Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 15, 1992 TAG: 9201150355
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: BEDFORD LENGTH: Medium
RHINOCEROS LEAVES FOLKS DIRECTIONLESS
Somewhere, maybe, there's a place with one-eared, red-eyed rhinoceroses on every corner.This region is not among them.
We have but one one-eared, red-eyed rhinoceros.
It has stood, silent sentinel, outside the Wheatland Market on U.S. 460, just west of Bedford, for 14 years. Four feet tall, twice again as long, battleship gray with white horn and - obviously - red eyes.
The rhino used to have two ears. The fate of the other ear is smudged by the years and forgotten. Red-eyed, one-eared rhinoceroses, like dead men, don't talk.
They don't boast. If they boasted, this rhino would tell you what a landmark it is, how it guides motorists, how it provides easy directions for the masses who live up Wheatland Road. Make a right at the rhino, they tell their friends.
They don't whine. If they whined, our hero would have been pouting during the weekend, when vandals toppled him. For days he lay prone on the grass.
Red-eyed, one-eared rhinoceroses do not, above all else, cry.
If they cried, our hero would have let out a rhino whimper on Tuesday.
It was about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The winds were howling. The Wheatland rhino, still chained to a signpost but laid flat on his belly by mischievous rhino-haters, endured another typically rhinotic day.
Then a blue van, eastbound, lost control; the driver swerved off the shoulder, plowed through wet sod, and smashed the rhino.
Virginia State Police troopers in Bedford have erected a soundproof wall of silence around their investigation.
This much is known: The van driver appears to have been uninjured. The rhino is dead.
It lost a leg. Its flank is crushed. The one ear that had survived the eons was lopped off on impact.
Shreds of fiberglass littered the grass surrounding the corpse.
But the accident shattered more than the fiberglass behemoth.
It busted the collective gut of the rural community that has grown up alongside of, and in spite of, the one-eared, red-eyed rhinoceros.
Danny Johnson of Thaxton, who drove his pickup truck to Williamsburg in 1978 to buy and carry home the used rhino, stood in stunned silence next to his baby shortly after the accident.
Motorists gawked at the mourning man. Many stopped.
Two offered condolences. One asked what happened to the dinosaur. One man rolled down his truck window and asked where the cow went.
A school bus full of children roared past, a dozen tiny grief-stricken faces pressed hard against the window glass.
A man suggested that Johnson find a bulldozer and shove the rhino corpse into a ditch.
But Danny Johnson shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. He pushed a toe against the severed foot of his one-eared, red-eyed rhino.
He shrugged off questions about blame and about insurance claims.
Johnson vowed to remake the rhino.
Know this, Danny Johnson. You are not alone in this, your moment of grief. We shall miss him. Or her.