Doppler

I am on the couch watching our Doppler radar channel while T. is doing something in the kitchen. “What’s it saying?” he calls. We’re looking for a tornado. The sky looks likely, the air likely, but the on-screen weather map displays the quilted graphic of area counties, no text, and I’m not sure which one we are. There’s a red and a yellow zone.

T. comes in. “Oh,” he says, tapping a spoon, leaving again. I don’t say that I can’t tell, don’t know where we are.

Maybe that squiggle is the river, the state line, drawing down through the otherwise straight rows like a knife through frosting.

Either way, it is only a watch, not a warning, and neither of us is afraid, not unduly, of Storms in the Midwest—for which there is a theme song and an MTV montage on our local news channel, lightning snaking a purple sky. This Saturday afternoon, we have cows to check out at the farm. In particular, we are to scout for new calves in the grass. On the ride out, the rain falling through sunshine, the whole of the cultivated countryside lit up by springtime, by late-afternoon, blowing-storm color, T. says we can listen to the Ramones. Hey pretty girl, I wanna be your boyfriend….

It’s been a month of color: things shooting upward in our lawn. T. gave our grass its first half of a mowing and our seedlings in cups in the upstairs office-turned-greenhouse grew all the way to poking into the florescent bulbs, requiring the use of more and more books in our jerry-rigged lighting suspension system, the result of which, I knew from the start, will be ruined books but possibly vegetables.

Also this month we took in our second community theatre production, this one, so appropriately, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

I didn’t tell T. what I’d been hearing about the show until we were in the car, on our way. It was the guy who plays Joseph: some dream boat, beef cake. An actual six-pack, I overheard some women in town discussing. And he doesn’t wear a shirt through the whole play, a student told me.

And the show was selling out; every lonely seat matched with cash-paying mate in that gemstone of a new county auditorium. Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Pack. Not to disappoint, the twelfth son of Jacob strips to his white loin cloth by the second song, and the house lights dwell attentively. In line in the bathroom at intermission, one woman asks another which number of performances this made for her, and a sixth-grader at the hand dryer interrupts giggling: four. In the program, we read that Joseph works at Marathon, and that his future plans include “making lots of babies with my trophy wife.”

A week later, T. will see Joseph at Wal-Mart, with the trophy wife. Guess who I saw at Wal-Mart? He’ll report. You didn’t get his autograph? I ask.

At the end of the show, back in our car and nosing our way into the line of cars headed out the one highway, past the one Dairy Queen—conducting a brisk business given the few hundreds of us who’d just sat transfixed by one fellow human’s sculpted shape—T. maintains in a disapproving whisper: No man has naturally that hairless of a body.

T. comes out to the farm to work three days a week, but I’ve only been a few times. The drive takes us south and east about twenty miles, tacking the dizzying grid of county roads. There are wild turkeys to watch for, and today craterous, road-washing puddles. “This will get your gilly-hopper,” T. says accelerating over the one small hill so that we hang in air. Immediately thereafter, he points out a dilapidated, one-room schoolhouse, next a set of county-historic-register oil pumps, still working, somehow rigged to pump in concert by means of an underground lever system, the whole thing so wonderfully mechanical and quaint even an environmentalist would have to love it.

Mechanical is the last age of technology I understand, or so I imagine. But perhaps that is also untrue. Send me back in time and give me one of those enormous, rusted scythes and I would not know how to use it. I would not know what was wheat.

It is pouring, and I pull up the hood on the red slicker I still have from a Goodwill in Milwaukee. It says I am Summerfest Security. We stop at the barn to exchange our car for the Chuck Wagon, an ATV with a golf-cart-like roof that we can use to tool out along the muddy path to the field. I think we will tip. There are no doors and I am hanging on to that small roof, rain pouring directly down my sleeve, and my butt sliding around on the vinyl seat in my purple wind pants, these from a Portland Goodwill. We will get stuck in a rut, I know, but T. laughs, gunning through. The first herd, the steers, clump out of sight, back in the woods. That’s when we begin Y-turning, slide, and get our wheel stuck in the bottom wire of the electric fence. I yelp, pull back my hand, pull up my feet; the sky cracks with rain and storm, and T. says shit.

He gets out a pair of pliers, climbs down from the chuck wagon. He grabs the fence with his hand and yanks it.

What are you doing?

