The Road to the Millers

My electric car battery died in the middle of a valley of green pasture, speckled with black and white jersey cows. In a better frame of mind, I would have appreciated the setting; the spring blue sky and the winding rural road that disappeared ahead over a hillock, like in so many of those paintings, where I loved to let my imagination wander and lead me into the unknown. But now, over the crest, a kilometre away, there wouldn’t be adventure, but another no-news nuisance story.

  “Damn asinine assignments,” I shouted, and hammered my head on the steering wheel, setting off the horn. A few cows raised their heads and lowed, and stared at me with large baleful eyes, until it seemed they were confident I wouldn’t hit the horn again, and then they returned to their grazing, without the slightest concern. I was marooned in their midst, because of the lack of electric hookups at my apartment building last night, and also in the parkade under the office building where Dillingsworth News took up the fifth floor. 

I blasted the horn extra long and hard. Why should these damn bovines carry on like nothing had happened? Most affected disinterest, but a few closer ones jerked up their heads and sent baleful stares my way. I shook my fists at them through the open window, and shouted, “My life is crap right now, shittier than all your manure heaped together.” One nodded, as if concurring. Fuming and muttering obscenities, I grabbed my briefcase that held my laptop and my notepad and pens, and stuffing my car keys in the pocket of my beige cotton trousers, and making sure my cell phone was in my other pocket, I got out of my car and marched up to the barbed wire fence.

Seeing the face of my chief editor on the cow’s face, I let loose. “Ian, you moron, why did you send me to interview the Millers? The guy faked those You Tube videos of his wife mooing like a cow.” A fly buzzed from the cow’s shoulder, cleared the barbed wire fence and zoomed into my face, more particularly it beetled into the corner of my eye, and I poked it out, crushing its fine wings on my index finger. When I looked up, instead of Ian’s frazzled, thinning ginger hair and bulbous bespectacled blue eyes, I met with the cow’s malevolent stare. She seemed to urge me to move on.

Obviously, these cows had to belong to the Millers and their home would be just over the hillock where the road disappeared just ahead. I’d walk there, get the damn story done; expose these hick fraudsters for wasting media time, and call for a tow to a charging station. 

Stomping up the road, I plotted how I’d uncover the Miller’s deception. Maybe I’d make it a niche of mine, revealing fake news, I’d become famous, get invited onto talk shows, and then I’d get picked up by a major news station. Ian would realize his mistake in trying to squelch the life out of an excellent reporter like me. I slapped at a few flies that had landed on my arms. “Go back to the cows. Can’t you smell the difference? Clear off!” 

Huffing up the incline of the hill, I noticed the grade getting steeper than it had appeared earlier and the crest getting further away. Sweat drenched my armpits and stained my white short sleeved collared shirt. No traffic had passed, and I gave into an impulse to strip my shirt off and stuff it in my back pocket like some young jocks do. In no way feeling like an athlete, I heard wheezing sounds emitting from my mouth, but pushed on, until I found myself at the top hill, and I caught my breath, ready for the downhill hill march into the Miller’s place. 

Instead of the derelict farm building and shacks I’d expected, more pasture land with black and white Jersey cows stretched out ahead of me. Where was the damn Miller’s home? My cell phone showed I’d walked one point six kilometres in the last fifteen minutes, and should have arrived already. I faced off with the cows again. 

“Don’t tell me the address is a fake as well. City road planners, Google Maps will hear from me.” The only cow looking my direction while her cohorts munched the grass at her hooves, flicked her head with an apathetic look in her large brown eyes and turned her hind end to me, and swished her tail as she ambled away.

“Where are you going, you cow? I’ve got to make a living, too.”

The road ahead proved as arduous as the road I’d passed, in fact if I didn’t have my phone, I’d say it was the same, only harder since, now I’d put in over three kilometres and the up-stretches were tougher with the heat from the sun baking down on me. 

Arriving at the top of the hillock, I looked for the Miller’s house. Some country hospitality would cheer me up at this moment. Maybe I’d go a little easier on them. Hanging out with these damn self absorbed cows all the time, I might start mooing myself. Anyway, Ian is expecting a cynical piece from me. Well, I’m going to turn my hinny on him and swish my tail, and see how he likes that.

Coming over the hilltop, I fancied a tall ice cold drink, but my dry mouth opened in disbelief. The same vista as the previous ones rolled out before my eyes. More pasture and more cows and a road that wound up to the next bend. I felt my forehead. Mildly diaphoretic, but no temperature. It couldn’t be. No welcoming farmstead ahead with a picturesque well and an antique plow in the front yard and a cheery ‘Welcome to the Millers’ sign and a white clapboard farmhouse with a large oak tree shading the front porch.

  How far was I expected to go? Why had my life led me here, stuck eternally between cow pastures, on a road going nowhere? Wiping the sweat off my forehead and neck and back with my shirt, and brushing off the flies drawn in by those secretions, I walked up to the fence and placed my hands on the barbed wire, crushing my hands on the jutting sharp ends of wire until the pain registered in my cranium. None of the cows showed any more curiosity than if I were one of their own. At no cow in particular and at all of them, and the world, I mooed.