'Til The Cows Come Home

Go on back and have a look. Just stay within earshot.

It is a black and white aerial photograph. A picture of the farm from 1958. A relic in itself when aerial photography still required an airplane. It had always hung in the backroom of my grandparent’s house, the very subject of the picture–a farmhouse backdropped by wide empty fields with a rising wooded hill to the north that is just out of frame. Empty land in late November, bisected by a neat grid of lonely north-south, east-west roads.

Looking, looking. In that house, we would glass out the back window with a pair of black binoculars eternally perched upon the sill. We were always watching for deer and sometimes we would see them, brown anomalies betrayed only by their movement, who would just as soon materialize into the gray hillside. A long way off, measured in acres instead of yardage (the usual metric for the deer hunter) because between us and them was the cornfields cut to stubble.

The photo had always presided over the backroom and its proceedings. A singular image backdropped by wraparound 1970’s wood paneling. Just the sight of those broad planks and false grooves recalls scenes of second Christmases—opening presents at grandpa and grandmas either before or after December the 25th. (A boon if before for the impatient, gift-adoring kid that I was and in some small part, still am). While the image is a broad exterior view, I find that glancing at it invites me indoors to the spare room. I am ushered into the gallery in which it hung, rather than the wider subject matter it depicts.

I am once again seated in the backroom, shrugging against the cold due to its proximity to the uninsulated garage. I can feel the polyester carpet between my fingers as I sit awaiting my next turn to open a gift. I can even scent the plastic linoleum in the entryway. Through the door my uncle is making homemade vanilla ice cream. My cousins and I will venture out there in our bare socks to watch the machine whirl in its housing, standing on the raw, cold concrete until our feet ache.

I asked my mom for a copy of the photo. A piece of the farmstead to hang proudly in my own, far removed, home. A wish she fulfilled this past Christmas, pulling it from the garage (a great parental trick that works even on adult sons), and I was overjoyed. A coveted relic fenced in by a blond wood frame. I treasured it for its self-referential nature. An all-knowing perspective of the dwelling in which it hung. Something self-assured and immortal. Sweeping from a southwestern approach, the image is a low passing still of the home and its outbuildings–Two wood sided barns, a silo, a smaller cattle shed and three smaller barns near the road. Lodged somewhere in my boyhood memories, I still remember the remnants of these roadside structures, the last vestige of their bones sinking into the good earth, obscured for posterity by a row of pine trees that were planted much later, and much earlier than my time.

In the dirt oval driveway is a wide 1950s sedan, whose make I am not able to discern, but it is a puzzle I’m confident any middling car aficionado would solve (could be you, dear reader. Send me a DM). I am certain that the car was spotless despite the dusty surroundings. A hallmark of the good Dutchman farmer–the practical purpose of maintaining equipment, the quiet and intrinsic stick-to-it-ness of the Midwesterner, and the prideful upkeep of appearances to avoid becoming the object of conversation among the other farmers over diner coffee.

Beyond the drive are the same fields, though not barren at the time of this photo’s creation, and rather than wide open, they are instead hemmed in by a stitching of posts and barbed-wire fence. On its own it is a plain bucolic scene—a farm suspended somewhere in our post-war America, unaware of yet another storm already brooding out of frame. An image adrift in the void of anonymous history. But that is not to be. The pitched, perpendicular roof of this residence is the shape of my grandfather’s house. It is the poignant outline of my own recollection and history. It is a silhouette my siblings and I recognized on the horizon, and strained in our car seats on the approach to be the first one to spot it and declare so; “Iseegrandpaandgradmashouse!”

The curvature of the semicircle drive in this image is firmly affixed to the Christmases, the Easters, and the Thanksgiving mornings. It is inscribed with the hazy summer afternoons when we would visit, when the corn was high and green as bamboo. The half-moon of gravel is etched with the tire marks of the UPS truck that my grandpa drove faithfully for decades. It reverberates with the cheerful honk of the horn as he pulls into the drive for lunch, which sets us running to mob him, begging to be hoisted into the jumpseat of the cab.

