Dairy Americana
Content
1
Dairy Americana Dave, who'd just been promoted to dairy enforcement sergeant, began to glaze over in the monitor light. He had just been upgraded to a pretty sweet desk chair, the Aeron executive all black, which accelerated zoning out in general, and he sat sinking deeper into his chair while he laid down a rhythm with the outer edge of his thumb for some ruff neck bass and his middle fingernail keeping Pro Tools time with a glitched-up snare. "Do we have to shut these people down, or is there some way we can give them a warning or something? I don't think they’re really a threat to anyone, much less regional food safety," Agnes complained with a glum look on her face as she read the damning report form with tons of check marks while looking up the perps' website that had a “wayback machine” feel to it due to the fact that the code was done by their nephew who had a brief stint at a community college during the dotcom boom; he didn’t get very far. There was a small pixelated photo of an elderly couple out in the crisp, farm air standing in front of a milk cow, the namesake of their Delaware cheese business based out of their retiree-style, colonial house with a bit of land. To even call it a company would let anyone in that area know you were from somewhere else, probably not even the same state, and to call it a web-based business would let everyone know your Wi-Fi hot spot was a McDonald’s. Dave looked back and reminded her from the luxury of a new swivel position, "The investigation and appeals dates are all past, all the suspension orders are in place; we gotta close the doors—stage three on the last form."
2
This was one of those situations at Agnes’ job that made her feel like pounding her fist on a huge, oak desk, which they didn’t have in this particular headquarters, and saying, "This is America damn it! Don't people have the right to choose the foods they eat? Don't they have the right to whatever foods aren’t available at Costco as well, even if there are “potentially harmful” bacteria thriving within the old, wax rind of a cheese wheel?" Having immigrant parents always made her think she could win people over instantly with a "mad as hell" kind of speech impromptu, like a town square soapbox speaker back in the day. I'm not sure if Norman Rockwell or any other grand, lifelike illustrator ever painted any Poles with fierce convictions about American dairy rights delivering emboldened speeches on the founding mandates of our experiment in democracy though. There may be some purely subjective Americana that drives some, probably everyone, into grand, proper persuasion. Dave said, "I feel like a panda in this chair; by the afternoon they drift into a, kinda, bamboo coma, ya know?” "Do you know what that contraption costs? I'd bet, like, $250; if you were running for office that chair would be used to show how out of touch you are with the middle class” said Agnes with “gotcha” journalism attitude. "Try tripling that for the basic all-black model; this one’s onyx." It was really weird for him to talk about the chair so much. This was the first time it got on Agnes’ nerves. Most of their coworkers at the FDA wouldn't put up with that kind of bragging about purchasing department details since office supplies don’t uphold
3
any of the dairy enforcement ideals. This branch was particularly no nonsense, especially about keeping costs down in order to play it straight with their tax payer dollars; these agents were enforcers, regulators, so they'd travel anywhere to pull the plug on noncompliant operators even if headquarters supplied only sandwiches and Asian-style floor mats to rest on between rotating night watch shifts among the street lights and diner neon seen from a studio apartment used for grabbing some shuteye before the next day’s drive to a plant, the last stop. The New England food supply was patrolled by white-hat lawmen (and women now, even though there weren’t any female sheriffs back in the Wild West days when legendary, poignant sheriffs had a “sense” for justice). Dave's Aeron executive chair allowed for a wide range of heights, angles, and varied resistance. The tensest part of this luxury perk was that it sometimes put his hands curiously at the same height as Agnes’ skirts, which weren’t short or