Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [75]
The last time I visited Equity Cooperative Livestock Sales, I was the same age as Amy. Dad didn’t come here too often. He usually shipped cows and calves with a hauler, and when he had lambs to sell he drove them to the stockyards in St. Paul himself. (Sometimes I got to make the trip. I remember sitting beside Dad as the truck labored east on I-94 and he taught me to identify the make of the oncoming big rigs by the shape of their hood ornaments. We’d keep a running tally in his pocket spiral notebook. It’s a game I still play and have taught Amy, but consolidation has taken most of the fun out of it—whither Autocar…Marmon…Diamond Reo?) But when it came to cull ewes, they weren’t worth the shipping cost or the mileage to Minnesota, so he’d bring them to Equity. Plus, he told me recently, the sale barn provided a day of cheap entertainment for us kids. Like the zoo, with no admission fee or cotton candy vendors.
Today the rigs—mostly dusty four-wheel-drive pickups hooked to aluminum goosenecks—are of a different vintage, but they clog the parking lot in the same arrangement I recall from thirty years ago. When Amy and I step out of the pickup the gravel is white in the sun. All the empty trucks and trailers lend the lot a detached stillness, implying as they do that all the action is inside, out of sight.
I have arranged to meet a man named Kenneth Smote. Kenneth’s last name always conjures some past-tense act of God. In fact, Kenneth is an atheist goat farmer and retired former chair of the local university psychology department, and father of my dear friend Frank. Over the years Kenneth has bought and sold goats at the sale barn, so I am hoping he can guide me through the process. Between critters, I envision an energetic discussion of fixed action patterns, specifically as they relate to the principles of imprinting as proposed by Konrad Lorenz—even more to the point, what are the odds that any given feeder pig will develop a lasting attachment to my favorite rubber barn boots? While we wait outside for Kenneth, I tell Amy that the sale barn used to be located well out into the countryside. The barn itself has not moved, but now it is within hollering distance of a mall. To the unexpected wrinkles of existence add the fact that slaughter hogs are available three minutes from Victoria’s Secret.
Kenneth arrives in a worn gray Nissan sedan. An erudite man of comprehensive intellect known to write pleasantly eviscerative letters to the editor of the local paper, Mr. Smote nonetheless cuts an unprepossessing figure and comports himself likewise. He presents himself this morning in green coveralls, a cockeyed St. Louis Cardinals ball cap, and a wispy beard. After a pleasant hello and introductions—he and Amy have not met previously—we walk through the glass double doors of the foyer and up the steps to the sale ring.
Dad was right about the sale barn as entertainment. The minute I hit the steps and smell the manure and sawdust, my pulse quickens. The seats are stair-stepped around three sides of the ring nearly to the ceiling. The front row seats are cushioned and fold down just like in a movie theater. The auctioneer sits ensconced in a stagelike enclosure with a microphone propped before him. There are cows in the ring when we enter, and we watch for a while to get a sense of the rhythm of the sale and figure out the bidding. Each cow comes in through a gate on the left, takes a few turns around the dirt while the auctioneer recites salient details, and then the bidding begins. The tension and gaming of the bidding charges the room. The rattle and rhythm of the auctioneer creates a breathless momentum, and now and then over the more organic scents we catch the smell of hot dogs and onions sold at the café downstairs. The bidding culminates, the winning bidder’s number is recorded, the cow exits stage left, another enters stage