Richard Sansom
The Apparition
Running north-south, through the bountiful
San Joaquin valley of California, resplendent
with its orchards of fruit and nut trees,
miles and miles of vegetables in precise
rows and vineyards of table and wine grapes,
there are two double ribbons of highways.
These well traveled ribbons carry the automobile
and truck traffic at eighty miles an hour
day and night, but the western most ribbon,
Interstate 5, is the straightest, the fastest
and the most boring in terms of sights. To
the west are farms and then the low rolling
hills, often piled on their tops with creeping
clouds drifting in from the Pacific, and
to the east are many miles of farms, laid
out flat and neat, and there is the pristine
concrete aqueduct, conveying water from the
north of the state to the water-hungry south.
The drive can be pleasant, tedious, or dangerous,
since, on some occasions what is called the
Tulle fog can quickly form and blanket the
valley in its gray and impenetrable solidarity,
often coming on an unsuspecting motorist
and causing horrific wrecks, massive confusion
of metal, overturned trucks and even death.
In consequence of taking the western most
ribbon -- Interstate 5 -- one comes by the
apparition about which I am about to speak,
especially when one is traveling north and
comes close enough to recognize the sight
for what it is.
Recently, when driving
north, in the morning of a bright early spring
day, I occasionally looked out over the freshly
budding orchards of plum, peach and olive
trees, or witnessed the farmers pulling their
machinery across the black earth in laser
guided rows, preparing the soil for the seeds
of onions, spinach, lettuce, and a great
variety of other fare to be consumed by the
state and the nation. I was traveling north,
the sun brightly shining to my right, between
white piles of clouds that had that night
rained down snow on the highway near Los
Angeles, through which I drove with some
abandon, aching to be in my home, some three
hundred some miles further on. Cold winds
whipped my car about, tumble weeds danced
across the freeway like choreographed dancers,
and when hit, disintegrated into wisps of
brown stubble. The trip went apace, I passed
trucks carrying cars, produce, odd cargo
no one could guess, steel girders, canvas
covered objects of curious shape, Coke and
Pepsi, small prefabricated houses, and I
wondered where all these various things were
aimed, no doubt at the city dwellers to the
north, their cargo having been hoisted from
the ships that anchored at San Pedro harbor
far to the south.
The radio had to be constantly
retuned to different stations so as to avoid
the babble of preachers, country-western
music and the local news for farmers, decrying
this or that political catastrophe, the tragedy
of water loss due to environmental hagglers,
or news of the recent deaths of Palestinian
and Israelis in their enduring war in the
name of Abraham and Mohammed. I closeted
myself against these insulting entreaties
that I had accustomed myself to generally
ignore, and drove on, fast and fixed on my
mission of simply getting home quickly and
safely, as I passed line after line of lumbering
trucks and timid car drivers, engaging my
"cruise control" and relaxing my
right foot as a measure of protection against
a much to be avoided calf cramp.
Then, as if to shock me
out of my imposed ennui, I came across the
apparition. I had passed it many times, as
I had traveled this road so often before,
but for some reason my sensitive mind had
made the reasonable decision to forget its
existence altogether and pretend that such
a thing was too much against the sanguine
nature of man to be there in its blatant
and repulsive reality. So quickly it came
upon my sight! To the east spread out a vast
containment of ten or twenty thousand head
of cattle, all standing in their bovine solitude
on hillocks of black feces produced by years
of these sad creatures standing thus, awaiting
a fate they could no more imagine than me
imagining I would soon enter the confines
of Orion and encounter alien denizens of
which I could never dream. I glanced them,
as I had before, and watched them standing
so still, so fixed in their dumb, wide eyed
expectation of nothing, and pictured myself
thus, entombed in a genetically formed abyss
of abject innocence as to the creation and
results of the next moment of my existence.
There were so many different colors of hide,
from black to shades of tan, and speckled,
beautiful in the their diversity of shades
of color, and stately in their immobile and
trapped state of having no where to wander
or trot, no tree beneath which to garner
a bit of shade against the encroaching sunlight.
They were stacked, yes, stacked up against
one another like blocks of stone to be hewn
into whatever shapes and purposes the hand
of man devised.
