I think it’s a Lactaid milk commercial where a computer generated Holstein cow stands next to Mr. Lactaid and seems to nod her head in agreement with everything he says. The possibility of a cow nodding in agreement seems a bit of a farce to me. It runs along the lines of my boys playing Minecraft when they were small and showing me how bumping a cow on her hip puts milk in a bucket. Simply not true. Cow myths. But now after a five-day trip to Iowa, my perspective has shifted.
Though I didn’t plan it, I arrived in Iowa the day after my brother had surgery on his arm. Since he would be out of commission for a while, Dad is back in the saddle to feed the cattle. The saddle is the skid loader with a bucket attachment on the front that scoops silage from the long snaking storage tube near the timber. It takes four trips from the timber to the feed lot to fill four eating stations; each is a pair of huge tractor tires turned inside out to act as feed bunks. That’s the most banal, watered down version of this daily feat.
With the twenty-plus cows about to have calves any day now, they are waiting for the big moment on the feed lot and in the barn. Normally, the cows roam the sparsely wooded timber, the long lane leading to the barn, and the feed lot where the water tank stands. With the cows kept in this smaller space, Dad and my brother can regularly check to see if calves have been born or to help if a cow is having trouble calving. Once they are born, each calf is checked over and given an ear tag with a number that matches its mom’s.
Shared space in the barn: cows at the back, dog and cats in the front.
The feed lot is a large, cement outdoor space adjacent to the barn. Inside the barn, an equally large space is bedded with cornstalks. Then in a couple days when the cattle crap all over the clean cornstalks, another layer of cornstalks is laid down. And so, the layering continues until the last calf is born; then all the babes and moms are let back into the timber.
Two steel gates, maybe each ten-feet long, are hinged at either end of the opening to the barnyard, and they cross at the center when they are closed. A chain wraps the two together locking them in place. Dad showed me how to wrap the chains to hold while he took the skid loader down the fence line toward the timber to get the silage. My job was to fill in for Mom for a few days as gate girl. To save Dad from getting in and out of the skid loader eight times to open and close the gates, I would open the gates, guard them once he took a load of silage in, then close them when he headed out for another load. Then I would wait and watch for him to come back with the next load.
For these five days that I was in Iowa, March lost touch of what normal, leaning-toward-spring temperatures should be. Most mornings were windy and around 20-degrees. Thankfully, I had packed my snow boots and ski pants; they kept me as warm on those days as what they did on top of mountains. After letting Dad into the feedlot the first time, I took my gloves off to wind the chain around the two gates. As I did this one white-faced Angus cow watched me so intently that I wondered if she was thinking about charging at me. She was a thinker. A starer.
The gates’ overlap left me with a geometric quiz of how to best wrap the chain to hold the gates shut. Dad had made it look easy: around and around and around went the chain and off he went. With the thinker cow intently watching, I copied Dad’s chain configuration as best I could then went and sat in my car parked next to the gate to warm up. From there, I could keep my eye on the gate and watch for the skid loader bumping over the horizon a quarter mile away with the next load.
The moment I closed the car door, the thinker cow meandered to the gate, right up to the chain. She sniffed at it. I had a surreal premonition of what was about to happen next, but it wouldn’t—I was surely imagining something that cows aren’t capable of doing.
Yet, slowly, with a deliberate glance toward the car, she turned her body as if she was going to saunter away, but instead, she backed up to the gates. With a pronounced single swing of her hips, she gave my chain contraption a firm, thousand-plus-pound bump with her back left quarter—and I’ll be damned if those gates didn’t spring open! I flew out of the car, yelling the necessary cuss words while waving my hands. She ambled away from the gates, surely, with a chuckle in her midsection.
With my fingers numbing, I worked on intricate, tight figure-eight chain maneuvers in between the gate openings and closings. After the final load of silage an hour later, I wrapped the chain for the final time. Dad checked my work before we left, and said, “That looks good to me!”
The thinker cow had fallen into ranks with the Angus blob, er, herd. She’d had her fun with me that first morning and didn’t approach the gate again the following days when I was on gate duty.