cow town

My work, which has a subtle sense of humor when it has one at all, saw fit to turn me straight around from my Thanksgiving trip to Seattle and drop me like a extra frozen turkey at a client site four hours south of Silicon Valley. In a way, it was punishment for having gone forth and enjoyed myself. Others, Wistful after American holidays that the company didn't seem to think applied to non-Americans, toiled and slaved during the two obligatory days off that were allotted to us by custom. I, on the other hand, took my vacation. In fact, I left the state, and traipsed off to some imagined Nirvana full of home cooking and leisure.

No amount of arguing will convince my coworkers that a vacation at Mom's House is hardly vacation at all. I offer them stories of gardening all day, raking leaves, making compost, and they counter with a flat, "Well, I was in the office working on our product." This is the trump card to beat all trump cards. "And besides," one of the other trainers said sulkily, "we need you down at V----. Don't think you're getting out of it, either."

So it was that the day after I came back from Seattle, I hopped into a rental car and drove south.

I didn't want to drive P-man. Mapquest informed me that a round trip to V---- would be a round 424 miles at best, a total that would boot P-man's odometer straight over the 80k marker. I booked my car through a nationally known car rental agency, sneakily renamed here to B----- so that no risk of litigation will come pounding after me. B-----, I discovered online, gave rather decent rental rates for week long rentals, and even cheaper rental rates for people renting cars out of local offices rather than picking up at the airport. Everyone loves a deal, even if one isn't spending one's own money.

I booked over the internet and managed to collar a decent price. B----- sent me a polite, email confirmation a few hours later. I could pick up my economy compact car at the local Palo Alto branch on Sunday, December 1st, at 2:00pm and thank you for using B-----, have a nice day.

Only, it turned out on Sunday at 2:00 when the Guy drove me up to the Palo Alto branch that B----- didn't actually have any economy compact cars at the Palo Alto branch. In fact, the Palo Alto branch only had three full size cars, far out of my price range. The manager of the branch was waiting for me, hovering anxiously outside the door only to duck back inside the second he saw I'd noticed him.

When I walked into the office, he was skidding behind the counter that barred his safety zone from angry customers. He was a big man, or would have been, if he'd straightened up a little. Instead, he was halfway crouched behind the counter, looking as though he would have hidden if I hadn't caught sight of him in the door. I proceeded to the counter and he hurried behind his battered computer monitor and peered at me over its top, ready to dive for cover. He remained that way through the entire explanation of B-----'s failure to serve, perhaps expecting that I'd burst into some perfectly justified tantrum. He was pathetically grateful when I didn't.

"So ... what can we do, then?" I asked, after digesting this information. I stared at him trustfully over the counter, which I could barely see over -- so this was what it was like to be a hobbit -- and he expanded just a little from his shrunken, beaten dog posture.

Despite a certain sulkiness in his demeanor, he was actually quite helpful. A few phone calls later, I was set up with the knowledge that there were cars available somewhere in a 20-mile vicinity. "We did try to reach you," he told me reproachfully, disavowing responsibility for that failure in the plans, at least.

"I didn't get any emails or phone calls," I said.

The manager drummed his fingertips on the counter. "Well, we didn't have your phone number or email address," he admitted after a second.

"When I booked my car online, I got a confirmation email," I told him. "You could've emailed me."

The manager looked even more gloomy. "We don't have internet."

I blinked at him a little, finding that concept a little difficult to process.

"In fact," he added, straightening even more as a sense of his own grievances took hold of him, "there isn't any connection at all between us and reservations. They have no idea how many cars we have. They don't even ask. It happens all the time."

"Wow," I said cordially. I was sitting on the phone with reservations, listening to hold music.

He was now burning with the injustice of it all. "On Thanksgiving weekend, they sent us fifteen cars and made forty-seven reservations."

Just then, the hold music cut off and a woman came on the line. Her voice was suspiciously smooth and mellow, just the sort of tranquil voice you'd want in a nurse with excitable patients, or a negotiator talking a suicidal jumper off a ledge, or an airline attendent with a plane full of Shriners or, say, a reservations agent at a disorganized rental agency. "Hellooooo," she luted. "How may I help you today?"

