A Third (and for the moment, final) Installment of the Fauxtobiography

 PRIDE OF FOUR WINDS

Reality takes many forms, few of them expected. Speak to me of ‘reality’ and I see a red and white cow bearing the grandiose name, “Pride of Four Winds” (or ‘Pridey’ for short.[1]) In fairness, she was a beautiful animal, with perfect dairy cow conformation. She gave gallons of milk every day--but she was far from contented.

There has been little research on bi-polarity in cows, so it is difficult to say whether her unhappiness was genetic—or whether it might be traced to social causes—the ever recurrent problem of “nature versus nurture.” Certainly there was a disquieting genetic component—she was the product of a misalliance between a Guernsey cow and an Ayrshire bull.

She had the Ayrshire build and temperament, stronger, ruder and more active than the Channel Island breeds,[2] a classic demonstration of ‘hybrid vigor’, superior in appearance and performance to either of her parents. In our present world she would be recognized and welcomed as a precursor of the future American cow, but post-war Litchfield County looked askance at half-breeds. Neither the Guernsey nor the Ayrshire registries would have anything to do with her. She was a cow without a country, admired by objective judges of cow flesh, but with no place in the increasingly purebred herds of the neighborhood.

As a calf she had been a 4-H project. A 12 year old neighbor bought her for five dollars—intending to raise her for beef, but like lots of 4-H projects she became a pet. When she was old enough for slaughter, he found he couldn’t do it, so she was sold to the new guy (who had studied dairy farming under the G.I. Bill)[3] a beginning farmer, not so choosy about a cow’s lineage.

A local joke referred to his herd as a ‘gang’ (reserving the word ‘herd’ for those bovine collectivities whose uniform beauty was the result of seven or eight carefully planned generations.) The new people owned a bunch of unregistered Guernseys, a few grade Jerseys, a possible Brown Swiss, and ‘Pridey.’

They hired me to help with the haying, and to milk the cows after school. The haying was pleasant, and if the milking was a little boring, I could, at least, see that for the farmer it offered measurable and immediate rewards (each cow’s production—was weighed on a scale and marked on a daily chart.)

I thought seriously of becoming a farmer.

My mother, who also had ‘notions’ about education,[4] agreed. She arranged for me to take Agriculture at the Regional High School—a joint effort of the six most Northwesterly towns in Connecticut. But once again, I was too late. The school had been established in the 1930's to provide practical ‘vocational’ education for the children of local farmers, gypsum miners and factory workers. It was hastening to catch up with post-war Litchfield County, increasingly populated by exurban retirees, former New Yorkers, dermatologists, artists, and writers, all of whom wanted the high school to offer a stronger college prep curriculum.

Who needed Vo-Ag? Why was ‘Industrial Arts’ still required? Post war America needed people who could puzzle their way through a quadratic equation, new and better children, able to read “Ethan Frome” and write a well punctuated book report. However, the Vo-Ag and Industrial Arts programs lingered on—as government programs do, but they had become a holding pen for losers, destined to quit school at sixteen. Indeed, this may have been the reason they lasted so long. Boring and pointless, they encouraged early school leaving, thereby saving the district hundreds of thousand of dollars every year. And yet, I was romantic enough about my agriculture heritage, and my ancestral connection to the land, that I might still have persisted—except for Pridey.

By the time I went to work for Mr. Duncan, the ignominy of Pridey’s associations (as part of a cow gang, run by an ex-hobo) combined with her prickly sense of her own worth, had turned her into a slut. Like many a bastard child, if she was not to be valued for her inherited virtues, she was determined to be noticed for her behavior. More robust than her peers, she pushed them around unmercifully. In the barn she took up twice her allotted space, never sitting placidly with tail and legs tucked under. Instead, she slept with her legs splayed into her neighbor’s space, her tail soaking up manure from the drop.

I hesitate to assign human traits to animals, but malice is malice wherever you find it. 

In the three years I worked there, I must have milked her about 600 times. I tried to cozen her, giving her extra grain and the choicest alfalfa. I used fresh, warm water to wash her teats—attentions that (at 14) I supposed any female would appreciate. But she was not appeased. For her, any encounter between man and cow was exploitation, my first contact with militant feminism. To take anything of hers, especially her sacred milk, was a declaration of war.

Given her restricted circumstances—her head locked in a stanchion—she was surprisingly ingenious in her attacks. If I wasn’t quick she’d stamp on my foot. When I leaned against her flank to attach the milking machine, she’d swat me in the face with a urine soaked tail. She often stepped into the milk bucket, thereby wasting both our efforts, and if I was not alert to prevent it, she’d piss in any milk bucket left standing in the center aisle.

