Line 'O the day - May 3, 2009

Change and balls are two things I’ve lacked in recent times. Absence of the former begat the withering of the latter, and I shall endeavor to reverse course in both regards.

Line 'O the day - April 19, 2009

One need not hit the road to be part of a menagerie. Seek and ye may find copious diversity in your own backyard.

Line 'O the day - April 9, 2009

A valuable thought occurs to me. I will aim not to forget it come the end of the week nor the instance which brought it forth.

Present day note:

I've forgotten whatever the hell this was.

Line 'O the day - April 5, 2009

That’s four day old fish, and I ain’t buying it! --- Steve Dallas

Jake Up a Tree

It's been a little over a year since I wrote the first of these farm stories, and about six months since I posted the last one.  Hopefully I can get back on track here.

I’ve yet to mention the sale barn, which is odd as it served as a major focus of my life from the time I can remember up until I got out of high school.  Now when I say ‘Sale Barn’ I mean a livestock auction.  You’ve seen it in a movie or somewhere, hell you might have even been in one.  There’s a ring and auctioneer, stadium seating for buyers, sellers and other rural folk just there to pass the time.  On sale day, which is Monday by the way, Grandpa would usually make his way to the sale barn at some point and when I was little I would obviously be right at his heel.  When I was real little like that my favorite thing about the sale barn was the bubble gum man.  Now he was an older dude who hauled cattle to and from the sale barn for other folks, but he always kept a variety big bucket of Double Bubble in his truck and a bunch in his pocket, and was always just the bubble gum man to any of the younger set who happened to show up around the auction.  But moving along…

My story for today stems from my many years working at the sale barn (I’ll probably have a few more stories to remember from the place).  Our old man worked at the auction as well as both my brothers and this particular event has me and Jake, my older brother, trying to entreat a cow to return to her assigned corral.  I started working at the sale barn during the summer I turned 14, but this event I reckon was a few years after that and I figure Jake was around 20 at the time so I was 16 or so.

Cows can be crazy, if you didn’t know, and they’re really dumb to start with so a crazy cow is a mess to handle.  They’re unpredictable cause of the natural stupidity and they don’t even know what they want to do.  Well there are dozens of pens and stalls that the livestock can go in and then two large pastures at the far back of the sale barns property.  What transpired that allowed this particular crazy cow to find her way into the back pasture I’m uncertain of. Figure she broke through a gate or something.  Regardless Jake and I were tasked with getting her out of the pasture and back into one of the smaller pens near the front, an easy enough task on the surface.  But remember now she’s batshit insane.

A little more on the setting, along the fence of this pasture there’s a stand of trees that hang out from the fence about forty feet or more.  And the cow, showing a semblance of intelligence is hiding back in the trees.  As we're stomping across the pasture she comes to the edge of the clearing and gives us a glance.  We had been warned she was a handful, but in that little instant we saw that, yep she was crazy.  Before we even got to her she rushed out and headed up toward the open gate to the proper pens, and for a second we’re happy cause she’s gonna remedy this problem all on her own. Wrong!

She gets almost out of the pasture and wheels around and runs full steam back to the trees as far from the gate as she can.  This is when we formulate a plan.  Jake will go into the trees, get behind her and flush her out, and I’ll flank her guarding against her angling back away from the gate.  Now there are only two of us and we have to wrangle her through an area the size of a few football fields, but cows are stupid and usually are very obvious in their intentions so you can stay a step ahead.

As Jake gets into the tree line I set up out in the middle of the field as a deterrent from her looping back once he gets her moving.  I’m waiting for her to come busting out into the clearing, and waiting and waiting, and just as I’m about to start yelling after Jake to see what the holdup is, I see the top of a tree start to shake.  When it dawns on me that she must have chased Jake up a tree, he starts to yell out to me, confirming my thought.  Obviously I start to laugh at the notion of a crazy cow running my brother up a tree, but that humorous thought lasts all of about two seconds as she steps out from the trees.

There’s a good fifty yards between us, but as she stops and stares at me, with dumb cow malice in her dull eyes, I start to realize I’m pretty vulnerable out in the middle of the field.  And then she just starts to barrel right at me.  I’ve got that fifty yards between us, but I’ve got double that to the nearest batch of trees or the closest fence, reckon she would have got me if I tried for either of those.  And getting waylaid by a thousand pound cow isn’t exactly like a shiatsu.  My best bet was a small brush pile out in the middle of the field maybe fifteen or twenty yards from me, so I turned and bolted.  I could hear her coming up behind me, gaining ground, but I was pumping my legs and not risking losing a step looking back to check my odds of survival.  I reached the little island of branches and thorns and dove head first to safety, with maybe a couple yards to spare.  She didn’t follow and veered off swinging back towards the trees and away from the gate.

Jake stepped out of the tree line just as I was untangling myself from the brush pile.  We tried twice more to flush her out of the trees toward the far off gate, but to no avail, mainly because we ourselves wouldn’t stray too far from the protective trees or brush pile thus giving her ample room to get between us or around us.  We gave up and opted to let her ‘calm down’ some before trying again.

There’s no real moral to this story, except maybe to say that no matter what you’ve heard know that cows are incredibly dumb creatures.  That doesn’t mean I don’t respect that I tip the scales at a buck seventy-five and most cows got ten times that on me.  I’m not dumb, well at least not as dumb as cattle.

Line 'O the day - March 19, 2009

Title for a melancholy Neil Diamond album: The Unforeseen Triumph of False Love

Present day note:

I don't remember how this came about, but I'll say it; its pretty good.