anything but did leave enough air between skin and fabric to draw attention, and the angles of the armrests could’ve aided someone sliding his hand slowly upward as a natural extension of the vertices, unopposed by gravity. The close range afforded by the chair was ratcheting up someone’s adorkable magnetism like when you rub scissors together to get paperclips to stick to a partially and fading attractive surface out of boredom in the office. Agnes thought about her job and what she did for a living while standing there, wondering if those were the same thing or not. She had been a warm-hearted activist fresh out of university where she studied water conservation and watched a lot of documentaries before she began at dairy enforcement. Her job now had none of the Frontline investigative reporting to it and was unlike exposés on
4
how U.S. gun laws lure in Mexican drug thugs and, in turn, spark anti-immigrant sentiment, and lacked all the surprise of internet video demonstrations of how medulla-rotting fluoride combines with traces of anti-depressants in our tap water. All of her interests were in protecting “Joe Six-Pack” and the cast of characters making up the populace from corporate power and anemic accountability, but, in fact, every dairy company they had cited for violation or shut down all together had fewer than 15 employees, all of which were making less than $35,000 a year, including the owners. Dave secretly imagined how different things would be if they'd met on some chimp rescue preserve in Uganda. They'd probably share a mosquito net hammock, even after his promotion, and make love stuck in the mesh having no money except a “stipend,” which is like money but so small that organizations have a unique term for it. Agnes came in the next day with all the “termination” paperwork on the tiny dairy in a durable black notebook like one a rough and tumble travel writer would take into a Tibetan gorge. She wondered for a minute if she had the only copies and if destroying them would save the small farm, which was obviously a ridiculous plan to throw dairy enforcement off the trail. She imagined all the folders and Post-Its turning to ashes among the staples and red hot paperclips as a big victory for the little guys of the world, and that tactic might’ve worked back in the Atticus Finch days of stamps and slide rules, but now everything was quadruplely backed up on Krypton Cloud Services off in some Nordic data campus, where storing info. is cheap because the all the giant drives are cooled naturally by the rarified air at the top of the world.
5
Their headquarters was in Connecticut, near "Heroin Town" that was featured on all the 80s in-depth reporting on the drug war. The town was good for policing dairy regulations from a central location since most dairies were a short drive away. Until recently Agnes’ job involved rubber stamping well-established, bleach-filled plants with no living yogurt cultures or a single batch cottage cheese pushing the limits of FDA allowances for probiotics, but recently there had been a boom of old-style yogurt, kefir, and cheese with recipes and guidelines from the middle ages, and they often smelled like they had been made during that period and left sitting around until the 21st century and had the colorations to match. "Have any customers complained or been sick from their cheese?" Agnes said with a little confusion but while knowing full well that this was not one of those yearly salmonella in the cantaloupe scares. Dave quickly answered, "No, not yet, but tests showed a W. acidophilus living culture, so it's pretty open and shut; you can’t have that kind of thing running around the food supply even if it’s relegated to foodie get-togethers and health nuts. The owners don't dispute the claim, and they're not ceasing production, so there’s no way to let them stay open as it stands right now. Agnes new that wasn’t the case at all; those were the immediate facts on paper, but America was built on loopholes in the most respectable kind of way: a grand experiment in loopholes and simultaneous strict enforcement of law in general. The Wild West sheriffs knew what had to be done at the civilian level to push the frontier all the way to the ocean, right? They didn’t just ride about checking boxes and levying fines.
