Here There Be Cows

My brother has always been afraid of cows. Which may sound pretty funny for someone from central Pennsylvania, our state being one of the top five in the nation for dairy production. But it's true, nevertheless.

My father was something of a frustrated farmer. He had come from a farming family, but my mother was a town girl. I think he always secretly wanted a farm, but they compromised on a rural property. My father was employed as a railroad brakeman for more than forty years; to soothe his inner farmer, on the side, he kept (and still does, although not this time of year) a small garden. My mother was a full-time homemaker, taking seriously her responsibility of raising six children. We kept no livestock; so it was not at home that my brother learned his fear of cows.

My father and brother were, and still are, famous fishermen; and to get to many of the best fishing holes, they would have to walk through cow pastures. For my brother, such situations were a cause of high anxiety. He would scoot through a cow pasture with great haste, like the devil was on his heels, especially if any of the cows turned and looked at him; especially more so, if any of the cows had horns. (Devil? Horns? Coincidence? Perhaps not!)

I am not sure my brother was ever actually attacked by a cow; sometime, I will have to ask him. I think his fear was chiefly derived from the size of cows, they being so much larger than us, and by their numbers. And he believed (as McManus does, more on him below) that cows are not to be trusted. With a whole herd of cows milling about, you just can't keep your eye on ALL of them at one time. Which leads, perhaps, to general, free-floating cow anxieties. Might not any at-first-glance-seemingly-empty rural field harbor . . . *shudder* . . . cows? Perhaps.

I myself am glad I did not pick up my brother's fear of cows. I treat them with a level of caution due any creature several times my size, but I like the way they look and how they make an open pasture seem homey and peaceful. I have posted pictures of cows here at least twice before. Once, cows in the mist, and another time, a cow photobomb. In the latter posting, I talked about a classic piece of outdoor humor literature: The Great Cow Plot, a story written by Patrick F. McManus, and included in his excellent 1978 book debut, A Fine and Pleasant Misery.

There is a line in the story where McManus gets home and his wife asks him whether he's had any luck fishing; he replies that he had GREAT luck! "I only saw two cows and got away from both of them!" I have to admit that when I saw these two cows, I thought of my brother, and I remembered the line from McManus; and I laughed out loud. Here there be cows, brother; and I got away from both of them!!!

I took this photo in black and white because I liked how it emphasized the shapes of the cows. They looked like bovine art works created via the old-fashioned method of Scherenschnitte, practiced among the traditional Pennsylvania German (or more often called Pennsylvania Dutch, which is actually not Dutch at all . . . ) community. Almost like the idea of cows, not real cows at all.

My musical selection to go along with this is not a song particularly about cows, or about farming. I find myself a country girl at heart, who enjoys looking at open fields . . . and, yes, cows. This song is for those who find themselves happiest when their path leads them down a dirt road into the middle of nowhere: Sugarland's awesome cover of the Brooks & Dunn song, Red Dirt Road.