Cow Country

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In truth, my first impression of Cow Eye Junction was less of fulfillment or productivity than of desiccation and despair. I’d just been offered a job with the area’s local community college and after selling all my earthly possessions and leaving no forwarding address for family or friends — but vowing to inform the world of my whereabouts someday — had jumped on an old bus that would take me halfway across the country and deposit me along the highway just outside the town. It was late summer then and the entire area — from Cow Eye Junction all along the breadth of the Diahwa Valley Basin — was in the midst of its worst drought in collective memory. Ranchlands were scorched and the golden pasture grasses that in wetter seasons had waved poetically in the summer breeze now lay low and brown outside the windows of late August like barren prose. By then the cattle industry that once dominated the landscape was in its death throes, the local ranchers were coping as best they could, and the cottage enterprises that always seem to rise from the carcass of moribund industry — the writer’s colonies, the yoga studios, the guided nostalgia tours through the abandoned meat-processing plants and slaughter houses — were already popping up like so many mushrooms from the scabbed-over dung piles of the countryside. The area was both dying and being reborn. And as I stood over my luggage in the hot sun, sweat running in thick streams down the back of my neck, I got the faint sense that the air of the place had lost its ability to move, as if the wind were trying to blow in too many directions at once but instead had ceased to blow at all. Watching my bus drive away, I ran my hand over the back of my neck and shook the sweat from the tips of my fingers.

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