6
She had heard of ways around some of the “human consumption” dairy regulations if the product was well-made, not the result of an odd, damp exhaust pipe in an ice cream plant with a clogged blowback full of fungi, for instance. You’ve probably seen those tankers that read “not for human consumption” on a vat of wheat or milk pulled by an 18-wheeler; that’s the loophole category. If you can get foods under that umbrella you can sell anything, as long as it’s under the pretence of pet food. America has a special soft spot for ways around inconveniences when it comes to freedom or business: every week there are Good Morning America stories about people who pay no property taxes because they filled out the form that claims their two-bedroom house is a “church.” The same has to work for food because, “This is America, damn it!” Agnes went back through some of the rarely used forms on dairy and feed in their office and quickly found a “pet food distribution” form that seemed to match up well. She scanned for some key words, and it seemed legit, and everyone knows anything can be fed to one kind of pet or another; some people keep tigers; who are we to judge? “I know what you’re goin’ for.” Dave said as he looked over her shoulder through a doorway, “You’re gonna try to do their lawyers’ job yourself (the dairy didn’t have even one lawyer, much less the team Dave imagined), from our department, but why bother? Government workers get this bug more often than you think. A still new employee, after a successful start, two years or so, gets the activist virus or the individual liberty virus and starts helping people out of parking tickets or letting tax audits slide because of a
7
family or “family business:” a serious contradiction in terms, by the way. Like tons of newbies all over, you’re lookin’ a lot like Fern from Charlotte’s Web, tryin’ to rid the world of injustice before breakfast.” * Agnes was charged with making the next, and probably last, inperson visit by the FDA to the crime scene (she imagined lining the barn with yellow police tape and lifting it up to step under it into some carnage from a Liberian logging firm) to document the last of the dairy stock that would be confiscated if not “destroyed on site, per request of the state of Delaware.” She had the department’s Ford Fusion for the two hour drive, and she knew the responsibility of keeping the FDA procedures on point was all on her from then on in terms of this case. She imagined an intern leaving some files stuck to the recycling stack and losing so much evidence that the case would have to be thrown out and reinvestigated from scratch. She left early to drop off a 12-piece china set at her family’s home, which was a couple of highways north of her route, so it wasn’t much of a problem to swing by on the way to the small dairy. Another perk of the straightforwardness of her job was time for detours on “official” road trips. There was some insane reason that her mother had shipped the ten heavy boxes to Agnes’ apartment for additional transit on one of these detours to the family’s home, and Agnes had given up on getting to the bottom of her mom’s logistical plans for antiquing and practical decision making in general: these two activities do not get on so well together, and they rivaled the fairness and common sense of bureaucratic quality control in Agnes’ opinion. Anyways, she reluctantly loaded the last box of the china in the Fusion and prepared all the navigation, music, etc.
8
A farm went by quickly on Agnes’ right about an hour or so down a two-lane highway with tractors leaning out on the shoulder with mower attachments every couple of miles, and the panorama from this highway looked like a Windows screensaver circa ’96, which isn’t a bad look for any American roadside. That green hill desktop background is considered one of the most recognizable photos in history, so there was an immediate compulsion to stop, walk around, and get some pics from the road. Agnes pulled off since the mowers behind would take weeks to catch up to her. She stepped over a small unpaved drainage area to get to the fence. The few cows close enough to the fence for her to get a good look at were like an old magazine illustration on curling paper the color of cheap linoleum in the kind of early magazine that took facts as mere starting points to get a moving story and move copies. Anything beyond the person and place was subject to “illustration” and should’ve been suspect as far as its relation to America on the ground, but whether readers in the old days even thought that far along isn’t really known today. Maybe even a farm boy from a oneroom schoolhouse reading an almanac story with ink drawings of a prize cow or hog back then knew the pictures were not documenting the giant animal; they were affecting something all together more abstract and outlandish, despite the sometimes straightforward storytelling style of the frontier days. I mean in the magazines people read back east during that era with the wonderment at the edge of civilization and the outer limits of the north and the west full of post-spawn salmon and eagle feathers. She crossed the drainage area to get to the corner of the now unpainted wooden fence, nearly below her waist. The cows weren’t looking to make an escape anyhow. She got some photos with the
