The Incident with the Cows

There’s a lot of folks these days talking about whether we – mankind, I mean – were pulled straight out of the proverbial clay, smiling and calculating potential profit margins on our financial investments, by a divine and eternal lonely bearded dude or whether we’re perhaps descended via mutations and natural selection from other life forms.

Personally, I’ve never understood the argument and all the hostility that surrounds it, because I’ll be damned if I can’t see evolution at work in our very day and age, on the branches my own family tree, even. 

Why, my maternal grandfather was a single-cell amoeba. We called him Grandpa Mo.

I remember my mother taking me and my brothers on over to see Grandpa Mo when I was a little girl. We’d get all spiffied up and drive the many miles to his house.  It felt like forever.  Then Mom would say, “Okay, kids, now get on over there (chirp-chirp) and look into the microscope and have a look at your old Grandpa Mo (chirp-chirp, chirp-chirp).”

For, verily, Mom was a bird. A North American barn swallow, to be exact. And Grandpa Mo, he was so elderly and decrepit during the time in which I remember him, his pseudopods were all wrinkled and withered. I’d say he was barely even capable of phagocytosis at that point.

One of my favorite crackpots of all time, the late enthnobotonist and writer Terrence McKenna, sure believed in evolution. In fact, McKenna thought that mankind’s psychological evolution was ongoing, spurred ever upward by the use of psychedelics.  These psychedelics (especially mushrooms with high concentrations of psilocybin) had been gifted to you and me and all of us by an alien consciousness. Or maybe the mushrooms were an alien consciousness.

I forget just now.

And so it was – to complete this most awkward of all possible segueways – that Greg sat last week at my lakehouse, talking to me of how he wished to delve into personal psychological evolution by finding and consuming large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms.

Greg is my boyfriend.

Psychedelic mushrooms are found in the wild exclusively in cow shit.

And me, despite my better efforts to talk Greg out of his scheme, well, there was only so much I could do. Heaven knows I’ve talked him into doing some stupid things before.  So before I could really raise much of a stink about his plan, I found myself in the passenger seat of his car, and we were roaring off down the road to the land of a friend of the family/former client who I knew wouldn’t be around.

Out there, way, way north of Houston, there’s no one around to talk sense to either one of us. There’s just a cool breeze and miles of empty road and it’s relaxing as hell and stupid ideas have free reign to eat right on into your brain.

And I retrieved the key to the latch on the gate for Greg.  I stepped in front of his car waving my prize at him through the windshield.  “You’re going to have to actually do the ceremonial unlocking,” I informed him.  “I’d like to remain at mere accomplice status throughout all of this.”

And so Greg stepped out onto the gravel road, unlocked the gate, swung the heavy metal grating out to reveal the sparse grassy acres that are my friend’s land.  Not a television, stoplight, sushi bar, or internet connection to be found as far as the eye could see.

“We come as thieves but we will leave as gods,” Greg said, tongue marginally in cheek, as he put the car back into drive.

Five minutes later, we were stopped, staring at a cow that lay in the road directly ahead of us, mindlessly chewing its cud. 

It was an enormous damn cow. They never look that big when you see them on television.  And this cow, well, she was so massive that there was no real way we were going to be able to get the car around her. 

You could almost call her a guard cow.  

“Well,” I mused out loud, “we can get out here and start looking around for mushrooms.”

“Hell no,” Greg responded, making a face at the cow, who, to all appearances, remained unfazed.

I swear, I tried to stop him. I’m City Folk, mind you, but I swear I knew enough to try and prevent him from honking the horn.

But it was too late. What seemed to be dozens of cows materialized around the car as though beamed in by some Star Trek-type teleporter.   

I felt as though, perhaps, I owed Greg something in the way of an explanation. “Bud – the guy who owns all of this – honks his horn when he comes in to feed them. They hear the horn and, well, you know…Pavlov and all that good stuff.” 

The cows were by this time closing in around the car. We were completely surrounded, unable to even back up in retreat.  “Why would he have to bring them food?” Greg asked, obviously miffed.  “There’s grass all over here!”

He honked again, which startled a nearby cow, who in turn sideswiped the car, knocking off a side mirror and damaging the passenger side window.

“I don’t know, Greg,” I responded truthfully. “I think it has something to do with how many acres are needed per head of cattle, but I’m no farmer.”

“Neither am I!”  Greg shouted back at me as he winced at the closeness of the bovine invaders.

I laughed. God help me, I laughed.  “Thanks for confirming that, ya Cow Whisperer. I thought most of your very best agrarian types got trapped inside their cars by cattle who then proceeded to dismantle the vehicle around them.”

Greg panicked, swung around in his seat, looking for anything that might resolve the situation at hand.  “Give me your gun,” he naively attempted.  “I’m going to shoot up into the air.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Well, for starters, we’re trespassing. Secondly, discharging his firearm is how Bud calls the pigs over.”

Greg’s cute little jaw dropped in dull amazement. “Really?”

“No!” I settled down into the passenger seat more comfortably, slipped off my shoes, shut my eyes. “I’m going to sleep. If and when you outsmart these lower life forms, wake me up, will ya?”

The next thing I knew, someone was tapping on the window.  The light was rearranged from how I remembered it.

It was a new day.

It was a new day, and I was still sitting in Greg’s car on a gravel road.  Best I could tell, Greg was not yet a god.

“Adri-honey, is that you?”  I look out and up into the face of Farmer Bud. Farmer Bud, on whose land we were trespassing, if you remember.

I rubbed my eyes and rolled down the window.  “Yeah,” I mumbled groggily before launching into the kind of lie I have been professionally trained to ad lib. “We were coming back from a bar last night and I didn’t trust his driving on these dark country roads…”

“I figured that,” Bud confirmed. “I didn’t recognize the car when I pulled up, though. These dumb high school kids come up here at night lookin’ for mushrooms to get high, and well, they’ll just get trapped all night by the cows.”

“Yep,” I glanced over at Greg. “Cows can be very sneaky that way…”

-----------------------------------------------

Five minutes later, we were racing towards my lakehouse again.  I was laughing so hard that I cried.  I was laughing so hard my sides hurt. The threat of actually puking from all the laughing was looming large.

But Greg wasn’t laughing. “I think I’m going to file a claim against his… cow insurance about my window and mirror!”

“Don’t be upset!” I punched him in the shoulder. “Historically, lots of great men have been outsmarted by cattle!”

“Name one.”

“Um, my Uncle Ernie!”

What I didn’t tell Greg was that my Uncle Ernie was less evolved. Uncle Ernie, in fact, was a raccoon.  When it came to cows, not even Uncle Ernie’s opposable thumbs could save him, in the end.