The Life and Times of L.J. Fox

For some, Buffalo Bill Days is a few days of fun, food, festivities, and a very ignorant and heavily romanticized concept of the Old West.

For me, it is a week and a half of the foul stench of sun-baked horse shit.

The staging grounds for the Buffalo Bill Days Parade happen to be on my street. 

“Wow,” one might say, “The City of Golden’s most culturally significant event, right out the window. What an honor it must be!”

How very wrong one would be if one were to say that.

Buffalo Bill Days quite a few horses. I don’t know the exact number, but the equestrian population of the city rises significantly for the parade. As they wait in the parade, their seemingly perpetually-filled bowels drop a good 50 pounds of horse byproduct onto the asphalt. The City is obligated to clean this mess, and so they send a street-sweeper over it a few times. 

The attempt to scrub the shit out of the street is futile. The high-velocity rotary brushes thoroughly compress the dookie into the cracks in the asphalt and smear it around. One might infer that the smell of frothed feces forced into the freeway is unpleasant to say the least. 

An astute inference indeed.

Now, these newly shit-paved streets bake in the burning sun for a week or so, creating an olfactory Odyssey through hell.

And that is why, after 17 years of this happening, my appreciation of my town’s cultural events has greatly regressed.