All my life I’ve called small-town America home.

Only time I lived in a city with more than 10,000 or so people was when I was in college. Even then, Richmond was only home to about 30,000. I’ve visited bigger cities, sure, but never called one home.

I don’t know if those larger metro areas have as niche sorts of festivals as smaller slices of the country have. I’ve witnessed a re-enactment of the Matewan Massacre, which gave way to the birth of the union. I’ve watched the Miami Nation of Indians march down Main Street and bang drums in an audible spectacle that led to me being offered to take a drag from an actual peace pipe.

But you learn real quick that when you go to a festival called Cow Plop, you watch your step.

Working at the local newspaper, I covered events. It’s just what I did – that’s the job. You go see things, you talk to people at or about the things and then you write about the things. Sometimes it’s a council meeting. Sometimes it’s a car accident. Sometimes it’s an election. It’s a pretty fun job.

But sometimes it’s everybody jammed up tight against around a fenced-off area eagerly waiting for a cow to do its business.

Every summer, the City of Rawlins’ population swells with tourists. It’s on the U.S. 52 corridor, a busy and crazy-dangerous stretch of highway that’ll take you from San Francisco to New York City without you having to make a single turn. Rawlins happens to be a good pitstop for travelers and has a handful of neat things to look at or participate in. A haunted prison, a pretty great nature walk, some historical buildings and a cool museum with a death mask of a notorious outlaw and some shoes made out of his skin.

Rawlins is also host to a festival called Cow Plop. It’s handled by the chamber of commerce there and it’s the biggest fundraiser they have. When I was first told of it in an interview with the head of the chamber, I didn’t believe her.

-It’s called what?

-Cow Plop.

­-…Really?

-Really.

I’m from a rural town. Not even from a town, really – you’ve heard of a holler, right? So I know some things. I’ve seen some things. I know about rural living and all that comes with it. But they do things different out west. We didn’t do things like that, at least in my part of Eastern Kentucky. And going to Wyoming, I didn’t know the first thing about ranches or horses or anything of that sort of culture. It just wasn’t what I grew up with.

-This a pretty big event? You get good support?

­-People LOVE it. They wait all year for it.

The Chamber brings in bands, has food trucks, beer tents, pony rides for the youngsters and loads of other fun things. Even the Chamber’s mascot, a cow of course, makes an appearance. I saw it in two variations – one was papier-mâché, the other was a wooden cutout. Regardless, you could milk it if you were a kid. Not really sure how that worked, but I never really looked into it. You could do it as an adult too if you wanted, I guess. Never saw anyone try though.

And sure, some folks come because of the festival food and beer and all that. It’s fun to listen to local bands too and I bet it’s a nice way to unwind after a stressful 12-hour drive if you’re traveling 52. There’s worse ways to spend your time, and from a distance, it looks just like any other small-town festival.

The big draw though is the titular event. That’s why it’s got the name it does and isn’t called the “Beer and Pony Ride Extravaganza,” even though that doesn’t sound like a bad time either.

No, it’s called Cow Plop. And while it carries other names in other locations, like Cow Pie Bingo or something like that, I think it’s more akin my favorite gambling game.

You’re familiar with the concept of roulette, right? I wasn’t until I actually played it until my eyes turned to dust and my wallet looked like it got stuck in a spacesaver bag in Las Vegas. Fun game. Anyway, you’ve got this big checkerboard, except it’s a rectangle and there’s numbers where you’d put your checkers at.

Now, you put as many checkers on the table as you want, and those are your bets. You bet on where you think the ball is going to land when it gets spun on this big old wheel. The more you bet, the more likely you are to win, but it’s only going to land on one space. You might win that square, but you’ve lost the others. There is zero strategy in this game. It’s just fun, pretty easy to play and hard to completely bust out on because there are so many different bets you can make.

You won’t always win, but you hardly ever lose. Hard to straight up bust out. You might just lose a quarter of what you wagered. It’s a fun way to keep the free drinks a-coming while you slowly whittle down your savings.

Anyway.

That’s this. But instead of a small number of spaces to bet on, think there’s 40 or so in roulette, there’s hundreds in this version that features all the great parts that comes with a name like Cow Plop.

For just a couple of bucks, $5 or so, you can buy a square on this enormous playing field – hundreds of those bad boys to choose from. And if ol Bessie, or whatever the cow’s name was, decides to plop on that particular square, congratulations! You’ve made a sizable profit – grand prize was something like $1,500 or something.

I got there early. Before the cows arrived. For some reason, the local rancher who donated the time and dignity of some of their herd to go plop in public was late. So I grabbed something to drink from one of the nearby tents, made small talk with the folks I recognized and grabbed small, innocent probably-not-going-in-the-article interviews from other people nearby.

The problem with this event was that I wasn’t sure what this story was going to be.

Pretty much anytime I attended an event, I had a general idea of what I was getting myself into. I know I’m gonna have quotes to structure the story around at a government meeting. I know I’m gonna have details from police reports in a car accident. But for festivals and stuff, it’s a little harder. It’s based a lot more on what I, the reporter, sees and experiences without framing the story around that perspective or placing myself in the story.