9
corner of the fence meeting in the middle with posts expanding outwards in both directions until they disappeared into some low trees to the left and over a hill into the horizon on the right. There was no way of knowing if this place was a farm owned by retired hobbyists, a dairy farm, or a beef farm, but there was also no reason to care—about anything for a while really, much less advocacy or activism for living standards for these animals; doing nothing without being bored proves pretty convincing as a mode of perfection and purpose united in the middle of your odd, little existence, no matter what else you might believe about things right in front of your face or camera. Then, like almost anyone under 30 would, she gave in to the penultimate amateur photography cliché, a photo of a spider web with beads of moisture catching bits of flittering light. She knew she had to get closer, hop the fence, and get to the huge web over a tiny creek, clearly the original demarcation for the property, so she straddled the low fence, threw her other leg over, and went through some damp, low bushes and vines to get the web, so large that it was visible and glittering like frisson through the greenery. This secluded spot was the kind of place you would see in a collection of “amazing reader photos” that would make National Geographic a bit jealous. Multi-generational farmers know that it’s key to have an uncut area around fields and pastures, no matter what you’re growing, and it’s not some kind of offering to leave pristine environments as a bribe or penalty for the forest you just leveled for cotton or corn, but it has something to do with organic transit in the highly abstract sense, maybe just lore. After getting the spider web perfectly aligned with fading sun, she spotted some crayfish dueling in the shallow water by some
10
trees leaning out over the creek, so there wasn’t much of choice but to try to get a shot of them as well down into the water duking it out in what seemed like an immense struggle to them. She had no idea those trees with the thick roots at the side of this creek were all dead but for a few thin extensions. A sinkhole let all the water drop down around fifty feet before the trees could get enough of the water to thrive. They were still alive but letting all the bank side soil erode underneath the surface, since they could expand and compact the dirt, and left no disturbance at the surface. No one from the farm would ever wander all the way over to this nook that had a particular allure, tempting an amateur photog. Before she could even feel the new gravity, and before she could blink enough to steady herself, Agnes went head first into the sinkhole and all the way down to the karst cavern hollowed out by the constant spill of water from the creek under the soil and dying roots. It took several days for her to be found, and the Fusion ran for three days on its battery; the white boxes of crisp china stayed pristine by any standards in the backseat. Without Agnes to deliver them, the old couple never got any of those new pet food forms and had their doors shut for good, but Agnes’ mother got the China after headquarters sorted out who the plates and bowls were for through a thorough investigation into their origins and purchasing information, even though they were paid for in cash at a small flea market.
Dairy Americana Dave, who'd just been promoted to dairy enforcement sergeant, began to glaze over in the monitor light. He had just been upgraded to a pretty sweet desk chair, the Aeron executive all black, which accelerated zoning out in general, and he sat sinking deeper into his chair while he laid down a rhythm with the outer edge of his thumb for some ruff neck bass and his middle fingernail keeping Pro Tools time with a glitched-up snare. "Do we have to shut these people down, or is there some way we can give them a warning or something? I don't think they’re really a threat to anyone, much less regional food safety," Agnes complained with a glum look on her face as she read the damning report form with tons of check marks while looking up the perps' website that had a “wayback machine” feel to it due to the fact that the code was done by their nephew who had a brief stint at a community college during the dotcom boom; he didn’t get very far. There was a small pixelated photo of an elderly couple out in the crisp, farm air standing in front of a milk cow, the namesake of their Delaware cheese business based out of their retiree-style, colonial house with a bit of land. To even call it a company would let anyone in that area know you were from somewhere else, probably not even the same state, and to call it a web-based business would let everyone know your Wi-Fi hot spot was a McDonald’s. Dave looked back and reminded her from the luxury of a new swivel position, "The investigation and appeals dates are all past, all the suspension orders are in place; we gotta close the doors—stage three on the last form."
