Cow Moooving Day

Before I tell you all about Monday—there will definitely be blood—I want to sincerely thank y’all for showing up here, being present, reading along, and all the notes you send publicly and privately. I feel like, at long last, I may have found my happiest writing place. It is absolutely grand to be here. 

Cowboy Brandon wasn’t available to help the day Bobby-Jo’s calf died, but I was glad I’d thought to call him, a man I’d met just once before, years ago, when he unburdened me of an adolescent bull that no longer saw fences as obstacles and started regarding me as a potential future mate. Brandon gave me a beautiful pregnant ginger heifer in exchange. I named her Nancy and when her baby came, I named that baby CoCo.

I was glad I thought of Brandon because now his name, which I had stretched to remember during the crisis, now rested close memory’s surface. So when I had yet another cow issue yesterday, he was the first I texted. I briefly explained that I had two Dexter cows and they each had a baby, one heifer and one bull. I did not withhold from him an important piece of information about the mom cows, which had not been withheld from me. I had been warned clearly that they were loud mooers. 

I had not paid this warning much mind. I had been living with cows for years. I wasn’t a complete novice. How bad could it be?

In fact, these cows moo so long and loud and with such frequency, and the moos they issue are so horror-movie scream, that there was no hour of any day or night that any of us were safe from being startled into the next room by one of these constant shriek-fests, typically offered in stereo by both cows simultaneously. Just as I have, in my life, acclimated to so many other perpetual forms of suffering, I kind of learned to block the cows.

Not this day. Oh no. I was out in the fucking heat, middle of the day, trying to rearrange campers for our upcoming not particularly grand reopening of the AirBnB thing this weekend. One RV would not cooperate. A war began in my head. Therapy Voice kept telling me to take a break, get some water, cool down. Therapy Voice was, of course, drowned out by IRISH DNA Voice, which informed me that oh no, we were going to finish this dogdammit. 

Then the dogs started barking at Buster the Lonely Donkey who is being temporarily sequestered so he doesn’t knock up a mini donkey or, worse (in his mind),  get Jailhouse Rocked by Levon, the other big donkey who is perpetually horny and, lacking a Jenny or a wooden chair, has been known to pursue Buster in a manner that makes Pepe LePew’s efforts seem introverted. I got angry at the barking. Then the fucking cows started Friday the 13th shrieking. Then who the hell knows what happened but I looked down and blood was geysering from my arm. A quick assessment suggested stitches might be in order, followed immediately by the firm knowledge that I need to be bleeding a whole lot more to convince myself to go to an ER. 

So I cleaned and bound the wound. Then I sent the text to Brandon. For very cheap or even FREE (I suck at hiding desperation) he was welcome to the Dexters and their babies. He’d be there as soon as his kids got out of school. 

The relief this brought me was immediate. I am way too “good” at adopting animals and relatively terrible at re-homing them. The Dexters, the rare times they were quiet, were a joy to behold. They are little cows, 3/4th size, and they very much look like they were sent in from central casting to give an air of Ireland to the place. But I have been through this routine enough times now—realizing an animal (or two or five) is not a good fit—that it does get easier. I knew those cows had to go. Besides annoying the crap out of me, daring to mock me as I nearly bled out, there is no way in hell I could score even a single-star review on AirBnb, what with the racket.

They had to go.

Brandon—which, say it slowly, is there a better name for a cowboy?—and I had a great talk while we waited for the cows to get used to the panel chute set up to guide them into the trailer. A lifelong journalist, I can’t resist getting all Terri Gross on people. I’m genuinely interested in their stories.

Brandon talked about ranching and real estate and then he mentioned he does advocacy work. My ears perked up. I asked what kind of advocacy work. He said agricultural stuff. I asked if he’d seen the recent Times article about Black cowboys. He burst out laughing. “See it?” he asked. “That was me on the cover of the New York Times.”

My turn to laugh. I told him that I, too, had made the front page of the times, though for far more frivolous reasons. Back during the start of lockdown a photo of a masked me performing an elopement at my tiny chapel was used to illustrate early pandemic adaptation. 

The mom cows practically loaded themselves—maybe all that time they’d been hollering to go live with Brandon. And, ironically, the entire time he was here not a moo, not one single moo, escaped them. Brandon and his eldest son, in a move that appeared to be Broadway choreographed, swooped up the calves simultaneously and those little ones barely batted an eye. Seven years in and I am still enough of a novice to experience a dropped jaw when I get to see real pros in action.

We walked the back pastures after that and I told Brandon how it was time for me to start making the land work for me, to cover my annual taxes, which now easily exceed what I made annually when I first moved to Austin. 

Brandon looked across fifteen particular acres I would love to turn into a weed farm when the time is right, and we dreamed out loud together. He had a lot of ideas. I had a few. I told him I’m less motivated by maximum income potential and more interested in a solution that allows me to continue to live in privacy without being driven out by taxes. We got excited at the possibilities and we will meet again soon to discuss realistic plans now that I got my weed farm dreaming out of the way. 

As it happened, we were standing in a spot of particular interest for a couple of reasons. Before I got this place, which had once been majestic, it had gone to shit thanks to the meth cooks who let the property go and who also allowed people to use the pastures as makeshift junkyards. I spent an obscene amount to have a lot of it cleared seven years ago, but there still remain some drainage pipes, solid concrete, up to four feet in diameter, that each must weigh at least a literal ton that I could not afford to have taken out.

Well Brandon had been looking for these very things to fix a low road at his place. I told him if he could pull them, he could have them. Pretty soon, then, I will have more sections of my land cleared for free. See? This is what I was talking about last time when I got invited into the Secret Round Bale Hay Club. 

More significant still, was that the spot upon which we stood was very near to where Bobby-Jo had spent much of her protracted, unsuccessful labor. Having to help deliver her stillborn baby was, hands down, the second most traumatic event in my life, outranked only by my son’s birth, during which he very nearly died courtesy of the same thing that killed the calf. I have spent the weeks since that baby cow died alternately visited by horrible visceral memories of that day and blocking out the same with such tenacity it’s like the whole thing never happened.

Now I reframed the event. It still sucks that little cow didn’t make it. But at least its death had brought Brandon back into my life. A rancher his whole life, he could help me feel less worse, remind me with the voice of experience that sometimes there really isn’t a thing you can do to intervene. And we discovered our shared passion for advocacy and began scheming to put our superpowers together to help ourselves and, at least as important, be of service to others and share our abundance.