The rash woke me up in time to finally investigate the cow field more than the roosters did. The infamous “cock-a-doodle-doo” onomatopoeia (surprisingly close to the mark) isn’t as much a signifier of dawn as I’d been led to believe, as roosters actually make the sound about 24 hours a day. The frequency’s a bit higher at dawn, but interspersed throughout the night, all it takes is a single confused rooster to cackle out before another from an opposing farm chimes in to retort, starting off a long-distance sonic cock-fight. I almost slept through this last night.
The potrero’s like a cowpie minefield and it’s still dark out, making the little patties just a shade less dark than the ground they cover. Dawn is silent except for the roosters and surreally dreamlike, with silhouettes of cows and calves standing frozen while dark figures attend to them. Roberto’s nowhere to be seen so I stumble up to the first figure I see, a short man leaning over a large tin bucket and make my point in a mix of broken Spanish and broken international sign language.
“Roberto habla, uhh, yo” (Roberto speaks, uhhh, I)
I pause and make the universal gesture for milking a cow with a solid grip on two teats and hands going up and down opposite one another. I point to myself ecstatically.
“Me! Me!”
More confusion. Apprehension.
Fuck. Does he think I’m some pervy extranjero (foreigner) that wants to get milked??
“Me leche!” Two more squeezing gestures for good measure.
He smiles with a slight laugh, friendly yet incredulous. Silly gringo!
We hopscotch our way to the back of the field and he tosses the bucket down directly underneath a cow that throughout the process could best be described as motionless. For having to sit back and suffer through an awkward lesson in the bovine equivalent of areola yanking, I would’ve expected a grunt, moo or at least a quick “That’s definitely not the right way, sir!” dart of its head back towards me at some point in my manhandling (cowhandling?) of it. But unless the cow was rolling its eyes the whole time, it appeared fairly unconcerned.
Slightly less oblivious, a young calf stood just feet to the right of us, looking on intently. It knew better than to get in the way of men at work, but clearly was quite ready for any leftovers. The worker reached down placing a visibly solid grip around its mother’s teat and, tightening his grip at the same time, yanked downwards, letting out a single burst of firehouse intensity that shook the empty pail. He then removed his hand and gestured for me to duplicate his feat.
“That’s it? That’s the lesson?”
I wouldn’t have understood his response anyway, so it was probably for the best that he didn’t understand my question and remained silent, making the same “milk!!” motions with his hands.
As I began this paragraph with “The teat was hot and thick…” I knew it was hard to avoid this sounding like sweetbestialityblog.com, but I can only say the experience was more like being dropped into a strange science fiction novel than even moderately arousing for me. And it certainly didn’t seem to be erotic or pleasant for my subject.
The udder itself was bloated and visibly taut, as though my retrieval of its liquid payload would be a tremendous relief for the cow, which made my awkward task a little bit easier. Gingerly taking the closest teat in my right hand, I worked my fingers around it a few times, toying with the perfect grip before imitating my instructor with a quick squeeze/yank combo.
pssssssshhhht
A short but steady stream poured down into the pan; it was hardly of the intensity of the earlier burst, but undeniably milk. The teat seemed to have a dense, inner-teat (no Tootsie Pop jokes here) that needed to be accessed in order to release each serving, though by modifying my squeeze, yank or both, I wasn’t sure. For such a “seminal human experience,” the whole thing was pretty damned alien.
I pulled down on a slightly gimpier teat with my left hand, now taking the standard cow-milking posture (the alternate teat actually makes for pretty good support!), and attempted the action again with a similar reaction. My two attempts combined didn’t seem to even come close to matching the demonstratory burst, but as a (uhhh) stranger to teats, I was fairly pleased. Platonically, of course.
Being about an inch and a half longer than my fist, the teat fits perfectly for the task of repeated yanking with a soft, leather-like (obviously) texture allowing for a good grip. I start yanking — right, left, right, left — in the same steady pattern, with the din of the streams hitting into the bucket forming a nice background rhythm to the point where I lessen the left teat’s flow a bit to get a more techno beat. Mistaking my untz’d output for difficulty, my instructor reaches in and stops me.
Through a series of hand gestures, I get to placing my hands, palms up, directly under the largest teat as he gives it a sharp pull. Hotter than I’d anticipated (though about what anyone with common sense would expect given that it is a bodily fluid) my hands are now covered in fresh milk. I stare at him quizzically, and, not getting an immediate response, sample the milk. It was warm, rich and inherently fresh, but not terribly unlike any other of my myriad past experiences with the beverage. He looks at me with a kind of pained shock, before making a series of hand motions.
The hand-coating was to ease the milking. Not for drinking. Oh.
My forearms and wrists increasingly more tired, I began to take note of just how little milk I was getting compared to my mentor and prepped to give up, lasting just long enough to make him take an almost scarily perfect picture.
One more thing off the list.