Most of all, in this photograph, this omniscient history that forever hung in the backroom, is my great grandfather himself. It is not immediately obvious. You have to look past the shadow of the barns, trace the dirt trail that leads to the west of the image and continues out of frame. Find the tractor first with the feed trailer hitched behind it. Standing upright, slightly tipped at the waist is Tys Koster. His face is obscured by a wide brim hat, his body diminutive from the aerial distance, but to the cows angling toward him, funneling in pairs and singles like set pieces on a diorama, he is a familiar form. The cows are not so unlike us. They recognize rituals and routines and a trusted figure that signifies comfort and shelter. And if our eyesight should fail us, should we be weaving between the corn rows (not too far, now) or meandering far out in the pasture, how will we know we should come in? Perhaps the honk of a parcel truck announcing its arrival. Perhaps the low call of the farmer to his cattle. But what would Tys Koster have said? Coboss! He uttered. Coboss!

Was it in a mid baritone? A deep bass like the lowing of his audience? The intonation is lost to time but I can reconstruct an indication, sampled from my own grandpa's cattle call. Grandpa Hutt (the one of aforementioned UPS fame) always raised a few beef cows that were held in a small pen with an electric fence. Our grandma instructed us not to touch the fence. Our grandpa amused and startled us by grabbing it with a gloved hand and yelping. We tested it on our own and unobserved with a length of plucked switchgrass.

When it was feed time my grandpa would always don a pair of navy coveralls that smelled like the barn and toss a bale of hale into the middle of the enclosure. If we pleaded enough, he would do what we called “Rodeo.” Slipping between the fence where the posts met the pole barn, he would enter the pen and follow the poor skittish cows around like a cattle dog, sending them scurrying to the other end or to the safe confines of the barn. All to our gleeful delight. And when he was tossing the bail or dumping the feed into the troughs in the barn, he would call the same way in a low tone with a raspy finish like he was trying to clear his throat, Coboss! Coboss!

So, where did it come from? Coboss. What did it mean? My dad remembers it too, recalls hearing the farmers call in their cows from the fields behind his own childhood house not so far from our discussed homestead. The cattle fence was right out his back bay window, the barns up on the hill, and the sound reverberated across his own upbringing, descending down the hilltop and urging the cattle home.

There is no firm answer for where it originates. History is elusive like that sometimes. The best indication is that it derives from the Latin (what doesn’t) word for cow–bos. The precedent “Co” is likely a contraction of “Come.” Come Boss. How many pastures did the low tone echo across, how many years and generations and farms called in their livestock like Tys Koster, like Grandpa Hutt, like the neighbors, and their fathers before them, and their great grandfathers before that?

Perhaps that is why I am so fixated with this aerial photograph, this monochrome still from 1958, captured from a veritable aeroplane. It calls me to the backroom, to the wood paneling, and the cold floor and the rough carpet. It harkens me back to the faux tree my grandparents would install every year like a radio antenna, laden beneath with bright packages. Within the confines of the frame are more than my great grandpa's farm, my grandparents house, the acreage beyond and near, all contained in the photograph and also extending beyond its margins.

Captured within that image are not only my own recollections, but a sample of my lineage. It is where my own grandmother was born–so frail at birth that they placed her in a box next to the roaring wood stove to keep her warm, never mind that it was the end of June. It holds my own mother’s childhood and adolescence, bursting with its own joys, and secrets, heartbreaks, and desires, flitting among those eternal fields that sprout, ripen, wither, collapse. Sprout again.

How many histories lie in the shadows of those farm buildings, brushed against the wind-worn wood before it bowed, collapsed, and was re-erected with 2x4 bones and sheet metal skin? Gaze into the grit of the monotone image, root around in the shifting soil that has been held, just for a moment, in total stasis. Glance over to the northern hill. The way you used to when your young eyes strained to pick out deer among the skeleton hardwoods. And when you feel yourself wandering too far, just listen for the call. Coboss! Coboss! And come on home.