Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

It's funny what things make a huge impression on you at an early age, and how you carry those things forward as dreams, or cautionary tales, or even phobias.

In 1965, when I was a baby, my parents rented a small dairy in the Santa Rosa area, and moved in about a week before Christmas. Dad bought a new vacuum pump motor at a farm supply (the one that was in the barn looked to be on its last legs), and he and my grandfather began to install it bright and early Christmas Eve morning. My grandfather was a very handy guy, but somehow they got the thing running backwards, and knew it was time to call in an expert.

Did I mention that this was going on while Dad had the cows in the milk barn? Oh, I forgot. Six cows were in the milk parlor, happy to be munching grain as they waited to be milked.

So a local electrician came out to help. While checking the system, the expert did the unimaginable, and touched a live wire to metal. Dad and Papa were with him in the machinery room at the time, and not in the noisy milk parlor, so they didn't know immediately what had happened, but they found out soon enough: five of those cows, with their heads secured by the metal stanchions, were electrocuted.

Now, I wasn't old enough to remember the events, of course, but I've heard the story of those cows all my life, usually from Mom, who still gets agitated talking about it. As deaths go, this was a brutal way to die, as evidenced by the condition in which the cows were discovered. When you think about my parents' stage in life -- fledgling dairy farmers on a rented ranch, in a brand new town, and a new baby to feed -- it's hard to imagine a more devastating blow. It was a big loss.

But that's not really what I wanted to tell you about; I told you that downer story so I could tell you this:

Fast forward ten or eleven years to the ranch where we all live now, in Orland. We had a little camp trailer we'd use occasionally, and it was kept behind the house next to the pump house. My girlfriend Cheryl and I had talked my parents into letting us sleep in the trailer one summer night -- a treat for scruffy ten-year-olds.

It was nearly dark when Dad came out to hook up the outdoor extension cord from the trailer to the pump house, so that we could have light for our sleepover. Cheryl and I were giddy with the anticipation that only little girls can understand. Cheryl threw open the trailer door, grabbed the pull-yourself-up handle, put one bare foot on the iron step, and let out a howl I hope never to hear again in all my life. I was standing behind her, crowding her in my jumpy state, but frozen to the ground as I tried to understand the problem.

Now, I don't remember this, but Cheryl says I was yelling, "What?! What?! Snakes? Snakes! Spiders! What?!" as I conjectured the only things that would make ME yell that way. I grabbed onto Cheryl instinctively, though surely out of fear and not out of heroism, and immediately felt the surge of electricity coursing through both of us.

Whether Dad unplugged the extension cord at that moment, or I in my hysteria had knocked the howling Cheryl and myself to the ground, I'll never know. But we were suddenly free from the pain, gasping for breath, lying in a heap below the trailer steps, and shaking so hard that it hurt. Then the tears started.

I think we stayed up half the night in my room, crying and getting hysterical all over again. There was no question of sleeping in the trailer that night, or ever again, for that matter; I think it was sold not too long after that. I refused to touch it.

The shaking is what I remember most of all, because it was violent and involuntary. As frightened children with exquisitely developed senses of drama, Cheryl and I no doubt elevated our fear and discomfort to new heights. Dad rolled his eyes at my melodramatics. But then, Dad didn't know the effect that his story about the cows being electrocuted -- remember that story? -- had had on me. I was absolutely sure that Cheryl and I would have met the same fate had we not been very lucky that evening.

Well, I don't know squat about electricity, so for all I know the headaches that Cheryl and I suffered that night were as much damage as could have happened. But the larger truth came from my remembrance of the family mythology. My respect for all things electrical certainly dates back to that night, but the respect was crystallized as distrust by the story of the electrocuted cows. And the strangest part of all is that, ultimately, the events of that Christmas Eve morning didn't have much of a life-long impact on my father, I was stunned to learn recently, as I was gathering my facts. The horror definitely didn't hold him in thrall as it did me.

Cheryl still likes to yell, "Snakes! Spiders! Snakes!" every once in a while, to get my goat. I let her. After all, we're both still here to laugh about it.

(Edited 8/20/07 for a few goofball mistakes I made the first time around -- like thinking that I hadn't born yet, which I had. SHEESH)