I was slow, but thanks to her, I gave up my Jeffersonian ideals, quit farming and sent away for college catalogues.

CIVIL DEFENSE AGAIN

When President Truman announced that the Russians had “the Bomb” we all got re-excited about Civil Defense. The wooden claxon had been confiscated by my mother who had a low tolerance for noise, and the white helmet had been lost in some post-war game of “soldier”—but no true patriot would shirk his duty. As a recently licensed driver, I jumped at the chance to meet my friends at night, spotting aircraft.

The nearby town of Cornwall built a wooden shack on an isolated hill. It had a direct line to Civil Defense headquarters in New Haven. Whenever a plane passed overhead, volunteers called in their observations, which were plotted on a map at headquarters. The early watches were taken by high school volunteers. Between planes we smoked and joked. Reliable adult spotters took the late watches, when (it was thought) the Russkies were more likely to test our mettle.[5]

On the third of December, 1951, I borrowed my father’s Hudson and drove the eight miles to the spotting shack to meet my buddy, Jack Coughlan, who later became a priest. At the time, his career choice seemed unlikely. He arrived with Susan M. a classmate reputed to have far more sexual experience (and a greater zeal for instruction) than was usual among high school girls in those days before birth control pills.

Three patriots in a spotting shack was one too many. I offered to return another evening. No, no! they insisted. Procedure required that two spotters sign the log upon arrival, and that the same two should turn the early watch over to the senior volunteers. Susan might have been imprudent in some respects, but she knew better than to sign anything. It would be wiser, Jack suggested, if he and I signed in, then the two of them would retire to observe the fly-overs from a different angle. He’d be back in time to sign out. “I’d do the same for you,” he promised, as fervently as he ever said Mass afterwards.

O.K. Why not?

They drove off in the direction of Mohawk State Park while I lit a cigarette and, squinting the smoke out of my eagle eyes, binoculared the night for Russian bombers.

None appeared.

At 9:30 I reported a West-East flight, probably a New York to Boston passenger plane, and, the skies being clear, I retired to the shack to work on my algebra homework. I meant to check every ten minutes, and having twice interrupted my pursuit of the meaning of ‘x’, it must have been between 9:50 and 10:00 pm when the shack was lit up like daylight. I thought it must have been Jack returning, or even one of the occasional inspections by the local CD Commander.

I stepped out to greet whomever it might be, but instead of vigilant friend, or even dastardly Russian, I was confronted by a short, greenish man who invited me, by gesture, to follow him up a ladder to a circular spaceship, suspended some twenty feet over our heads (by what means I know not.) Thinking it rather short acquaintance for social visiting, I declined. He shrugged and pointed a device at me. There was a flash and I was paralyzed. My mind remained alert, curious and calm. (I do not attribute this to my innate heroism, but rather to some feature of the disabling ray.)  He slung a rope around me (note the absence of tractor-beams) and I was hauled up into the spaceship by two fellows indistinguishable from my captor.

Although I felt relaxed I was totally rigid, my hand raised to fend off his Buck Rogers’ death ray, exactly the position I had assumed when zapped, so it was not completely surprising, once I was aboard, to find Jack and Susan locked together in an embrace that could only have been achieved by particularly enterprising and supple teen-agers, he on the bottom with his trousers about his ankles, and she with her skirt hoicked up, impaled on his (perhaps forever to be) turgid organ. How the green fellows had extracted them from the back seat of a 1946 Nash I cannot imagine, and indeed, there is very little about alien ways and means that is readily comprehensible.

The captain of the aliens released them from their catatonic straits and gestured for them to continue. Alas for Jack—perhaps suddenly reminded of his priestly vocation—he could not. At the captain’s impatient command, Jack was defenestrated. Susan shrieked. I would have hastened to her side, but I was still as brittle as a pretzel.

The aliens, whether biologists or pornographers, gestured to me to carry on. Suddenly I too could move freely. I wish I could say that I responded to Susan’s intelligent appeal, “Don’t be a fool, AJ! Do what they want!” but lacking experience myself, I was too modest to instruct others; nor did I wish our species to appear inept. Who knows what the consequences might have been?

I too was flung overboard and the ship departed at what we later learned to call ‘warp sped’, Susan still on board. I believe I heard her despairing, “NO...oo...ooo!” as the hatch closed, although (to be honest) it could have been me, for although alien researchers are experts in the science of gravity, they are curiously indifferent to its effect on falling earthlings.

