City of Pompano Beach historian Bud Garner responds to this morning's post on Florida's open range:

The "open range" made for very interesting traveling through Florida, especially during the night. The cattle seemed to favor the black macadam roads with their "stored up heat" to lie on and "chew their cuds."

I had many, many encounters with them, some of they physical.

I had one real bad one during the war in 1943 while stationed in Jacksonville, Florida. I was hitching home on a weekend pass one night and two sailors from North Carolina going to Miami driving a Model "A" ford roadster picked me up. The headlights kept going out and one of the Sailors would climb out on the fender, bang his fist on the lights and they would come back on.

On one of these "blackouts," he crawled out on the fender and banged on the light which came on and right in the middle of the two lane road (US 1) was a huge hog that must have weighed 300 pounds. The driver tried to swerve and miss it, but the hog ran in the same direction we were turning and we had a big collision.

We swerved off the road where there was a ditch with about a foot of water in it. We ran into the ditch, through the water, up on the slope and hit a big pine stump that smashed the front of the Model "A" and came to a stop.

We pushed the car off the stump, got it running and back up on the highway and as they were attempting to straighten out the damage, I decided I did not want to continue the rest of my trip in their company. I turned and hitched hiked back to Jacksonville.

I don't know if they made it to Miami or not. They didn't seem to mind the turn of events and I am sure with their outlook, they gave it a good try.

This was just one of several incidents I had with "the herd."

We're happy that you survived the encounter, Bud, but what about the hog?

Update: Bud believes that the hog escaped, "We never saw anything more of the hog; it was dark and cold and he wasn't lying in the road as we could see."

And that was just as well. Under Florida law, "The motorest was liable if he killed or injured any of these "free ranging" animals on the roadways. It was for our protection that we didn't follow-up on the hog."