No. 19: Two Cows Collide

A Fable of Ideas

“Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s a hazing ritual for an author, this question, asked in a thousand different ways, no matter where in the world you are, what age the audience, and what stage your career.

I’ve tried numerous tactics. My first approach was to answer: “It’s a mystery,” but that never left them satisfied (especially Americans). Then I tried a more pedantic answer about the sum of experiences filtering through the unconscious (ugh, bang the gong). I even tried a winky, imperious: “It’s a trade secret,” and everyone hated that. Truth is, there is no good answer, as most authors will tell you, and every time it’s asked, it is the one time we are lost for words.

But then something happened on the farm this week.

And now I have my answer.

For those of you who don’t read this diary regularly, I live half-time on a goat and cattle farm in Missouri, having moved here last year to be with my partner, after 25 years in Miami and New York.

This was a surprise, because everyone thought of me as a high-maintenance city boy, which I am, but turns out I am also a down-in-the-dung farm boy, and the multiplicity of incarnations makes me feel more like Madonna, which let’s face it, is all I’ve ever wanted.

This month is calving season at the farm. My partner has lovingly raised a set of two dozen yellow heifers and now they are 18-months old and ready to have their first calves.

This is a dicey time. First-time mothers of calves are skittish and stressed and it doesn’t always go well. Which means my partner is tied to the farm 24/7, checking on them, day and night, in case a calf needs to be manually pulled out of a cow that’s struggling with birth.

On average, this happens once or twice a year. My partner locks the struggling mom in a cattle-chute and with 6’6, 240 pounds of cowboy heft, he wrangles the calf out of her. Mom is freed. Calf is healthy and safe. The two are reunited and all is well.

But this week, the script didn’t go as planned for one of the moms.

By the time my partner got to her, the calf was trapped backwards in the birth canal, umbilical cord already detached, and nothing could save it.

Mother nosed around, searching for her calf… but there was none to show her.

For a moment, my partner was devastated. This never happens. He’s so used to being the hero. To uniting a calf with its mom, no matter how difficult its journey into this world. I’ve seen him stay up continually for days, saving hundreds of goat babies in blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, heating them in his truck floorboards, bottle-feeding dozens of them at a time in his own house, sacrificing his own health to preserve every ounce of life. This is what he lives for, the joy of real-life creation, the same way I live for it on the page, which is why the universe brought us together, me just a meager shadow of the immensity of his powers.

But today, he’d been foiled.

I could feel how low he was. How helpless he felt.

But then he had an idea.

I knew the look in his eye because the look is how I feel when I get an idea too. A good idea. The one that sends ripples of heat through your blood, like you’re being renewed. Like the universe is lighting you up with the energy you need to execute on an idea that has to work.

The mother hadn’t seen the calf’s body yet.

Which meant my partner still had a brief window of time.

The next cow auction was starting in an hour only a few miles away from the farm. He sprinted over there, in time for the first part of the sale, where people offload their little orphan calves, and he bought the very first one on the block.

“Ehhhhh. You sure about this?” I asked, when I saw the calf, hauled home in his trailer. “It’s very…”

“…malinky,” my partner finished for me.

Malinky: an invented word between the two of us to mean something, usually a farm animal or piece of equipment, that is made bad by Man or God (can be used as an adjective, noun or verb)

And yes, this calf was malinky.        

Snotty-nosed, underfed, wobble-footed, mangy-furred, with a dumb look in its eye.

It was, to be honest, worse than a malinky.

But the idea wasn’t.

This is where things get a little… gross.

My partner located the afterbirth from the earlier calf — still hot on the ground, a teeming, smoking pile of placenta, amniotic fluid, umbilical cord, etc. — and manually smeared it all over Malinky, hoping it would convince Mom that this was her child.

Then he locked Mom and Malinky in a pen together.

Malinky was skin, bones, and starving. It would only be a matter of seconds before he tried to nurse on Mom. If Mom thought it was hers, she would let it nurse, and the fairy tale would be complete. Mother and Child united.

We leaned over the fence. Waiting. Waiting.

Malinky crept closer… went for the udder…

Mom took one sniff, one look, and kicked it away.

Malinky tried again. Another kick. Harder this time.

Clearly, the idea failed.

But that’s the thing about a good idea. It doesn’t let go so easily.

Case in point: the idea for this new novel haunted me for years, before I finally summoned the courage to write it. (See Entry 1 for more details). And even then, in the throes of a good idea, buoyed by inspiration, there are still all kinds of false starts and ups and downs that threaten to sink you. I shed many tears and endured sleepless nights in the early months of this book. I’m inventing a genre that doesn’t exist and for a while, I’d thought maybe I’d lost my mind. But in the end, what kept me afloat is what keeps every idea afloat – the purity of it, the memory of its genesis, that fizzy, transcendent thrill you summon again and again to remind yourself it’s not the idea that’s the problem, it’s the failure of your imagination and will.

And if there’s two things my partner and I share in common — it’s big imaginations and the stubbornness of an ass (we have two of them in the back pasture, in fact).

Back to Malinky.

My partner wasn’t giving up.

After an hour, he put Mom back in the head-chute, holding her in place. Then he took Malinky and stuck him on one of her udders, letting him drink to his heart’s content.

Mom snorted and kicked, but Malinky had the advantage now and hung onto the udder, lapping up milk until he was so drunk he stumbled off.

This made Mom despise Malinky even more, and when he soon came hunting for her udder again, she kicked him away and hid in the opposite corner of the pen, walling herself behind bales of hay.

But now, my partner’s plan was in full tilt. The next day, he moved the two of them into an even smaller pen, so there was nowhere for Mom to hide from the calf. Then three times a day, my partner put Mom back in head-chute and let Malinky drink until he was full.

By Day 4, Malinky (and his poop) was starting to smell a whole lot like the Mom’s milk.

Suddenly, Mom was sniffing at him anew. Oxytocin was conjuring through her like witch’s brew.

By Day 5, Malinky was drinking from her in the head-chute without her kicking him.

On Day 6, he slid up to her in the open pen, took her by surprise and drank from her udder. She could have beat him back… but never did.

By Day 7, Malinky started turning down the supplemental bottles of milk we offered him, a sign that he was getting enough from Mom on his own.

Today is Day 8 and she’s been licking his ears and cuddling him while he naps.

Next step, says my partner, is moving them out of the pen into a small pasture and seeing if the bond holds. And if she still lets Malinky drink, then he’ll start rotating them into the bigger pastures with all the other Moms and calves, and they’ll just be another happy, healthy pair. Big strong Mom and her runty, raggedy Malinky.

The whole story brings tears to my eyes.

Not just because Mom and Malinky might find their fairy tale. But because it all happened because of the persistence of a good idea.

My partner wouldn’t let this idea go. The same way that Malinky wouldn’t let go of Mom. The same way I can’t let an idea for a good story go. The ideas that haunt me until I can’t take it anymore and I surrender to the birth.

Mom, too, surrendered. She tried and tried to resist, but in the end, nature has its way. And at the heart of nature, at heart of our very existence, is just that –

An unexpected inkling.

A spark of inspiration.

A good idea.

And on that heart-swelling note… I better get back to mine.

What about you? Ever had a good idea that grabbed a hold and wouldn’t let go? And what should we name Malinky and Mom?

Until next week –