It’s been a silly day, the kind that comes naturally to travelers after enough miles, enough meals, and enough roadside scenery to make the brain resign its post and leave the body to fend for itself. We have reached that peculiar stage of exhaustion where ordinary objects cease to be what they are and become whatever the mind, in its declining judgment, wishes them to be.

A fence post becomes a man. A bush becomes a bear. A road sign becomes an accusation. And, apparently, a rolled hay bale becomes a cinnamon bun.

The first indication that our collective intelligence had begun to desert us came when we encountered a jackass wearing a bright red fly mask. It stood in a field with the dignity of an elected mayor by people who had never met it.

The mask gave it an air of theatrical importance, and one member of our party immediately declared that it resembled the Mexican wrestler Lucho Libra. I have never seen Lucho Libra, nor am I entirely convinced that this is the proper spelling of his name, but after several days on the road, one does not challenge such matters.

One merely nods wisely and hopes the conversation will continue. Then we realized the jackass was standing on a rolled bale of hay.

This is where civilization took another small step backward. Someone looked at the rolled bale of hay and saw a cinnamon bun.

I am not certain what kind of hunger produces visions, but I understand it. Travel does peculiar things to the appetite.

After enough hours in a vehicle, the mind begins converting scenery into food. Mountains become potatoes, clouds become mashed potatoes, and, apparently, a several-hundred-pound cylinder of dried grass becomes something one might reasonably expect to find beneath a layer of icing.

The jackass remained perfectly still atop its imaginary pastry, surveying the landscape. Then came the final contribution to our intellectual decline.

Someone suggested the animal was probably standing there defending itself from Sasquash. Not squatch, but squash.

I pictured the scene: a red-masked jackass upon a cinnamon bun, bravely defending itself against a giant wilderness squash with questionable intentions. The sight would have astonished science, embarrassed zoology, and received a federal grant.

By this point, we had abandoned all pretense of seriousness.

The jackass stared at us. We stared at the jackass, and somewhere in the distance, I imagine a real Sasquatch was watching the proceedings and wondering why people are permitted to travel without adult supervision.

And so I have reached the only reasonable conclusion: we are exhausted. Not ordinary tired, mind you, but the profound exhaustion turning livestock into professional wrestlers, hay into pastries, and legendary monsters into a vegetable.

Travel broadens the mind, they say, and ours has apparently broadened so far it has fallen off the map.