Eventually I got my car, though it entailed driving to another office. I left the first office with an urge to apologize for the inconvenience. That the inconvenience was all on my part made no difference to my messed up Japanese priorities. In fact, a polite "Sorry for the trouble," managed to escape me on my way out, though the door was swinging shut at the time so it's possible the manager didn't hear my brief foray into un-Americanism.

The drive itself was a long and dull one, a stop-and-go affair thanks to the heavy interference of post-Thanksgiving traffic. Bloated with turkey and stuffing and family fun, it seemed that all of Northern California was returning to Southern California, down the exact same one-lane highway that I had seen fit to take. There was a sort of lethargy to their driving, a drowsy live-and-let-live attitude that ignored green lights and empty intersections and right-of-ways. It was as though, absolutely sated by egg-nog and cranberry sauce, the drivers had decided now was as good a time as any for a post-prandial nap. "No hurry," they were saying to themselves, yawning through one green light or another with idle engines. "The road's not going anywhere."

It was already starting to get dark when I'd left, so it was pitch black by the time I hit highway 152. There was something hypnotic in the flatness of what little scenery I could see, a night only lit by the taillights ahead of me. Bright: brake. Dull: go. Bright: brake. Dull: go. Ten minutes later, three-quarters of a mile along, I, too, became one of the lotus eaters. Bright: brake. Dull: go.

On top of everything, I had Ian Carmichael fluting away about Lord Peter Wimsey in my rental car's tape player. The stars were out and the sky was clear, thrilling the amateur astronomer's heart. My car appeared to have an obscure fascination with the opposing lane, and several times I had to drag my attention away from the stellar display to nudge it back into the correct one.

It is quite possible that I would have remained forever on those long, unlit roads, and been quite happy to do so, were it not that my rear end was becoming increasingly restless at the heavy, unrelenting demand being placed on it. And then, of course, there was the smell of cow.

I became slowly aware of it. The closer I came to my destination, the stronger it got. On normal drives, such unsavory offenses are prefaced by visual cues, by the sight of piebald grazers dotting the countryside. This gives the brain a chance to nudge the nose by way of warning. Signals are exchanged between the various senses, bracing them for impact. "What ho!" one sharp eye calls to the old proboscis. "Fertilizer factory ahead, what?"

In the inky darkness through which I was driving, there was no such preparation. I became dimly aware of it as a blot on the olfactory escutcheon, a less-than-satisfactory second cousin mixed in with the rental car smell and floral lotion. (My hands were dry.)

A few miles later, the blot had turned into a full-blown stain, followed by a thorough dye job. When I finally pulled into the parking lot of my hotel and stepped out of the car, I reeled.

The smell. The smell of cow. It devastated all senses. My eyes began to water. My ears fainted. And my nose, shaming the proud honor of our family, turned its back on the enemy and ran.

It was cow, and not just any cow. This was cows, plural profundis, the gathering of, the bovine equation, the epitome, the essence, the convocation of cow. The cows that originated this smell, one felt instinctively, were not of the paltry, unenthusiastic type of cow that makes a travesty of eating and digesting and secreting. These were not the cows that produced thin, 2% milk and fat-free cheese. No, these were cows that knew the beauty of a field of ripe grass, that could appreciate four full stomachs and knew what to do with the remains. These were cows with a rich, ripe culture of their own, with a vocabulary of over four hundred words to describe "manure" in all its forms. These were cows that digested for God and country. If Napoleon had such cows, one felt sure that he would have won at Waterloo.

The next day at the clinic, I made tentative mention of the pervasive V------ scent to one of the residents.

"Know what that smells like to some people?" he asked.

"Toilets?" I ventured.

"Money."

Our hours while in V------ were demanding. We left for the clinic while it was still dark, and returned after dark. Every morning the smell of manure would slap us in the faces when we stepped out of the hotel, more stimulating -- in its odd way -- than coffee. Every night, we would step out of our cars in the hotel parking lot and stagger against our car doors, thumped on the head by the same. I learned to tell the difference between morning manure and evening manure. Evening manure had had time to mature, and grow, and become all that it could be. It had body.

I left on Friday, speeding back home to my own bed and the relief of fresh clothes. And you know, after all that, not once during the entire week had I ever seen a single cow. Posted by yhirata at December 10, 2002 09:35 PM