Adrian Pearson - Cow Country

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. Then I sat down on my suitcases to wait for my ride into town.

*

The president of the community college where I’d been hired was a man named William Arthur Felch, an ex-rancher and veterinarian who’d held the school’s highest position for more than twenty years and had come to be recognized by everyone in town as the grandfatherly face of higher education. It had been Dr. Felch’s recommendation to bring me to Cow Eye despite a bruising three-hour screening committee interview that left me bewildered and insulted and questioning whether I really wanted to work at such a dysfunctional community college in the middle of nowhere. “You’ll be facing a deep cultural divide,” he’d warned me by phone a few hours before my interview. “So be prepared for the worst.”

The “worst” turned out to be a raspy phone connection and six unseen committee members who grilled me on everything from my favorite U.S. Supreme Court justice to my views on the current political situation in Cow Eye Junction. The connection was bad and as I listened I found myself squinting to make out their words. Several questions concerned my relevant experience in highly divisive work environments and how I might resolve a series of hypothetical conflicts — for example, what I would do if one of my colleagues tried to sever the head of a key administrator. Another hypothetical question asked me how I would respond upon learning that a tenured faculty member had provoked an untenured peer by leaving a bloated calf’s scrotum in her faculty mailbox on a Friday afternoon knowing very well that it would sit there until at least the following Monday morning and that by then the grisly mess would be covered in swarms of flies and maggots. There was a question about a burning building (I was given a list of instructional disciplines — math, chemistry, philosophy, eugenics — and asked to rank the order in which I would drag their respective department chairs out of a flaming, smoke-filled meeting room); and then a battery of word-choice exercises (in one I was offered a pair of nouns — tenderloin and arugula , for example, or rawhide and tantra — and asked to choose the one that in my professional opinion was more indicative of an effective student-centered learning environment). As part of my interview I was made to extemporaneously recite my philosophy of education in blank verse; then to give a self-critique of my recitation; and finally to self-critique the structure and meter of my own self-critique. One question asked me to choose a political entity of the world that best characterized my temperament (I chose Benelux ); another to name my favorite branch of Christianity ( Anglicanism ?); and a third to compare two significant works of literature from different cultural contexts and to provide an example of how these works illustrate a common theme or principle (my comparison of the Vedic imagery in the Upanishads to Gatsby’s green light at the end of the dock concluded with a plea for a literary reconsideration of Fitzgerald’s obscure yet defining work.) During the interview there were trick questions and leading questions and open-ended questions that provided just enough rope for me to hang myself like an effigy from a tree. There were allusions to ancient geometricians and medieval poets and a lumbering digression on the rise and fall of the Roman numeral. At one point the committee reminded me that I had neglected to provide the requisite urine sample, whereupon I dutifully excused myself; yet when I came back into my living room holding the steaming plastic cup in one hand and my cold telephone receiver in the other, and when I had described this grave dichotomy in effervescent detail, the committee seemed decidedly unmoved by the results:

“What is your greatest strength?” they asked.

“I am a lot of different things,” I answered.

“And your greatest fault?”

“While I may be many things,” I sighed into the telephone, “I tend to be none of them entirely .”

Other questions seemed to want to probe my family’s history in Cow Eye Junction as my grandfather had once lived in the area before moving his wife and kids first to another part of the state and then across country; by now desperate for a job of any kind, and seizing upon this rare coincidence, I’d made sure to mention this bit of trivia in my cover letter.

“So you’re a descendant of Cow Eye then?” one of the voices asked over the phone line.

“Well, I’ve never actually been there myself. But I have heard many stories….” And here I volunteered a legend passed down through our family about my grandfather, who had once rescued a suffragette from drowning in the Cow Eye River. Our family was truly proud of his gallantry and for several generations the tale had been told with abandon.

“So!” a female voice interjected just as my grandfather was laying the woman’s limp but still-breathing body on the bank of the river. “Would you allow for the possibility that women are equals to men? Or do you think it fair that a female surgeon performing late-term abortions should earn significantly less than her male counterpart in the neighboring clinic?”

“And if so,” another voice interrupted, “would you, or would you not, support one of the many initiatives to allow more red communists and their homosexual allies into our schools through the proliferation of government-subsidized arts programs?”