You’ve got to tell the story from a third-person perspective of what you’ve seen and then get quotes to supplement it and hope that someone says something good. Or that they want to talk with you at all. I knew already that the chamber head would say it was a great event, that she was happy for the support. Easy quote there. I hoped I could get the winner – ask them if they expected to win (already knew the answer to that) and if they’d attended before. Maybe find a kid for a quote, while they’re never good for them, sometimes they’ll surprise you, and look for a few tourists. That was the dream.

But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed in the towns I’ve worked in and called home is that there’s a constant battle with parking. And when these small towns host festivals and fairs and whatevers, bringing in out-of-towners and nearby-towners, you quickly start parking alongside the main thoroughfares in the city that aren’t supposed to have any parking there.

Shoved in between a McDonald’s and a strip mall that housed a Tractor Supply, among other stores, this series of multi-colored pop-up tents crowded the area. Find a decent enough place to park and hoof it the rest of the way, watching your step as you do since ponies also plop. Stuff was everywhere. But it’s just part of life. Some guy was just leaned over a shovel, waiting to scamper along whichever kid was riding the pony that was being led by the the other guy whenever he needed to.

It's a walk, but it feels nice enough in Wyoming at that time of year, so it’s not so bad. The closer you get to the tents though, the more the smell starts to hit your nose. It’s those ponies. And it’s a deterrent at first, especially if you aren’t used to it like I was. The folks out this way though, that’s life.

There’s this fenced-off area that already had attracted a ton of people to it. There’s nothing inside yet except for this giant grid of boxes, but there’s gonna be cows in there soon . I heard people clamoring about which square they got, how they’d use their winnings. How much fun this is.

I couldn’t lie – it was kind of fun. Mostly in a this-is-the-weirdest-neatest-thing-I’ve-ever-seen kind of way. There’s probably a better way to say that – unique? That works.

When the rancher and his cows rolled in, there was almost a cheer. I mean, that shouldn’t have surprised me. That’s what these people are here for – the cows and what they’ve come to do. The rancher said they got behind for some reason, but assured the crowd that his cows had been well fed throughout the day.

He really emphasized that point. Well fed.

The cows, walking down their ramp and into their grid-lined pen, faced their adoring public with a face that even the most hardened-celebrity would envy. People were jammed up close against the fence, some kids had their arms through it looking to pet ol Bessie or whatever her name was. She probably didn’t have one though. If she did, it was on that tag on her ear.

Parents had kids on their shoulders. People were laughing. Smiling. Talking out loud about how they think the cow could explode at any second. They’re taking selfies. They’re taking pictures.

I’m taking selfies. I’m taking pictures.

It’s an infectious excitement. For a moment, I lost myself in the fun of being in something completely foreign to me. I wasn’t just getting pictures and a story for a newspaper, I was getting them for me.

The cows kept their cool demeanor though. Just walking around, greeting all the youngsters who were getting snapped at by their moms to not bother the cow. It’s usually just a matter of minutes before a winner is chosen, I was later told.

But these cows weren’t just well fed, they’d been well watered too. Like a garden hose with your thumb slightly over the opening levels of gush. And for almost half an hour, the cows just spritzed the grid instead of plopping down a winner. Some folks got some on them. They’d been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and judged the wind wrong.

Despite that, people were still laughing. Still having a good time. Drinking beer, cheering for the cow to name a winner, eating tacos and stuff from this excellent food truck that had a cult following for a reason. It was something the chamber said they were proud of, that sense of community in their events.

I wandered around the outside of the pen, letting kids and other folks take up the front-row seats. Mostly because the better photos were with the crowd getting into the energy of the event with the cow in frame, as well as not wanting to get sprayed like those other people got. It’s a restless cow, constantly walking around and greeting everyone with a happy moo but constantly withholding her grand prize.

Until she didn’t.

I had my finger on the shutter hoping to nail that moment. That was the shot. It was the ultimate. I’m at an event called Cow Plop - of course getting that shot is the pinnacle! All the while, people were yelling and cheering while I was gagging.

The smell.

My nose wasn’t used to that.

But there wasn’t a clear winner. With the cow pacing the whole time, her plop was, uh, less than accurate and splattered across three different tiles. Despite that, people went wild for the plop. They knew on the highway that it’d happened.

None of the grids had numbers on them, instead, the organizers had these squares printed out and carried them over to the pen to cross-reference their location and who had bought them. It wound up being a split pot. Miss Wyoming helped figure out the winners. She was a good interview too. A nice surprise to round out the piece.

I got that photo of the plop though. And when I was sifting through the pictures later on my computer, I knew instantly that I couldn’t print it. But I did know I could share it with a few friends online and in the office for a good laugh. None of us in the newsroom were locals, so all this stuff was pretty new to us. We could appreciate the community’s spirit though. What was absurd to us was something to take pride in for them. And that’s fantastic.

That’s the kind of stuff that makes stories worth telling.