Chapter 3: First Milking

Silhouetted against the coming sun and wrapped within the distant form of the great mountain approached a person walking up the long slope toward me. I found myself stiffening up, standing my ground while feeling fits of shyness, assuming this was one of the “Sweet And Gentle Folk”.

A husky and taller person loomed in front of me for a quiet pause as he stopped walking. “I’m Vern.”

Vern introduced himself as the herd moved up the trail, calmly across behind him and toward the loafing shed. The farmer’s wife had told me Vern was their permanent employee, the “best capable of the retarded men”. She said Vern had the mentality of about a twelve year old. He was a big guy and his true age I guessed about 30 something. He was apparently the brightest of his work gang and assumed their leader.

He wore a cap very well worn and kind of permanently squashed to close fit his head. It appeared he perhaps used his head for some function outside the norm and the cap was dingy green-brown, essence of cow poop. His clothing was dark and darker in spots, stained apparently from hard work. He had big hands and forearms that made him look like Pop eye.

He was polite. I was really relieved I could talk to somebody who seemed normal enough to me. I asked him about what was going to happen next and he told about milking without too many details. He said I could just follow him and he’d show me what to do. My relief was tenuous but real. I now had some direction. He was acknowledging that I belonged in some sense.

We retraced my steps back to the barns and the cows were turning into the loafing shed I’d walked through earlier. They were following as if by rote having done it twice daily so many times before.

They were very calm to be walking among the hired help as though very routine and their herding instinct led them to know the leader cow was to be followed. The old leader walked right into the loafing shed and without much dawdle was heading to the opposite end, into the stanchions that began through a concrete course to the milking parlor, all explained to me by Vern. It was news to me cows were smart enough to do that and they seemed so purposeful.

These ladies were not wild like my grand parent’s steers and seemed gentle. As a kid I’d always been told to stay away from the steers but these cows were quiet and tame. They didn’t show much recognition to the humans bearing witness and yet in some sense completely aware of our presence. They seemed very accepting and very business like in their means. There was one mindset and their focus at all times was what was just ahead of them.

The long interior of the shed was poorly lit and light bulbs hanging high above in the corrugated metal barely lit the impenetrable deep darkness but seemed not to matter to cows who were retracing familiar steps. The natural light coming through the far exit door in the sunrise end of the shed seemed a brighter fresh beacon for home as the cows crowded in. Silhouettes against the coming dawn were only interrupted with rising breath generating steam in the cold morning air. In all the heavy smells of manure the steam glistened with new day sun rays.

This was a herd of over 200 milking cows intermixed with heifers who had not yet “freshened”. I would learn how breeding time upcoming would allow them to have their first calf and commence milking, new cows. All milk producers were bred and “freshened”, gave birth routinely. Heifers, young, were the potentially wild ones and Vern was starting to sort them out before they happened to get crowded into the parlor. As I would come to learn a young heifer entering the milking parlor could go wild in unfamiliar confinement and create quite a rodeo, best avoided.

Vern disappeared as the herd compacted more tightly against the outgoing shed entrance, he among the cows moving with the tide. It seemed a little alarming to see him being carried away in the flow of beasts but by nature, and his apparent expertise, seemed so normal as well. So, as the first cows entered the parlor stanchions holding them while they were milked, I wandered in through the room I’d seen earlier, was all stainless steel pipes and tints with white paint.

Milking was starting without a hitch, no delay, and the flow of the cow filled tide told me I was going to be involved in new work learning on the fly. I moved to get busy with whatever I was to be doing as I entered what was known as the milk house. The paint on the interior walls was supposed to be white, I assumed, but was a bit dingy in places yet kept clean. I could tell. It was cool, felt damp in there, almost uncomfortable cool but the kind of coolness that reminded me of my grandparents root cellar.

I passed by a closet that held equipment moaning and sucking and wheezing. I would learn these were the vacuum pumps running the milking machine operation. As I left the milk house I passed through another door hung on automatically closing hinges and was greeted by overpowering pungent, the rich ripe smell of farm fresh cow poop most intense. It was hard to believe I would ever get used to the presence because what already smelled horrible outside was ten times worse in the milking parlor, humid, and I swore I could actually feel and taste it.

The parlor was two courses of elevated concrete the cows passed over and to either side as they entered the barn. They would wait in line until one cow was finished and released from a stanchion, free to wander back out into the loafing shed. The stanchion, now opened on the opposite end, would beckon to the waiting cow and the urge to go in came from the cow’s memory of available food cranked down from a large feed storage attic above.

It dropped via vertical pipes which made the connection. The food would lay waiting for her in a feed bin and it reminded me of over sized Cheerios. The stanchion gate would close behind her. She would eat until the milking machine arrived after having her teats washed.