This was, as always, an
apparition having no purpose beyond that
of the preparatory stage before cutting the
thick throats of these innocent creatures
and conveying them to the next station of
dissection, thence to the various departments
of division of meats. I pictured the large,
round eyes, sleepily closing as their blood
drained out, and pictured the freezers that
would protect their precious red meat from
decay, and the shipping of that meat across
the nation, eventually culminating on the
plates of those who, for some strange reason,
completely beyond my comprehension, take
great relish in putting their knife into
the sinew, slicing it into tidy morsels,
and placing it in their open mouths for some
archaic pleasure.
I grant that, at some
distant time, the inducement to stuff the
stomach with great amounts of ready protein
was advantageous -- it takes the blood less
time to carry nutrients, a more efficient
means of getting valuable food stuff to the
brain, etc, etc. but I find that such an
inducement is by now, far beyond its usefulness
-- for surely the human brain is by now of
sufficient size and capability to get its
host in and out of troubles having less to
do with survival than with mere reckless
pleasure seeking and obscene materialism.
I calculated that it is certainly far beyond
the need to collect ten thousand bovine souls
and cast them into such a fate, force them
to stand on hillocks of fifty or more years
of feces, alone, uncared for, existing only
for the need of those who relish the knife
slicing through a bloodied piece of dead
tissue and then entering the open mouth of
one who requires this ritual for the sake
of -- what?
I drove on. The stench
of that vast population eventually faded
and the highway opened up before me. I had
imaginings of the poor beasts admonishing
me to forget the scene of their misfortune
-- "what will be will be, " they
said in my dreamy anguish. I heard them exclaim
that they had been bred only with the purpose
at hand, that their destiny was preordained,
that their life had been dedicated to the
will of humans for some hundred years of
breeding, that it did not matter that their
large dark eyes would be slowly closed by
the hands of indifferent laborers in the
smelly caverns of slaughter houses, that
it was of no consequence that their corn-fed
muscles would be laid out for the pleasure
of carnivorous mouths, that I should drive
on, tuning the radio to melodies of less
painful intents, that I, in short, should
forget them and go about my life as if I
had passed a great sign painting, displaying
the faces of inanimate creatures, already
destined to fill the niche given them by
providence.
I could not do this. I
carry their visage of dumb innocence in my
heart like the most dreadful baggage that
cannot be opened for fear of understanding
more of the animal heart than I need to know.
What should I know of the ancient brain that
felt connection, empathy and love long before
it felt the calculations of Pythagoras or
the combinations of sounds we call words?
Would I be shocked and afraid to know the
possibilities of what can conspire to cause
us the various pains of the heart, to see
past the million years of our animal ancestry
to the place that was dedicated only to touch
and feel that was like warm blood running
between us, making us as a single creature
that knew the other's heart and even their
mind like a map of the cosmos, encircling
every animate consciousness with a aura of
one singular spirit called life?
I went on, down the bright,
wide road, escaping the apparition as I would
escape the most dreadful dream -only I could
not escape it. Though we may, with our new
technologies and investigations into the
banks of our neuronal heritages, discover
that we are separated by great gulfs of genetic
branch points, far more distant than we can
imagine, going back to the most primeval
darkness's that may forever obscure where
and when and why we diverged into this and
that species, there is one truth we cannot
avoid confronting: we are, whatever else
we may call ourselves, animals. We live,
eat, breath and eventually die in the atmosphere
of our animal composition -- no matter what
name we choose for ourselves. While I may
call the bovine countenance "sad, "
or "forlorn, " or "dumb"
in its obvious innocence, awaiting a fate
it could never fathom, surely the few scraps
of genetic material that define what they
are versus what I am, are, in the greater
fullness of whatever cosmic realities swirl
amid the stars, insignificant and only worthy
of mention in treatises that deal philosophically
with these matters -- far away from the heart
that beats in my breast and those that beat
within those who stand by on dark hillocks,
awaiting their death, as I await my own.
No, it was no apparition,
but should have been -- like some Bruegel
dream-scape rendition of a monstrous unreality,
set squarely among the fresh greenness of
a fruitful valley and near the highway for
all to witness. It remains like a sepia photograph
in my memory, and when next I travel past
it I will keep my eyes straight ahead and
my thoughts as benign and pure as possible.
Richard E. Sansom
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