2
This was one of those situations at Agnes’ job that made her feel like pounding her fist on a huge, oak desk, which they didn’t have in this particular headquarters, and saying, "This is America damn it! Don't people have the right to choose the foods they eat? Don't they have the right to whatever foods aren’t available at Costco as well, even if there are “potentially harmful” bacteria thriving within the old, wax rind of a cheese wheel?" Having immigrant parents always made her think she could win people over instantly with a "mad as hell" kind of speech impromptu, like a town square soapbox speaker back in the day. I'm not sure if Norman Rockwell or any other grand, lifelike illustrator ever painted any Poles with fierce convictions about American dairy rights delivering emboldened speeches on the founding mandates of our experiment in democracy though. There may be some purely subjective Americana that drives some, probably everyone, into grand, proper persuasion. Dave said, "I feel like a panda in this chair; by the afternoon they drift into a, kinda, bamboo coma, ya know?” "Do you know what that contraption costs? I'd bet, like, $250; if you were running for office that chair would be used to show how out of touch you are with the middle class” said Agnes with “gotcha” journalism attitude. "Try tripling that for the basic all-black model; this one’s onyx." It was really weird for him to talk about the chair so much. This was the first time it got on Agnes’ nerves. Most of their coworkers at the FDA wouldn't put up with that kind of bragging about purchasing department details since office supplies don’t uphold
3
any of the dairy enforcement ideals. This branch was particularly no nonsense, especially about keeping costs down in order to play it straight with their tax payer dollars; these agents were enforcers, regulators, so they'd travel anywhere to pull the plug on noncompliant operators even if headquarters supplied only sandwiches and Asian-style floor mats to rest on between rotating night watch shifts among the street lights and diner neon seen from a studio apartment used for grabbing some shuteye before the next day’s drive to a plant, the last stop. The New England food supply was patrolled by white-hat lawmen (and women now, even though there weren’t any female sheriffs back in the Wild West days when legendary, poignant sheriffs had a “sense” for justice). Dave's Aeron executive chair allowed for a wide range of heights, angles, and varied resistance. The tensest part of this luxury perk was that it sometimes put his hands curiously at the same height as Agnes’ skirts, which weren’t short or anything but did leave enough air between skin and fabric to draw attention, and the angles of the armrests could’ve aided someone sliding his hand slowly upward as a natural extension of the vertices, unopposed by gravity. The close range afforded by the chair was ratcheting up someone’s adorkable magnetism like when you rub scissors together to get paperclips to stick to a partially and fading attractive surface out of boredom in the office. Agnes thought about her job and what she did for a living while standing there, wondering if those were the same thing or not. She had been a warm-hearted activist fresh out of university where she studied water conservation and watched a lot of documentaries before she began at dairy enforcement. Her job now had none of the Frontline investigative reporting to it and was unlike exposés on
4
how U.S. gun laws lure in Mexican drug thugs and, in turn, spark anti-immigrant sentiment, and lacked all the surprise of internet video demonstrations of how medulla-rotting fluoride combines with traces of anti-depressants in our tap water. All of her interests were in protecting “Joe Six-Pack” and the cast of characters making up the populace from corporate power and anemic accountability, but, in fact, every dairy company they had cited for violation or shut down all together had fewer than 15 employees, all of which were making less than $35,000 a year, including the owners. Dave secretly imagined how different things would be if they'd met on some chimp rescue preserve in Uganda. They'd probably share a mosquito net hammock, even after his promotion, and make love stuck in the mesh having no money except a “stipend,” which is like money but so small that organizations have a unique term for it. Agnes came in the next day with all the “termination” paperwork on the tiny dairy in a durable black notebook like one a rough and tumble travel writer would take into a Tibetan gorge. She wondered for a minute if she had the only copies and if destroying them would save the small farm, which was obviously a ridiculous plan to throw dairy enforcement off the trail. She imagined all the folders and Post-Its turning to ashes among the staples and red hot paperclips as a big victory for the little guys of the world, and that tactic might’ve worked back in the Atticus Finch days of stamps and slide rules, but now everything was quadruplely backed up on Krypton Cloud Services off in some Nordic data campus, where storing info. is cheap because the all the giant drives are cooled naturally by the rarified air at the top of the world.
