service. You have them driving down scenic Highway 150 about a mile east of Manson, Washington. On their left, the placid waters of Lake Chelan shimmer in the sunlight. God’s in his heaven, and all’s right with the world. Life is good.

So now you decide it’s time to have something dramatic happen to your protagonists, just so your readers won’t get bored and go looking for the remote. Your main writing rule: Keep it realistic. Do you:

a) give the Eversons serious transmission problems,

b) give their minivan serious transmission problems,

c) have Linda turn to Charles and say, "If you ever have great northern beans for breakfast again, you’ll go to church by yourself!" or

d) send Michelle the 600 lb. rodeo cow hurtling down from the sky onto the hood of their minivan?

Not so easy now, is it? Well, one thing which will make it easier is what I call my second writing rule: Never make anything up when the truth will work just as well. This is based on the old journalistic maxim: You should never print a lie if there’s any chance of getting caught.

That would mean that you’d be left with answer number ... uh, d. Last week, according to several news outlets, the Eversons, who are indeed real people, were indeed bombarded by Michelle, an actual 600 lb. rodeo cow who did indeed fall from the sky onto the hood of their 2006 Buick Terraza. Okay, so she didn’t exactly fall from the sky; what she fell from was the top of the Rocky Point cliffs some 200 ft. overhead. Indeed.

Initially, according to Ben Schmitt in his November 6, 2007 Detroit Free Press article, Charles Everson thought he’d hit a deer. Then the following happened, which if I were to write a humor column I would leave out, because it seems even less credible than the notion of a flying cow:

Miraculously, Everson kept driving.
 

After realizing that the 600 lb. object on his hood was a cow, not a deer, or a rabbit or a butterfly, Everson said "I don’t believe it," and repeated it "20 or 30 times," WHILE CONTINUING TO DRIVE!

"Everson pulled over about a mile down the road," Schmitt said.

I’ve never been hit by a falling cow while driving, but I will assure you, with every fiber of honesty in my being, that if it were to happen, I would pull over IMMEDIATELY! I was taught that in my remedial high school driver’s training class, and it has stuck with me.

And no, that is not just hyperbole. We did know what to do in case of a cow bombardment in the little town of Middleville, Michigan. And yes, we studied it in driver’s training. That is because of the Bowerman incident. When I was a kid, the Bowerman family lived on a farm outside our little western Michigan town. One spring, young Freddy Bowerman took his date to the prom. Or it may have been his sister, Linda, who was being taken to the prom, I don’t remember which. For all I know, they were double-dating. I was very young at the time. What I do know for a fact is that the car, which was traveling down M-37 either to or from the town of Middleville, contained one or more Bowermans, and somewhere between the Bowerman farm and Middleville, a cow jumped into the window. Actually, it didn’t jump all the way into the car, only halfway. Somehow, and again I am unclear on the details here, the rear half of the cow was involved, because the girl in question, which if she wasn’t a Bowerman was at least dating a Bowerman, found her fancy white prom dress all covered in cow flop, which put a real damper on the rest of the evening. The Bowermans attended our church, and would not have lied about something like that. The news report was eventually published in papers across the country and even overseas.

But while my memory may be a bit hazy on some of the details of the Bowerman bovine incident of so many years ago, I do remember that whoever was driving that vehicle did not continue driving down M-37 with a cow, or most of a cow, or even half a cow in the car. No, he followed approved cow collision procedure, stopped immediately and encouraged the cow to leave. I can guarantee you he did. Western Michigan farmers are not fools.

Fortunately, no humans were hurt in either mishap. Unfortunately, neither the Bowerman cow of the late 1950s nor the Everson cow survived their automobile encounters. Whether both incidents were suicide attempts, or just poorly planned acts of bovine bravado, no one will ever know. Scientists who study animal motivation have decided that cows are, for the most part, very inscrutable creatures. Except, of course, for the Holstein, which is slightly more scrutable due to grazing habits, educational background, and other environmental factors.

So if you plan to write a column about cows falling onto cars, or jumping into cars, or driving cars, for that matter, try to keep your column realistic. And at some point, possibly near the end of your column, you might want to stress the fact that, statistically at least, people from Michigan seem to attract more than their fair share of airborne cows.

And above all else, in your closing paragraph you should resist the temptation to refer to incidents involving falling cows as "cow droppings." A trained humorist would know better.