Insert Foot vs. cows.

MARTINEZ, Calif. — My 13-year-old daughter and I were driving along a dark suburban road on a warm spring Thursday night, having a pleasant conversation about how humans feel anxious sometimes, and what people do to remedy that anxiousness. We were doing the speed limit. We just saw a movie; it was nice evening.

Until the cows attacked.

You want anxious? Beasts suddenly hurling themselves at your windshield, desperately trying to kill you … that’s anxious.

We were on a section of Alhambra Road in Martinez (that’s in the East San Francisco Bay for anyone reading this in Spain and wondering what the big deal is) where there are no streetlights, and the road begins to stretch and wind some. It’s not super easy to see very far in front of you, but I certainly never thought it was dangerous.

That’s exactly what they want you to think.

The first escaped cow appeared out of nowhere, right in front of the car. Exactly … send the shock trooper on a full-frontal assault to see how your adversary reacts.

My daughter, whom we’ll call Lucy (because that’s her name), screamed, as I swerved hard left. Thank God we’d just seen the new “Batman” film, and my super senses were still on high alert and, like Batman, I’m a very fancy driver when circumstances demand.

The shock trooper I missed had a partner flanking our left, which of course I detected immediately with my high-intensity, super peripheral laser pointer radar range vision, signaling my lightning quick 54-year-old man reflexes (I used to be in a band) to pull hard right on the steering wheel. I wanted to minimize damage to the flanking bovine (they were just pawns in this game, sent by older cows who start problems without ever having to face the consequences).

Instead of hitting him straight on – and when I told this story elsewhere, someone pointed out you can‘t call cows “him,” which I thought was pretty presumptuous, even in California – we delivered a glancing blow to him/her/they from our left front fender.

I accelerated enough to get to the right side of the road. Lucy was still screaming. I asked if she was OK. She was physically, though it was pretty clear she was traumatized.

This is the part where I took a couple deep breaths. I got Lucy out onto the sidewalk and tried to open my door, which finally creaked open enough on the third try to get out. I was dreading seeing an injured animal suffering in the road.

As you can tell, I make fun of things because it helps me deal with them. This was the part that wasn’t funny (actually, none of it was). There were four or five cows scattering around the road, after they’d escaped from a nearby pasture. The one I hit was sort of hopping in one place but was still standing.

Holy cow … really. The front of the car was crushed, yet this guy/gal/both … didn’t even go down. Thank God. Though she didn’t look happy.

People were pulling over to help. I was going back and forth trying to comfort my daughter on the sidewalk while also trying to get in the middle of the street to stop other drivers from repeating our freak experience. Once some very helpful people (thank you) got the cattle off the road, and the police arrived, we could start sorting out what happened.

One of the police officers told me about a tree crushing his truck, and how an insurance agent said it was technically an act of God. He didn’t seem to find it amusing when I asked “What about an act of cow?”

Police never find me very funny.

My poor daughter kept asking over and over if the cow was OK (funny enough, when I spoke with my other two daughters later, they also asked about the cow before they asked about me). The cow stood in a nearby driveway, so being a gentleman, I naturally went over and apologized. It started peeing, then turned its back and ate some grass. That wasn’t the worst reaction I’ve received while trying to apologize to a female the past few years.

Cows and I have an uneasy relationship, going back to the ’90s, when I did a lot of hiking and once accidentally looked at a mother with a calf wrong. I’m still not sure what the correct way to look at a cow was, but she went ahead and chased me down a hill until I could hop a fence.

I’ve even stopped eating cows, so I don’t know what their problem is.

Once the cow, er … car, was towed, and my daughter was safely home, the next day I started having some flashbacks to that awful moment of unexpected impact of a vehicle accident. That my daughter was in the car, and it involved hurting an animal, really bothered me. But I’m thankful I can joke about it now, because it could’ve been much worse.

It’s just another reminder that life is random and sometimes all we can do is react. That doesn’t mean we should stop keeping an eye open for escaped cows.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.