The fence is hardly on, he says, totally annoyed with me. I try to back out of my own mental confusion: we are in something metal and we are entangled in an electric fence. Then I get a feeling to look behind me, where the steer, en masse, have drifted a startling ways from the woods. They think we’ve come to move them to their next pasture and they bellow, advancing in the rain, mounting up on one another’s backs, silhouetted against the almost midnight-blue sky.

He does this all the time, stands among these enormously-breathing animals. At the next field, where the Mommas and calves are, we get out to walk its full length. 2015 stumbles over, and T. scratches the space between her eyes. Then her gray tongue—like the one we have in thick plastic wrapping in our freezer, planned for Lengua Tacos—darts as if to wrap his finger. Here there are pools of poop; it pours from the back ends of cows like the rain is still pouring on us, like small showers, right and left, turned on and off sporadically. The cows watch us, but don’t bother to move—either to get closer or to move away as we cut through their field. The baby calves lie amongst the half-chomped tops of orchard grass, clover, and rye. They can stand immediately, but get tired on their spindly legs. T. looks for the one that has been walking on his knuckles for the past two days, the first two days of his life, tipping awkwardly forward as if unconvinced that the bottoms of his new soft hooves are the part that is supposed to touch the ground. He’s going to have to walk right soon, or he’ll get left behind when the herd moves, when his momma moves. The last time I was out here, T. and the farmer opened a pasture gate and the cows took off at once in their customary group-think gallop, the new calves left mewing behind like kittens. Finally remembering, a couple of the Mommas circled back. They gathered up the other cows’ babies too, neighborhood busybodies, mooing crossly at everyone.

The good Mommas will be kept around longer.

I hope I’ll get to see one born. T. has watched at least one shoot out, legs unfurling in the air, parachutist with sinewy cord trailing. Clearly by their wide sides, several moms are very close to birthing, and maybe they’ll do it right now, out here in the rain. The closest I get is that we do find one newly born calf, new since this morning when T. was last out here. First I spy a long piece of bloody mucus hanging from one Momma, and we look nearby in the grass to see him—he’s huge and square in the shoulders already, bigger than your dog, but sticky, blinking.

T. will tag him, paint his umbilical cord. We’ll record the birth in the spiral notebook, holding it away from the dripping ends of our hair. Back at the farmhouse, the real farmers pull in the driveway as we are leaving; all of us wave from behind our respective windshield wipers.

This whole week leading up to this weekend I have been sick with something, a cold or flu or allergies; I lost my voice for two full days at a conference where I had to honk and rasp through a presentation on Encouraging Classroom Discussions, and where there were people for me to meet, people who might be on hiring committees, but where I was delusional with Day-Quill.

So by the time we get home from the farm and I am peeling off wet layers and running the shower, I am also sneezing.

You’re not a farmer, T. says, smiling, in the kitchen stripped down to his underwear and eating something off the end of a knife.

I’ve got a stack of papers to grade. Maybe, I’m not a teacher either, I say.

By the time I get out of the shower, T’s on the computer, updating his Facebook with something crass, checking out poetry journals.

It’s Saturday night. We grill hamburgers. We read on the couch with the cat. The tornado watch continues until 11, though I am asleep at 10:30, in my bed. The next day, we’ll take our walk, past the Drive-Thru liquor store where the manager agreed to put on order for us some Full Sail and Deschutes beer (from Portland); and past Gabriel’s Family Restaurant, where we have never eaten but which, we’ll see, is closed for Patty’s surgery.

We’ll bicker a little because it’s raining and because we’re out in it again—and with no purpose at all this time really, just a walk, a reason for me to avoid my grading. I have this idea that I want to see the county historical museum, which is near us and which—among all the things that are not open on Sundays—is open from 2 – 4. T. has this idea that walking in the rain is stupid. He also claims not to be big on historical museums.

But then again, he didn’t want to go to Joseph, did he, and that was a good time!

In our raingear, cars whooshing by, we’ll come across the only other person out here walking, a long-haired kid, maybe twelve or thirteen, in jeans and a Rodman Bulls’ jersey, his bare shoulders streaked with warm rain and a wood-handled handgun jammed in his front jeans pocket.

“Really?” I’ll turn to mouth to T., trudging behind me, and also to make sure the kid is leaving, moving on and moving away from us with that gun.

He gives me a look like shuddering—like being weirded out.

But by the kid and the gun? Or still by me and my insistence on this walk in the rain to the county historical museum and maybe that last thing I said about him being a big baby who never wants to do anything I want to do?

I turn around again because we’re almost there.