My son and I worked calves the other day. Not many, just enough to get hot and sweaty. I’m not very efficient at pushing calves because I don’t do it often, but there are days when even my help is better than no help (that’s what I tell him anyway). I like to think there are still a few things I can do, a few things maybe even I can teach him. For instance, he taught me that when you’re pushing calves into the head catch and working around facilities made of pipe to always carry wasp spray. I, in turn, taught him that when 0you get stung by those wasps and your arm starts to swell up, you put lavender and peppermint oil on it – it helps.
Not many days later, we were trying to corner a calf in the pasture. You know the one – there’s always that one calf – the one that can’t find the gate and runs like crazy but has no idea where it’s going. So it creates a new hole in the fence. And it is absolute suicide (heatstroke at the least) trying to chase that calf around the pasture in your irrigating boots in over 90ºF weather. It’s always surprising how much energy a month-old calf can have, how little interest it has in listening for its mother, and even less concern for finding her (through the correct gate). It certainly has the energy to tear out the hotwire in a few places – probably didn’t even faze it, the little twerp.
A calf like that stacks the deck against the calf’s owner (again my son) from the beginning of the chase. But wait – let’s add a slower-than-she-used-to-be woman in summer hiking sandals and shorts, carrying a yard rake and slipping on cow pies, because she offers to “help.” The calf owner quickly assesses the situation and wonders, “Well, how bad can she be?” But it turns out, she can be worse than he thought. She’s never in the right spot at the right time. She can’t run fast enough to head off the escape route. She will be slapping at wasps or mosquitoes at the very moment he needs her to pay attention because the calf is coming right for the gate, and she’s going to miss that opportunity. But what’s worse, is the calf owner’s growing fear that this woman might actually twist an ankle on one of those cow pies, and then he’d have to carry her to the house.
Yes, my son, this is your life, and on a day like this, this is your hell. All I did was build the illusion that together we could finally corner the calf and make it go where it needed to go. You fell for it. Silly you.
So, I asked my son, “Did you learn anything?”
And he replied, “Never let your mother help again.”
Exactly. And he thinks I can’t teach him anything.
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