Adrian Pearson - Cow Country

Dr. Felch’s truck was the only one making its way through the campus on a late Saturday afternoon, and driving slowly we passed the diverse flora that bequeathed all this emerging life to the college. In the central mall, still vacant of students toward the end of the summer break, a huge sycamore tree cast its shade over a quaint eating area. By the administrative building giant poplars mixed with birch trees and date palms to form an eclectic vegetative canopy. A long esplanade lined with alternating saplings of fig and elm led down the main thoroughfare. And in the distance I could see a banyan tree, an old cedar, and a Dahurian larch, all planted within several feet of each other yet none encroaching on the others’ shade and all managing to live side by side in ecosystemic harmony. Pomegranates grew next to peaches. Grapefruit and apricot comingled. Love vines wrapped their way around boughs of billowing cherry in a fond and nurturing embrace. The campus was built around three manmade lagoons and as our truck lumbered toward the faculty housing complex, we passed the three thematic fountains — one in each lagoon — that shot water high into the air out of imposing bronze statuary celebrating the richness of Cow Eye’s history: in the first fountain by the library, an Appaloosa had risen up on its hind legs with water shooting out of its mouth; in the second near the natural sciences building, a cowboy looked up at a lariat with water shooting out of his mouth; and in the third lagoon — the one that fronted the animal science complex and that served as the face of the campus — a huge bull was preparing to mount a heifer, an impressive stream of water gushing out of him as well.

“This is a beautiful campus!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, unfortunately it is…” said Dr. Felch with a world-weary sigh.

At last we reached a two-story brick building covered in faux Ivy: the Francis K. Dimwiddle Center for Faculty and Transitional Housing. Dr. Felch pulled up to a curb and turned off the engine. The sound died away just as suddenly, and in the new quiet the ambient sounds of the birds and the breeze and the pelicans became even more striking.

“Well, this is the faculty housing complex,” he said. “You’re on the second floor.”

Dr. Felch grabbed my suitcases and carried them up the stairs to the apartment door.

“Sorry, but you’ll be staying next to the math faculty. I hope that’s okay…”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” I had begun to ask, but Dr. Felch had already unlocked the door and pushed it inward. Without stepping into the apartment he handed me the key and wished me a restful remainder of the weekend.

“See you first thing Monday morning,” he reminded me and shook my hand. Then he clapped me on the shoulder again and said, “You’ll do great, Charlie….the future is yours for the taking.”

I thanked him and he left.

It took several minutes for the sound of Dr. Felch’s engine to trail off into the distance, and not until the sound had disappeared entirely did I begin to unpack my suitcases and arrange my things: the requisite toothbrushes and medications and shaving supplies and notes that had to be prepared for my first day of work on Monday. Happily, I found the historical novel I’d been reading during my long bus ride and placed it on my pillow; the work of fiction still had its bookmark in the exact spot where I’d inserted it before arriving into Cow Eye Junction. When this was done I opened the living room window overlooking the cowboy with a lariat. The water shooting out of his mouth was being scattered by the wind and as it came down in a traveling mist the sun reflected off the water crystals and made shifting rainbows through the spray.

“My future!” I said and grabbing my apartment key I set out for a closer inspection of the three fountains where the rainbows danced.

*

The campus was surprisingly spread out for such a small college with fewer than a thousand enrolled students and walking along the main sidewalk leading from one fountain to the next, I noted the Samuel Dimwiddle Memorial Gymnasium and, adjacent to it, Dimwiddle Field which bordered the Dorothy Dimwiddle Botanical Gardens and Nature Walk on one side and the Dimwiddle Gun and Archery Complex on the other. Building after building bore the Dimwiddle name and it was evident that all these Dimwiddles — whoever they were — nurtured a strong affection for the school and had left it a significant legacy. The sidewalks were deserted and in the silent lull that is so strange yet so familiar before the beginning of a new semester I imagined myself the last straggler in a post-apocalyptic world devoid of living souls. If there is anything more lonely than a solitary bus ride across time and space it can only be the quiet angst of a school that is missing its young people. The joy of living that comes from youthful laughter and spontaneity gives a campus its soul; take it away and you’re left with an eerie void — the empty silence of grass growing and paperwork getting done. With no purpose to fulfill, the creaking swing sets, the vacant classrooms, the bicycle racks with no bicycles — all of it hints at the fleeting nature of life itself: the buoyant young people that have outgrown this most vivid time of their lives and moved on to the dull quietude of mature adulthood. Where earlier I’d felt the excitement of a new beginning while riding through campus in the cab of Dr. Felch’s truck, now I experienced its opposite: the forlorn silence that is left behind when the newness of hope has faded — when all that remains is a school without its purpose, or a town that’s foregone its soul, or a college that is at risk of losing its way, its history, and its accreditation all at the same time.

Against the fading light I sat on a cement bench in front of the largest lagoon, the hard seat soaked with mist blown from the fountain. The bull in the center of the lagoon was just as virile and his heifer just as compliant as when I’d driven by them earlier in the day; but now the sun was low and the mist had turned cold. Sitting there I thought about the tortuous path that had brought me to Cow Eye Junction — the countless random coincidences that must occur to lead a man halfway across his country to a fountain in the chill where rainbows gather and a bull is forever mounting a heifer. One by one I recalled the links in the chain, the random kindnesses of random people along the way that led me to where I was. Faces I had not seen or even thought of in many years — the second-grade teacher with auburn hair and a beautiful smile; the girl from high school who had unwittingly inspired my most restless dreams during those burning years; the kind college counselor; the friendly cashier; the man with the cane; the nurse; the acquaintance from college who had let me escort her from innocence into womanhood; the three passersby who picked me up from the bloody asphalt — now these faces came before me in their clarity: the people who touched my life for a time, only to continue on in the solitary trajectory of their own lives, like arrows being shot past each other. How clear and straightforward it all seemed in retrospect. How perfectly meaningful the many meaningless encounters along the way that nudged me ever so slightly toward my fate as Special Projects Coordinator at Cow Eye Community College. And at that very moment how it all seemed so right — so relentlessly and purposefully organized to bring me to the only place in the world where a fountain like this could embody such hope and promise.

By now it was almost dark and the air was very cold. I had not brought a jacket and my jaw was shivering from the cold and the spray. But before I could turn back there was one more thing I had to do. Pulling an old coin out of my pocket I looked up at the majestic bull and his heifer silhouetted in perpetuity against the dimming sky. In the near-darkness it seemed that the water streaming from this massive bull really would flow through eternal time and space all the way back to its ultimate source. With all my might I threw the coin at the center of the fountain and watched as it sailed away from me forever.