I wouldn`t have missed it for the world. It was the stuff of childhood dreams...
As a young girl, I often helped my grandparents, on their farm in the Piedmont, bring in the cows for milking in the evening. It was a pleasant activity without much stress since the cows knew when they saw us that they needed to head for the barn for their feed and relief. They would start walking right away and we walked behind them and followed them to the barn.
I often imagined how it would be if I were on a horse, riding, not walking, behind those cows.
Years later, there we were, the family in the car heading down 345 for Cedar Key, when we came around the bend and found ourselves in the midst of a bonafide cattle drive! The cows were being moved from a pasture east of the road to another pasture several miles away that was west of the road. We happened upon it by chance and what a thrill it was! The cows - black, brown , spotted, some with horns, some without - were moseying along, driven by cowboys dressed to the nines - hats, chaps, spurs, lariats coiled by their sides, and bedrolls behind their saddles. They had scarves around their necks and whips ready at hand. They were Cracker cowboys, after all.
Cow dogs and cur dogs loped along the shoulders, worrying the cows who stopped for lunch. The calves were confused and protesting but the cowboys moved everyone along with whistles and the crack of their whips. The dogs ran in to help. The cows were liberally fertilizing the way south and taking it easy. The older ones knew that they were being moved to greener pastures and did not balk.
We drove very slowly through the melee, windows down to take in the sounds and sights and odors, honking at the cows who blocked the road, and glorying in being able to be on the fringe of history. We knew it was pretty much a thing of the past already.
And it was. We caught parts of a few more cattle drives in the following years. Sometimes we drove down a manure slick road and knew that we had missed the actual happening. And then, in the late 90`s, the cows disappeared, the land was sold off in 40 acre parcels, and we knew that we would never be even a minor part of the 345 cattle drive again.
But once we were. | 