Happily, both Jack and I landed in a mossy bog and regained consciousness quickly. We had an anxious discussion about whether to report the incident to New Haven. If this sounds callous, remember that no matter how distressed we were by Susan’s plight, filing a report was all we could do, and if this feeble expedient was our only recourse, what was the point?

By arguments that might have impressed Ignatius Loyola himself, Jack persuaded me that since nobody knew that he and Susan had been together, and nobody could possibly believe what had happened to her, it would be better for everybody (somehow, Susan included, although I forget the details) if we kept silent. So it was decided, a decision whose consequences would be discovered years later when Susan reappeared. But of that, more later.

HAPPY COLLEGE DAYS

Correctly betting that ‘pickelhaube is to porkpie as helm is to hat’ [6] I was granted a scholarship to Colgate University. It was not, in the fall of 1953, a real University (it had no graduate departments) but rather a pretty good liberal arts college, and a pleasant place to spend one’s advanced adolescence.

My intellectual pretensions were suitably modest, but the college was not demanding. It was an all male institution with a ‘rah rah’ sports tradition.[7] Campus life was dominated by fraternities and their attendant idiocies. The football team had a consequence to which the Philosophy Department (although quite fine) could not aspire.

People migrate toward their interests. Those who care least about the ambient culture form tumors within the greater body.  Colgate’s sports programs were of no interest to me,[8] but I soon found a home at Phi Tau, the fraternity that disdained football and basketball.  Allowances were made for intramural tennis, and competitive swimming—but none of us played golf, or anything we thought likely to connect us with the ‘bourgeoisie’, or even the Phi Delts. In retrospect it seems comic, but we thought of ourselves as intellectuals, and may even have been considered such by others. We weren’t, and would never become ‘real’ intellectuals, for we lacked the temperament to dig deeply into a subject, or to love discovery for its own sake—but we could mention Wittgenstein with a solemn expression, and if Mort Sahl said something witty we (a) got the reference, and (b) knew enough not to clap.[9]    

Nevertheless, Colgate was a much larger and more exciting intellectual world than I had previously known, and it was in the Freshman survey course, ‘Philosophy and Religion’, that I first pipped the shell of my parochialism. Those excerpts from the great texts[10] were like meat and potatoes to me, and tartar sauce too. I wolfed it all down, half chewed, and looked around for more. I gobbled history for lunch, philosophy for dinner, and late at night, snacked on Tolstoy.

But eager as I was, the ambient atmosphere was ‘doubt’. We were taught to read critically, to spot each lapse of reasoning, to pounce on irrelevancies and false analogies. Everything was served cum granum salum, and nothing was easier in ‘bull sessions’ lasting through the long, cold nights of upstate New York, than to talk ourselves into despair—not the morbid sort that tempts one to step off a bridge, but a brittle cynicism that discounts any hopeful suggestion as soon as it is proposed.

As the years passed I accumulated such toxic levels of skepticism that by my Senior year, although I knew everything,[11] I believed nothing. Somewhere along the line I sensed what was happening. I tried to fight back, to maintain a manly and upright character—to yet remain someone capable of heroism. But my vital forces were so badly reduced that (like a Thomas Mann character entering a sanitarium) I applied to Law School.

CANNONEER

But first I had to do what I could to save Western Civilization.

Part of the purpose of going to college was to postpone military service which was (in theory) mandatory. Colgate was an all-male institution in those days. However cheerfully we pursued knowledge, football glory or Northampton girls there was a penumbra of anxiety around all our lives—not caused by the more or less hypothetical Mongolian hordes conjured up by the CIA to persuade Congress to increase its annual budget, but the annoyance of the draft—lurking, lurking, lurking somewhere in the future, to be dealt with whenever we had finally run out of deferments. 

It was my fortune to be too young for the Korean Conflict, and too old for Vietnam. Who knows to what heights of military glory I might have risen had I been born in 1932 instead of miscarried in 1935—or what lugubrious death I might have achieved at Inchon.[12] I have little doubt that if I had been born in 1940, I would have been one of those artillerymen whose lonely courage stymied the NVA for months at Khe Sanh.