5
Their headquarters was in Connecticut, near "Heroin Town" that was featured on all the 80s in-depth reporting on the drug war. The town was good for policing dairy regulations from a central location since most dairies were a short drive away. Until recently Agnes’ job involved rubber stamping well-established, bleach-filled plants with no living yogurt cultures or a single batch cottage cheese pushing the limits of FDA allowances for probiotics, but recently there had been a boom of old-style yogurt, kefir, and cheese with recipes and guidelines from the middle ages, and they often smelled like they had been made during that period and left sitting around until the 21st century and had the colorations to match. "Have any customers complained or been sick from their cheese?" Agnes said with a little confusion but while knowing full well that this was not one of those yearly salmonella in the cantaloupe scares. Dave quickly answered, "No, not yet, but tests showed a W. acidophilus living culture, so it's pretty open and shut; you can’t have that kind of thing running around the food supply even if it’s relegated to foodie get-togethers and health nuts. The owners don't dispute the claim, and they're not ceasing production, so there’s no way to let them stay open as it stands right now. Agnes new that wasn’t the case at all; those were the immediate facts on paper, but America was built on loopholes in the most respectable kind of way: a grand experiment in loopholes and simultaneous strict enforcement of law in general. The Wild West sheriffs knew what had to be done at the civilian level to push the frontier all the way to the ocean, right? They didn’t just ride about checking boxes and levying fines.
6
She had heard of ways around some of the “human consumption” dairy regulations if the product was well-made, not the result of an odd, damp exhaust pipe in an ice cream plant with a clogged blowback full of fungi, for instance. You’ve probably seen those tankers that read “not for human consumption” on a vat of wheat or milk pulled by an 18-wheeler; that’s the loophole category. If you can get foods under that umbrella you can sell anything, as long as it’s under the pretence of pet food. America has a special soft spot for ways around inconveniences when it comes to freedom or business: every week there are Good Morning America stories about people who pay no property taxes because they filled out the form that claims their two-bedroom house is a “church.” The same has to work for food because, “This is America, damn it!” Agnes went back through some of the rarely used forms on dairy and feed in their office and quickly found a “pet food distribution” form that seemed to match up well. She scanned for some key words, and it seemed legit, and everyone knows anything can be fed to one kind of pet or another; some people keep tigers; who are we to judge? “I know what you’re goin’ for.” Dave said as he looked over her shoulder through a doorway, “You’re gonna try to do their lawyers’ job yourself (the dairy didn’t have even one lawyer, much less the team Dave imagined), from our department, but why bother? Government workers get this bug more often than you think. A still new employee, after a successful start, two years or so, gets the activist virus or the individual liberty virus and starts helping people out of parking tickets or letting tax audits slide because of a
7
family or “family business:” a serious contradiction in terms, by the way. Like tons of newbies all over, you’re lookin’ a lot like Fern from Charlotte’s Web, tryin’ to rid the world of injustice before breakfast.” * Agnes was charged with making the next, and probably last, inperson visit by the FDA to the crime scene (she imagined lining the barn with yellow police tape and lifting it up to step under it into some carnage from a Liberian logging firm) to document the last of the dairy stock that would be confiscated if not “destroyed on site, per request of the state of Delaware.” She had the department’s Ford Fusion for the two hour drive, and she knew the responsibility of keeping the FDA procedures on point was all on her from then on in terms of this case. She imagined an intern leaving some files stuck to the recycling stack and losing so much evidence that the case would have to be thrown out and reinvestigated from scratch. She left early to drop off a 12-piece china set at her family’s home, which was a couple of highways north of her route, so it wasn’t much of a problem to swing by on the way to the small dairy. Another perk of the straightforwardness of her job was time for detours on “official” road trips. There was some insane reason that her mother had shipped the ten heavy boxes to Agnes’ apartment for additional transit on one of these detours to the family’s home, and Agnes had given up on getting to the bottom of her mom’s logistical plans for antiquing and practical decision making in general: these two activities do not get on so well together, and they rivaled the fairness and common sense of bureaucratic quality control in Agnes’ opinion. Anyways, she reluctantly loaded the last box of the china in the Fusion and prepared all the navigation, music, etc.
