The Future's in the Air
Take Me to the Magic of the Moment on a Glory Night
(In April I wrote about my time in 4-H and dairy judging. This is the continuation of the tale, you can read the beginning here1)
Dva
In the spring semester of my senior year of high school, I took part in an exchange trip to the Soviet Union with other Baltimore County public high schools students. Organized by Soviet businessmen and a Maryland school district administrator, the trip was lauded as a joint effort to bring peace between our two countries during the waning days of the Cold War through, well, the power of teenagers. The Berlin Wall went down in November 1989 and Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, adopted policies called ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ that meant more transparency from an opaque and painfully bureaucratic government and politicians along with freedoms for citizens to voice concerns and opinions without dire consequence. Ultimately these changes were to strengthen the economy, breaking the ‘Era of Stagnation’ the Soviet Union had experienced for some time.2
This exchange trip had to be a front for some business dealings for the organizers. Maybe public school students could tell you which household cleaners could get you high, but we didn’t carry the diplomatic skills for peace and order between antagonistic world powers. My school was the only school in this trip that offered Russian language classes, not because it was a fancy school, but because we had a teacher who taught it, Dale McPherson. He studied at Moscow State University in the 1970s. He’d regal us with stories of running water in bathroom sinks to obscure conversations from any recording devices in friends’ apartments and flights on the infamous soviet airline Aeroflot, where fellow travelers were sometimes goats and chickens. He was a great teacher and the head chaperone for this exchange trip.
We stayed with families in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, and travelled to other Ukrainian cities to high schools, meeting other kids. We took trains to Lviv and Odesa, then finally Moscow before coming back to the US. Each train trip, our families handed us bags with large cuts of meat, smoked fish, pickles and bread, a very Medieval Times spread for our suburban American brains.3 Our host families were connected enough to get food on the black market, or perhaps they were connected because they had kids from the US living with them.
This exchange trip took place in April of 1991, just four months before the unsuccessful coup by hardliner communists that led to the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union over the following months. That spring in the USSR was a wildly fraught time. The three Baltic republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were vying for their independence from Moscow; along with Ukraine. There were intense food and goods shortages throughout the country. I don’t know this because I saw it there, I know this because I read Masha Gessen’s excellent book “The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.” In hindsight I am stunned this exchange trip ever happened. At the time, I didn’t register any civil unrest.
This exchange trip filled a void from an opportunity I had in the fall to go to Wisconsin as part of the Maryland top dairy judging team. That senior Maryland team placed first in the nation, earning a free trip to Europe the summer of 1991 to judge cows. I dropped out late in the competition for the team during the Maryland State Fair, a mixture of complications and choices made on my part. I could have been a contender, hell, I was a contender.
For several summers when I was a teenager, I spent the last week of summer working for our family friends’ farm at the Maryland State Fair. I was a hired hand to take care of Spring Valley Farms’ cows and heifers. I washed the animals in the early hours of the morning, fed and watered the herd, picked up manure and emptied the wheelbarrow with said shit down to the south end of the Cow Palace. I swept the aisles and kept the straw pack high and tight for the Jerseys. I kept everything tip-top.
I was game, it was fun. I slept maybe 2 or 3 hours a night on a crappy lounge chair by by the herd. The fair is a very social event for farmers, they don’t get out a lot. There are parties and pranks, many flirtations, free admission to the midway full of rides and games and a lot of beer. If we finished our chores early enough in the morning, maybe 6:30, Wayne, one of my bosses, would take us to the local Denny’s for breakfast.
Mainly we listened to music, hung out, shot the shit, drank beer, played cards and answered people’s questions about the cows. No, the brown cows do not give chocolate milk.4 I made $50 a day cash, plus meals and drinks, including all the extremely cheap crappy canned beer my teenaged self could handle.5 That’s what to drink when it’s hot, and it’s always hot at the fair.
