The people have spoken, so today’s topic, by a 53-47 percent margin, will be cows and why I hate them. Also, thank you for humoring me and voting in the first-ever Personal Statements poll, and apologies if you were unable to vote because you got a message saying the post was for paid subscribers only. It was absolutely not my intention to be extortionate and I now know to double-check that I’ve set the post to be accessible to all subscribers, since Substack apparently defaults to the “paid subscriber only” setting. Anyway: cows.
Some context: in January 2023, my mother, my daughter, and I set out on a road trip to the California central coast to visit the Danish village of Solvang (which I thought would be quaint and cute and which my husband David said would be schlocky and touristy and as much as I hate to admit it, David was right) and, after visiting Solvang, to see Bruce Munro’s light installation, Sensorio (five out of five stars for Sensorio, would definitely see again). What I would probably not do again is the 200+ mile drive in a once-in-a-decade storm, complete with flooded roads and gale-force winds and driving rain. (But: material!)
All of which is to explain why I freaked out a little bit when I saw what I thought were weirdly tall and very ominous-looking black cows in a sodden field as we were drove through Buellton, California. I had been at the wheel for close to five hours, and I was white-knuckled and jangly-nerved, and it was drizzling and foggy and hard to make out what the indistinct shapes were, so I assumed I was seeing inexplicably tall cows.
It turned out, however, that we were driving past OstrichLandUSA and what I was actually seeing through the foggy drizzle was this:
and this was somehow even more triggering because now I had the image of extra-tall black cows seared into my brain and I might have mentioned already that I hate all cows and here’s why:
Tree. Field. Shouting.
When I was four, my maternal grandparents rented a dacha outside of Moscow for the summer, and my grandfather took me for a walk. We walked from the dacha through a field and then down a narrow path through the woods, where I picked flowers called Ivan da Marya, which are half purple and half yellow. In Russian, Ivan da Marya means Ivan and Marya, although I could never figure out which one —Ivan or Marya—was supposed to be purple and which yellow. In English, the flowers are called wood cow-wheat. My grandfather pointed out several red-capped mushrooms; they were called mukhomor, a sinister-sounding name that yokes together the word mukha (fly) and mor (death). “Never touch one,” he said. “Don’t even get close. They kill almost instantly,” and I peered at the red-capped mushrooms cautiously, astonished that something so small could be so lethal.
We retraced our steps to return to the dacha, and as we were cutting through the field, I heard shouting far away, and then closer, and some kind of commotion I didn’t understand, and suddenly my grandfather picked me up and ran to a tree and lifted me high into the branches, and it was only then that I realized there was a bull charging across the field, straight for us, and the shepherd was chasing the bull and shouting, and my grandfather was also shouting, and I understood that had he put me in a tree so that the bull wouldn’t kill me when it reached us but that it would almost certainly kill my grandfather.
He’s going to get knocked down and trampled, I thought, and at the same time, And I’ll have no way to get down. I’ll be stuck in this tree forever. Even amid the shouting and the terror, I recognized how selfish the second thought was as soon as it popped into my head. But it was too late to unthink it.
The shepherd managed to distract the bull before it reached my grandfather and my grandfather yelled something angry-sounding at the shepherd, and the shepherd shouted something equally angry-sounding back, and then my grandfather lifted me out of the tree and we walked back to the dacha. I kept turning around to make sure we were safe.
Some takeaways
I will never, ever change my mind about this, so don’t try to convince me otherwise: cows are evil. I don’t care if it was one rogue bull. I don’t care if they have soulful brown eyes. You know what else they have? Horns and cloven hooves. There is no argument that will disabuse me of my conviction that cows wish me ill. I know there are many people who hear “cow” and imagine this:
Do you know what I imagine when I hear the word “cow”? This:
Or take literature, for example. There are many books about worthy animals: an exceptional pig (Charlotte’s Web); some very clever sheep who solve a murder (Three Bags Full); a resourceful and lovable pig (Babe the Gallant Pig). Answer me this: where are the books about good cows? Nowhere, that’s where. And don’t bring up Munro Leaf’s Ferdinand, because I will bet good money that the “bee” that “stung” Ferdinand and sent him on a wild rampage was really just the manifestation of his own murderous id. There. I said what I said.
Next week: walking around Palo Alto, with a guest appearance by… a goat! Really.
A bunch of cows standing together definitely look like hoodlums waiting for someone to beat up. (I did wonder how one tipped cows. 20% for good service?)
Argh, I think my previous comment about how much I loved this post vanished because I got distracted by the other great comments. Anyhoo, I loved this post. SO MUCH. Thanks for bowing to the will of the people. Also, as an undergraduate at Stanford, I totally bought into this urban legend and thought people went up to the Dish to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tipping
I am nothing if not gullible.