Adrian Pearson - Cow Country

“I keep inviting them to visit,” he said. “But they haven’t made it back. I guess there’s not much to see in Cow Eye once you’ve already seen it. And it’s quite a damn long bus ride for the pleasure….”

“It sure is,” I said. Then I added, “You know, Mr. Felch, I give you a ton of credit. I can’t help but have immense respect for any man who’s been married five times….”

Between us passed another wistful moment and when it had passed I continued:

“So it sounds like that last Special Projects Coordinator didn’t exactly endear herself to the campus?”

“To put it mildly. And yet somehow she did. You see, there are some people who loved her, and still love her. But I haven’t even gotten to the funny part yet. So now, if you remember, we’ve sunburned our accreditors and compromised our accreditation. We’ve got a dozen cases of Christmas liquor gathering dust in a storeroom somewhere because there’s no party to drink it at. And to top it off, our divided faculty are starting to climb even further down each other’s throats. If the cultural divide seemed bad before — and it was; in fact it’s been escalating for years — now it’s just totally out of hand. And would you believe, at the height of all that, this person comes into my office to ask me for a raise?”

“In salary?”

“She says she’s tired of being everybody’s bitch and wants a cost-of-living adjustment to accommodate her for the hardship of living in such a rural, godforsaken place. Keep in mind we’d already paid to ship her car here from halfway across the country, not to mention giving her a one-time allowance to relocate her dog and her eclectic collection of Siamese cats. We’d sent her to tantric conferences for professional development. We even gave her a couple months of free housing while she looked for a permanent place more to her liking.”

“She didn’t want to live in the faculty housing on campus?”

“Oh, no. That wouldn’t work — not enough yard for the shih tzu. So it took her six months to find a place. All the while, she’s canceling Christmas Committee meetings to check out places. Realtors are leaving notes on her door. And amid the rubble she asks me for a raise . A raise! She probably believed she deserved one, too.”

“Did you give it to her?”

“Hell no! And I told her as much. Though I didn’t use those exact words. And that’s when she hit me with the lawsuit….”

As he was recounting this saga Dr. Felch seemed to be getting even more animated. And as he got further into the telling of his story his smoking became more insistent. He had already gone through a second cigarette and used it to light a third, then held up the glowing end of the third to light a fourth. Clearly his lungs were now paying the price for his decision to hire my predecessor sight unseen after a single phone interview.

“…I mean, you figure you’ve done your due diligence by hiring an award-winning administrator with personal references from the president of Rhodesia. She should know what she’s doing, right? Charlie, dammit, she had two Ivy League educations…!”

I shook my head sympathetically. Dr. Felch continued:

“So anyway, this is what you’re stepping into as Special Projects Coordinator. You’ve got to do better, Charlie. I can’t afford for this position to fail again. Too much is at stake. I can’t afford for all these phone hires to keep turning out like this…”

“It sounds like I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

“Mildly speaking. I’ll be asking you to help me shepherd the Christmas party this year. And I’ll be trusting you to lead the accreditation process on your own. Our next report’s due in November and the accreditation team will be visiting next March. And we really need to get that right. I mean, do you have any idea what it’ll do to us if we lose our accreditation as a college?”

“Well, if Cow Eye isn’t accredited it’ll mean your students can’t get valid degrees. Their degrees won’t be recognized.”

“Right. Which means they would have to go to other places for their education. And they will . All of our best and brightest will leave. And not come back. Just like my own kids went away and will probably never come back….”

Here Dr. Felch explained the recent demographic shift in the community: how families who’d lived in Cow Eye Junction for generations were moving away in search of jobs — and how a horde of newcomers was moving in. A few years back some rare healing minerals had been discovered in mines on the northern side of town — a part of the town called the Purlieus — and now the makings of a new boutique industry were growing up around it: vendors sold magic mineral crystals to weekend visitors and mingled with a new throng of healers, hippies, prophets, and priests. “Freaking weirdos ,” Dr. Felch concluded. “Only half the people in Cow Eye were actually born here. The other half just moved to the area from some other place. Either in search of magic minerals. Or escaping their own histories. Or both. Did you notice how your screening committee had exactly six people?”

“That's what I heard….”

“Well three of them were from Cow Eye proper and three were from other places. That's how we get things done here. Nowadays each group makes sure it’s never outnumbered….”

Dr. Felch had stopped at a cattle crossing and a line of cows was being herded in front of us by three men on horseback. Cattle dogs were trotting alongside to keep the herd in line.

“…I mean, don’t get me wrong — it’s great that we have faculty from exotic far-off places. Hell, we once had a tenure-track instructor from California …!”

Dr. Felch beamed. He seemed especially proud of this fact.

“…But it’s getting tougher and tougher,” he continued. “At some point you’ve got to hire your local folks too. And nowadays it’s getting impossible to do that. Nowadays they have to go away to get their degrees — and once they leave they never come back. They say they will but they just don’t. Would you?”

I shook my head:

“No,” I said. “I guess not. Cow Eye has a certain allure for a stranger like me. But I can see why a local person might want something more.”

Dr. Felch laughed.

“Actually,” he said, “you’re one of the few who’s come back.”

“Me? But I’m not from here! I’d never even been to Cow Eye before arriving at the makeshift bus shelter. I’m not from here at all!”

“In a way you aren’t. And yet you are. Remember, your grandfather lived here. He even rescued that suffragette from drowning in the river — and I’m sure there are voting descendents of that woman still living here in Cow Eye. And I’m sure her descendents have their own stories to tell. So you’re about as close as we’ve had to anybody coming back. I think that’s what the committee saw in you and why I was able to get all six to sign off on your hiring. Half of them liked the fact that you were from here. And the other half liked that you weren’t .”

“That tends to be my story,” I said. “Being a lot of different things yet none of them entirely ….”

We had moved on from the cattle intersection and were now passing an old meat-processing plant whose long fence seemed to run ahead of us into infinity. The fence was weathered but imposing, and so vast that it seemed it might never end.

“That’s the world-famous Cow Eye Ranch. In its heyday it fed half the country. Now it’s just barely hanging on….”

The fence was old and made of wood about eight feet tall, faded white, and with red painted slogans every so often: “EAT MEAT” one would say, and then a few hundred yards later: “BEEF IS BETTER!”