There was the time, back in the early 1990s, when a rogue logging truck lost its brakes coming down through the Cascades into Keene and took the kitchen off the house where my daughter, Molly, and I were living. Logs were ejected like missiles all down the left side of the road before the truck rolled to a stop outside Lawrence’s Garage. Molly had just gone to school when the logs hit; I was upstairs. As Molly pointed out, “Mom, it’s a good thing you don’t like to do the dishes, or you might have been killed!” I’m terrified of logging trucks to this day.

Remember the fire on Noonmark Mountain in Keene Valley in September 1999? I was working at the Ausable Club then, and I recall staff and club members watching the fire from the front porch dining area.

Adrian Edmonds used to tell about a forest fire that burned Round Mountain and part of Giant in 1913. The fire was so fierce, he said, that ashes, soot and “burning brands” from the fire were carried on the wind into the streets of the hamlet. People were afraid that houses would catch fire, but they did not.

And then there is the sad but true, pretty much, story of the cow in the cemetery: While the town of Keene sleeps, Norton Cemetery is the scene of strange shenanigans.

A local couple — I’ll call them Sue and Steve — returned home one evening and listened to the messages on their answering machine before turning in. A neighbor’s voice came on, telling them that their cow was loose and wandering around Spruce Hill.

They were afraid that the bovine might amble out in front of a car in the dark and cause an accident, and so, tired as they were, they decided to go and look for their cow (I’ll call her Bossy).

Steve collected feed to entice her with, along with some rope and flashlights. Sue brought a deer-hunting rifle because Bossy was skittish, likely to run out into State Route 73 in front of an 18-wheeler.

It may be that Bossy had got wind of the fact that she was not to be retained as a milk cow but as a beef cow, which is very different. Maybe that’s why she struck off on her own while Steve and Sue were out. It would also explain the skittishness.

Steve and Sue drove slowly down Spruce Hill, playing their flashlight beams over the woods and fields and front yards along the road. Once, when her flashlight picked up a pair of eyes shining through the foliage, Sue thought she had found Bossy, but the eyes turned out to belong to a deer.

Steve and Sue drove on, shining their lights and calling, and finally, when they were ready to abandon the search until the next morning, they spotted the errant cow wandering around the cemetery.

They called the cow the way they did at feeding time, but could not tempt her with food or with endearments that might well have sounded, to Bossy’s ears, hollow and insincere, especially if she knew, or sensed, that they thought of her as potential burger. Bossy kicked up her heels. Might just as well go for it, she probably figured. She would as soon jump over the moon as give up her newfound freedom.

I am sorry to tell you this, but they ended up having to shoot her. At least at the end Bossy had a chance to assert herself and see a bit of the world. Many cows never do.

Now what? Sue and Steve asked each other. There they were, in Norton Cemetery, an hour or two before dawn, with an 800-pound dead cow. They had done what they believed to be right, but the look of the thing wasn’t good. Besides, they had to act quickly to preserve the beef. It is difficult to load a futon into the back of a truck. Try loading a dead cow.

They eventually went home and called a friend with a front-end loader who came right out, scooped Bossy up, and took her away. A strange procession they must have made up Spruce Hill at the break of day, Steve and Sue in their pickup truck following the front-end loader with Bossy in its cow-catcher. Or shovel.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the News since 1996.)