The last time I worked for Spring Valley Farm was at the Montgomery County Fair in 1991, the week before the state fair. I had graduated from high school and spent the summer working odd jobs, desperate for some real money. Montgomery County is the county outside of Washington DC, it doesn’t have the majestic fairgrounds of the state fair. We were a pretty lean crew, me, Michael Heath—Wayne and Allan’s nephew who was truly gifted in seeing cows, and a guy Michael knew named Burdett, who I had never seen before nor since. Burdett came by a mullet naturally and cracked open a can of beer at 4 am as he walked the cows to get milked. At the state fair, all the milk was made into ice cream that was sold to the public. Here, there was no infrastructure to chill and store the milk, Mexican families came in the morning with jugs to take it home. Burdett milked the cows and I washed them and changed the bedding. I slept on a fold-up lounge chair in the aisle and he had a small trailer he slept in he called the “Fuck Hut.” I must share this detail, not because I ever went into this trailer but because I cannot shake the name and image of it and now I must poison you.
This was the third week of August. On August 19, 1991, hard-line communists attempted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that failed. We found this information out on 98 Rock, Baltimore’s Home for Rock Music, during the morning news. We didn’t have papers or TVs or cell phones at our disposal, we just listened to the radio. 98 Rock was a little edgier, a little more party and a lot less hippie than the classic rock radio station The River. The only news radio I knew about what the weather and traffic my dad listened to.
Michael was clipping the top line of a cow, trying to make it look as straight as possible, as he looked over at me and shrugged, a sort of “what’s this about” look. Michael was a top fitter at the time, meaning he knew how to make cows look their best, a statement that may seem ridiculous but how the animals look affect how they place in competition. Fitting means making the animal look as good as possible, knowing how to shave the hair to elongate and level and gently contort in places, create and/or enhance illusions of ideal physicality with hair spray and brushes, understanding when to milk the different quadrants of the udder so they look the most even and full as possible.
It was well known that I studied Russian and had recently been there on an exchange trip.6 The previous year I dropped out of the dairy judging contest, and that Maryland team went on to win the nationals and take a free trip to Europe to judge cows. In fact, it was Michael’s cousin Randy who ended up on the team. That was my fork in the road, that moment I decided the farm and cows weren’t my future. Studying Russian in the 1980s was no joke, Russia was our enemy, and everyone was on board with that. At this moment, in the livestock barn of the Montgomery County Fair, I had something to offer outside of carrying bales of straw and dumping manure. I took the truck to 7-11 that morning and the next few to get all the newspapers they had so I could boil down the news with the history and experience I had and we’d do it while having a coffee or a beer taking care of cows.
We were rapt the rest of the week, listening non-stop to the news on 98 Rock, along with many lifetimes worth of the Scorpions’ power ballad “Wind of Change.”7 Spring Valley Farm swept the fair with their exemplary Jerseys and Burdett’s brother showed up with a ripe watermelon he poured an entire bottle of vodka in for the party. I took my envelope full of cash and headed off to liberal arts college in Ohio, a strange transition I cannot recommend. I never worked the fair again, not for any reason other than my life changed. I was no longer in 4-H, I didn’t judge cows anymore and I didn’t spend anymore time on my family’s farm. The week I would have spent going to the Wisconsin Fair for the national dairy judging contest was instead spent going on an exchange trip to the Soviet Union and that had its own claim over me. That is, it all worked out in the end.8
Say what you will about the Soviets, they certainly know how to dramatically name things.
I know! I know! What a dream this bag of food would be now. Reminder, the year is American Suburbs, in the year of the first Gulf War, 1991.
Real question asked at least once every year.
It was a lot. I definitely gained a true affinity for the life of a line cook—day wages along with food & all you can drink. And a love for payment in the form of an envelope full of cash.
See previously-mentioned Russian translation of David Bowie lyrics written out on a t-shirt worn to dairy judging practice in the essay in the first footnote.
The Scorpions wrote this song after playing the Moscow Music Peace Festival, the first of its kind of Russian soil, in 1989. The Berlin Wall had fallen in a November 1989, and this song was a painful indulgent homage to the changing world.
If this writing seems sentimental, it is. When writing about diary judging in April, I found out Michael Heath had just passed at the end of March from a fatal fall while moving bales of hay with Wayne. Much love to his family.