As it was, I drove to Albany to consult the recruiter for the Naval Officer Candidate School—but with no war then in sight (where being a junior officer might be desirable) I decided, on second thought, to join the Army as an enlisted reservist for six months.[13]

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[1] In the 1880’s and ‘90’s, when farming in Litchfield County began to change from a survival strategy to a gentleman’s hobby, it was fashionable to give farms romantic names, as if they were proper British estates. This must not be blamed on the farmers, or on any woman who ever actually lived on a farm, but rather on sisters and aunts who lived in town. They came ‘home’ to visit in the summer, to read novels on the terrace, paint watercolors in the meadows, and embroider cushions with the names they had concocted for the old homestead. Thus Uncle John’s farm became “Hickory Hurst” and Grandma’s was dubbed, “Windy Walls”. Along the Post Road, north of Miss Striker’s place (which, as far as we knew, was called, ‘Miss Striker’s Place’) the newly arrived Duncans—whether in ignorance, or displaying a citified taste for irony, called their dairy farm by its 19^th century name, ‘Four Winds Farm’.

[2] I hasten to state that both her parents were exemplary representatives of their respective breeds, carried away, I have no doubt, by a youthful excess of passion. Perhaps her mother, a genteel, upper-class Guernsey, suffered morning after remorse, but we can be sure that her father (no moral philosopher) did not. Ayrshire bulls aren’t. They don’t.

  

[3] Let’s call them ‘Arthur and Martha Duncan.’ At first they seemed mismatched. He was quite old to be starting life as a farmer. It seemed that before the war he had had many ‘adventures’ in the WPA, and riding the rails as a depression era ‘hobo’. A powerfully built and rudely handsome Scot, he had a wealthy society wife. The much younger Marty had been a Red Cross lady. They met over a doughnut. He was as  impulsively affectionate as an Ayrshire bull (and nearly as well endowed.) The winsome Marty (in a war zone, five thousand miles from Montclair) was as game as a Guernsey heifer.

[4] For instance, that education should be practical first, and decorative later. But Vocational Agriculture was one of her less successful ideas. Aside from the fact that we had no capital, and I had no talent for business, dairy farming was dying in New England. It only survived at the sufferance of malingering bureaucrats at the Department of Agriculture, whose regulations were meant to “stabilize” the family farm. When someone finally realized that there were more consumers voting Democratic than producers (who voted Republican) price supports were dropped and farming in New England came to a screeching halt.

[5] Regulations called for two volunteers per watch. Patriotism knows no gender, and the exigencies of the Cold War were such that married persons often felt obliged to leave husbands or wives at midnight, to join other people’s wives or husbands, in protecting the American way of life. The Civil Defense roster became a matter of considerable local interest, and the volunteers, who ought to have been honored as minor heroes of the Cold War, were obliged to endure innuendo and obloquy along with sleepless nights. They should have been grateful when the Distant Early Warning Line was finally stretched across the Canadian wilds. Not at all! “Can we rely on Eskimos?” they wondered aloud. However, once the telephone line to New Haven was disconnected, the shack was removed to the First Selectman’s farm, where it served for several years as a chicken coop.

[6] By such subtle multiple choices did the Scholastic Aptitude Test separate future Harvard men from incipient Yalies, and so on (by degrees) until the ultimate sheep was selected from the last of the goats (doomed to attend State College.)

[7] It now admits women, to its great benefit: the usual case of social progress at feminine expense.

[8] I had been milking cows while my high school classmates learned sports, and as much as I rued my relationship with Pridey it never occurred to me to envy someone throwing a ball through a hoop.

[9] The correct (cool) response was to snap your fingers (no more than three times.)

[10] Yes, yes—the same fellows who created what so proudly we hailed as ‘Western civilization’ (now universally mocked as ‘the Dead White Males.’)

[11] So I thought at the time, and in fact, I knew everything I was expected to know, which was a little bit about quite a few things. The mission of a private, liberal-arts college was (and still remains) the production of ‘well rounded’ graduates likely to succeed in business and contribute to the Alumni Fund. I had a positive genius for guessing right on multiple choice exams, so it was no trouble at all to achieve an excellent GPA. If one achieved some skill in country club sports, golf or tennis, so much the better.

[12] For, as it was at Cold Harbor, it is always the best who are deemed fittest for sacrifice.

[13] An unfortunate decision for I ended up serving two years chasing around the boondocks of North Carolina and Oklahoma, shooting howitzers at junked cars, hoping never to hit downtown Lawton or Fayettville. This potential error, known as being ‘180 out’ was surprisingly easy to make and was deemed a serious breach of military courtesy. Being ‘180 out’ meant that you were firing in exactly the opposite direction from the one you intended—and thus stood for a whole range of stupidities to which novitiates of St. Barbara (patron of artillerymen) are prone. The phrase originated when circles had 360 degrees. Ours were marked into 6400 parts. Hitting Lawton actually required a 3200 ‘mil’ error (still easy to make.)