A Meeting of Horsepower
Certain meetings in life are arranged by appointment, while others occur because Providence has a sense of humor and no regard whatsoever for the highway code. Early Thursday morning, somewhere south of Fernley, a horse and an automobile met upon U.S. 95-A, and the meeting appears to have been conducted without the usual exchange of pleasantries.
The hour was about 6:11 in the morning, a particularly unfortunate time for a horse to be standing in the highway and an even more unfortunate time for a motorist to discover that the road contains a horse. At that hour, the sun is still negotiating with the horizon, motorists are operating on coffee and habit, and horses are apparently exercising their constitutional right to appear wherever they please.
Firefighters arrived shortly before 6:15 and found an SUV so heavily damaged that one might reasonably conclude it had been introduced to the horse at considerable velocity. The vehicle was off the roadway, and debris had scattered across the highway.
Traffic in both directions was temporarily stopped while emergency personnel attended to the scene. It is the sort of situation in which a driver learns the true meaning of patience. A person may spend years complaining about traffic, only to discover that traffic can be stopped completely by a horse, an automobile, and debris sufficient to turn a highway into a parking lot.
The occupants of the automobile refused medical attention, which is good news. However, I suspect that after an encounter with a horse on a rural Nevada highway, they may have required several other forms of attention not covered by modern medicine. A strong cup of coffee, perhaps, a quiet chair, or possibly a lawyer who specializes in explaining to insurance companies how a horse got involved.
The Nevada Highway Patrol and the Nevada Department of Transportation were called in to assist with traffic control, investigation, and cleanup. Thus the humble horse managed, in a single appearance, to summon firefighters, highway patrol officers, transportation officials, and enough equipment to demonstrate that government can respond swiftly when presented with an animal standing in the wrong place.
There was, however, one great unanswered question: What became of the horse?
At the time of the report, authorities had no immediate word on whether the horse was injured. It leaves the public with a peculiar imbalance in the story.
We know the automobile was heavily damaged. We know the road was blocked. We know traffic was delayed. We know the humans declined medical attention. But the principal participant in this unusual morning conference remained something of a mystery.
And so, Nevada has once again demonstrated that the highway is a place where man, machine, and livestock may encounter one another without warning. With autumn approaching and daylight growing shorter, officials have reminded drivers to watch carefully for livestock and wildlife on rural roads.
It is sound advice. In Nevada, the next obstruction in your lane may be a traffic cone, a jackrabbit, a cow, a deer, or a horse with somewhere important to be. And unlike the Nevada Department of Transportation, the horse is unlikely to post a warning sign first.
