Stuck in traffic behind cowboys saving cattle from the floods

Posted 12:40 p.m.

Brett Frick hates traffic. Who doesn’t? But his patience was wearing pretty thin as he and his wife traversed over the bridge coming out of Liberty heading through the river bottom for Dayton.

He and his wife, Janette GoulderFrick, nervously tried to look around the trucks in front of them to see what was going on, but all they could see was lights flashing, possibly from law enforcement or emergency vehicles.

This was not the ending to a leisure trip that they had envisioned.

Cooped up in their home in Dayton’s Fordland Estates, the couple jumped in the car earlier to take a Sunday afternoon drive. They had been pent up in their home for a couple of days with the torrential rain from Hurricane Harvey and a break in the clouds enticed them to get out.

Their drive turned into a search for something to eat, but there were few options in Dayton so they drove over to Liberty where, to their surprise, they found a Chinese restaurant open and ready for their business.

“After we finished, we got back in the car and drove over the Liberty bridge. Then we hit bumper to bumper traffic!” she exclaimed, a pretty unusual occurrence in a small town and on a Sunday afternoon. They couldn’t understand. While they were the fifth car behind all the traffic, they were frustrated because they couldn’t see around the large trucks in front of them.

“As we came up out of the river bottom going into Dayton, we could see the traffic behind us was miles long,” Janette said, and like them, most were angry and wondering why it was taking so long.

“We could see lights flashing in front of us so we supposed it was an accident or maybe something flood related,” she said.

But it became even more puzzling for them because the traffic continued to move, inching ever so slowly. “Then I figured it out,” she said. It was clumps of manure in the road that gave her an “a-ha”moment.

“It’s got to be a cattle drive,” she laughed.

As they rounded the top of US 90 going into Dayton, they made a turn by the Dayton feed store to avoid the traffic and that’s when she got her confirmation.

“I have never seen a cattle drive before in my life so this was quite the experience,” she said.

Her impatient husband’s face lit up once he saw the cattle. They came to a slow roll and he whipped out his cell phone and took a quick shot. Many of those behind them did the same, throwing off their frustration to capture the historic moment.

“I remember reading about one in the Dayton News a couple of years ago, but I’ve never seen or experienced one,” she said.

While the suspense nearly killed them, the waters lapping at the edge of the bridge flooding the river bottom almost brought certain demise for the cattle were it not for the efforts of some modern day cowboys who brought back a little western bravado to life.