Basura: The awful offal on the highway near a slaughterhouse

In 1968, as a 21-year-old sophomore at Grand Valley State in West Michigan, my girlfriend (wife to be) and our friend JV went to the Embassy Bar, a bit further out in the country than our rural campus.

We rode out in my car, and our friend rolled some marijuana — impressive, we thought, in that we were going 40 miles an hour on a dirt road. We smoked his very excellent weed, went into the bar for a couple of cool ones, and then decided to head back to the Grand Valley.

We were still rather high from the grass (although my driving seemed unimpaired, at least to our group).  Suddenly we came upon a huge pair of lungs in the road. I swerved around the lungs. A little further down the road there was a big trachea.  As we proceeded, we saw more and more “guts” — including guts.  There were intestines in the road.  As we dodged one messy pile wet meat after another, we wondered if we were hallucinating.

There were lots of things of this nature in the road. I was concerned it might be slippery enough to cause the Merury to skid (it was a Mercury, but the C had been lost from the name plate). There was quite a bit to swerve around, as we drove east, but there was essentially no other traffic. We were on M-45 now, a paved road that took us right to the campus.

Eventually, we overtook a slow moving stake truck, with the back tailgate swinging open from one rather shaky looking hinge. The truck had been loaded with offal at a slaughterhouse somewhere near Allendale, and was apparently being taken for disposal elsewhere. Awful offal.

The truck had some sort of company logo, identifying the slaughterhouse, which I don’t recall. I do remember the driver, blissfully unaware of partial loss of load. He was cruising down M-45, tapping the steering wheel, and singing along with the radio.

The next year, as a junior, I took a class called Dynamic Anatomy & Physiology. The professor started the first class by informing us all that we were fortunate to be located in a rural area, and near a slaughterhouse. We’d have a chance to get some nice specimens for dissection.