8
A farm went by quickly on Agnes’ right about an hour or so down a two-lane highway with tractors leaning out on the shoulder with mower attachments every couple of miles, and the panorama from this highway looked like a Windows screensaver circa ’96, which isn’t a bad look for any American roadside. That green hill desktop background is considered one of the most recognizable photos in history, so there was an immediate compulsion to stop, walk around, and get some pics from the road. Agnes pulled off since the mowers behind would take weeks to catch up to her. She stepped over a small unpaved drainage area to get to the fence. The few cows close enough to the fence for her to get a good look at were like an old magazine illustration on curling paper the color of cheap linoleum in the kind of early magazine that took facts as mere starting points to get a moving story and move copies. Anything beyond the person and place was subject to “illustration” and should’ve been suspect as far as its relation to America on the ground, but whether readers in the old days even thought that far along isn’t really known today. Maybe even a farm boy from a oneroom schoolhouse reading an almanac story with ink drawings of a prize cow or hog back then knew the pictures were not documenting the giant animal; they were affecting something all together more abstract and outlandish, despite the sometimes straightforward storytelling style of the frontier days. I mean in the magazines people read back east during that era with the wonderment at the edge of civilization and the outer limits of the north and the west full of post-spawn salmon and eagle feathers. She crossed the drainage area to get to the corner of the now unpainted wooden fence, nearly below her waist. The cows weren’t looking to make an escape anyhow. She got some photos with the
9
corner of the fence meeting in the middle with posts expanding outwards in both directions until they disappeared into some low trees to the left and over a hill into the horizon on the right. There was no way of knowing if this place was a farm owned by retired hobbyists, a dairy farm, or a beef farm, but there was also no reason to care—about anything for a while really, much less advocacy or activism for living standards for these animals; doing nothing without being bored proves pretty convincing as a mode of perfection and purpose united in the middle of your odd, little existence, no matter what else you might believe about things right in front of your face or camera. Then, like almost anyone under 30 would, she gave in to the penultimate amateur photography cliché, a photo of a spider web with beads of moisture catching bits of flittering light. She knew she had to get closer, hop the fence, and get to the huge web over a tiny creek, clearly the original demarcation for the property, so she straddled the low fence, threw her other leg over, and went through some damp, low bushes and vines to get the web, so large that it was visible and glittering like frisson through the greenery. This secluded spot was the kind of place you would see in a collection of “amazing reader photos” that would make National Geographic a bit jealous. Multi-generational farmers know that it’s key to have an uncut area around fields and pastures, no matter what you’re growing, and it’s not some kind of offering to leave pristine environments as a bribe or penalty for the forest you just leveled for cotton or corn, but it has something to do with organic transit in the highly abstract sense, maybe just lore. After getting the spider web perfectly aligned with fading sun, she spotted some crayfish dueling in the shallow water by some
10
trees leaning out over the creek, so there wasn’t much of choice but to try to get a shot of them as well down into the water duking it out in what seemed like an immense struggle to them. She had no idea those trees with the thick roots at the side of this creek were all dead but for a few thin extensions. A sinkhole let all the water drop down around fifty feet before the trees could get enough of the water to thrive. They were still alive but letting all the bank side soil erode underneath the surface, since they could expand and compact the dirt, and left no disturbance at the surface. No one from the farm would ever wander all the way over to this nook that had a particular allure, tempting an amateur photog. Before she could even feel the new gravity, and before she could blink enough to steady herself, Agnes went head first into the sinkhole and all the way down to the karst cavern hollowed out by the constant spill of water from the creek under the soil and dying roots. It took several days for her to be found, and the Fusion ran for three days on its battery; the white boxes of crisp china stayed pristine by any standards in the backseat. Without Agnes to deliver them, the old couple never got any of those new pet food forms and had their doors shut for good, but Agnes’ mother got the China after headquarters sorted out who the plates and bowls were for through a thorough investigation into their origins and purchasing information, even though they were paid for in cash at a small flea market.
