Chapter 2: Calling in the Cows

3:01 A.M.

Aside from the distant radio all was dead still and dark as if night would forever refuse morning’s light. It was bleak, it was cold, ungodly early and vastly preceding any time I’d ever risen. I didn’t understand why people were getting up out of bed. But the drill seemed somehow so ordinary for them it didn’t leave me too uneasy, just a bit amazed.

A tired young mind of broken rem sleep, awakened, is a hard thing to muster alive. Known reasons for refusing the new day are strong. I felt compelled to be responsible but instead pretended to be asleep not wanting to confront anyone before all had risen and hopefully left the bunk house. My head was turned away from the door and I was not wanting to stir, upholding my faked slumber. I didn’t move although I was dying to see more. One eye above the blanket could only make out a very little of what the day would bring, who I was to be working with as these early risers moved nearly silently about the room. Not a word was spoken. No one tried to wake me. They still seemed to ignore my existence. That was okay.

Apparently the light hanging on bare wires in the middle of ceiling was switched into service and yes, it did work. It shown that kind of harsh light that bare glass bulbs glare although the light bulb was obviously low wattage.

As if driven by some unseen power, or perhaps what almost seemed like some kind of fear, sweet and gentle folk left the bunk-house like spirits, quietly and quickly. A soft high voice made mention of something about cows and I was left wondering about the gender of that person and what I should be doing. The radio had been turned off and I was all alone in the darkened room. Someone had switched off the light as if they had no expectations of me and lots of questions filled my mind. The door closed; all fell silent in the dark as footsteps disappeared into the unknown.

I was hired out by my dad to work on a large dairy that belonged to someone well known at state level in the agriculture community. The regional agriculture extension agent was a friend to my dad and provided the link to make this job happen.

To this day I believe my dad had a theory that if he didn’t get me killed I would make a better human because of torturous experiences. He compared his own early life as a tough experience but was in fact advantaged with family wealth in the hectic roller coaster economy of mining in Montana.

But he had genius that won him favors as he grew up. Yet he wanted to share with me what he thought was “tough”, to fulfill some belief he held in proper male child rearing. I was focus, the only boy, the baby, with two older sisters to teach me their values with far more time for me than he ever made available.

I guess I accepted the ideology of his claimed history which we children were allowed almost no detail of. He rarely spoke of his own hardships. He and his older sister ran away from home to head west from Montana, to survive on their own closer to the Pacific coast and to get away from a drunken father. So, if he could survive then I was expected to as well.

I lay there in the cold for a few minutes, wanted to go back to sleep but then decided I better get up and look like I was busy even though nobody was watching.

Light from the loading dock filtered in the window and I moved the curtains aside to let more in. Although I assumed nobody was coming back I donned the stiff work boots purchased just for this summer job. I wanted to be ready. The boots were not cool, cheap purchased by my cheap father, but I wanted to be prepared, ready to work when the moment came, just how the parochial lords of my past trained me.

My father had told me, “Never make mistakes!” and prefaced my anticipations for keeping a job I was already afraid of. I’d long learned threat of discipline was always hanging ready around the corner, metered by the harsh authority in school. And I guessed I was anticipating it here as well in this cold non welcoming place. It had to be safer to make that assumption without testing the old man dairy owner who looked like he meant business. He had already shown signs of not liking me.

The heavy duffel bag I’d lugged up the road the previous night was full of items I would probably never use, insisted upon by my parents, including thick rubber foul weather gear consuming the largest portion of the bag’s space. That gear was definitely not cool. I loathed the act of having to wear it. The worry in the back of my mind was how somebody from my school, classmates, somebody I knew could possibly see me in that garb, a ridiculous notion here in the middle of nowhere one hundred miles away. But it was fear I still wore from the well taught peer pressures of the clique.

The items in the bag did not include any food at all and hunger began to climb the scale in the realm of awareness as I pondered when food might be offered. My stomach was ever so hollow after so many hours without anything. I was hoping food would become available, somehow, soon.

I feared joining the crew in the dark pre-dawn because of what I’d both seen thus far and what I might imagine because I was inexperienced in most everything other than city life. I didn’t know anybody yet. I didn’t want to meet up with the mentally deficient men out in the dark somewhere. As I pondered my situation I realized what I’d seen thus far was kind of weird, strange, perhaps somehow normal in dairy respects but really odd from my perspective. But I would have to allow the fact I was far out of my realm in this polar opposite world.

Certainly it was my fault for being so naive and I knew how to accept fault for almost everything, a well trained nerd.

Perhaps this was just a bad dream or I was nuts or something else but, no, I knew it wasn’t. I wasn’t nuts. I just needed an open mind to manage my new experiences. I was far from home, things were strange, really smelly and I was just going to have to adapt, somehow.

I looked around in the dark but saw nothing. Yet I sensed I wasn’t alone although I certainly was by appearances. It was bizarre how I felt I was being watched and oddly it wasn’t frightening. That propelled me to get up and get going. I didn’t want to stay in the complete darkness any longer than I had to.