Rural America’s Favorite Pastime

by Earl Lee

 

Last Christmas, while we were driving to my parents’ home in Arkansas, my wife started telling me about one of her creative writing students who had written a short story about some guy having sex with a goat. You would think, being from Green Bay, that this would not faze her, and she was especially surprised by the fact that none of her students (mostly Kansas kids) had any problem with the story. They object to any story that is unfriendly toward religion, but I guess bestiality is just too common to complain about.

The odd part of this was that, as she told me this, we were on that ten-mile stretch of highway east of Cave City and not far from Strawberry, and we were going past the house where this guy who I went to school with used to live. For some reason, he told me back then how much he enjoyed having sex with cows. He would back the cow up to a stump, jump on the stump, and then “roger” the cow. He even offered to show me how!

Then he told me that he had an accident once. He dropped his pants (blue jeans) and the cow decided to raise her tail and shit all over him. He had to walk to the nearest stream, covered in shit, and wash his jeans before he could go home.

I don’t know why he decided to share this story, but I wasn’t eager to join in. I mean–he was talking about cows! I wonder what the hell he was thinking.

* * *

Back in 1978 we moved from Fayetteville, Ark., to Green Bay.  I was looking for work and there were numerous ads in the newspaper for young men to work at dairy farms. (Wisconsin is, after all, “the Dairy State.”) The ads asked for experience, but the only absolute requirement mentioned in the newspaper ads was that the young man applying for the job had to be married. “No bachelors need apply.”

* * *

And then there’s Texas. My theory is that the reason there is so much bestiality in Texas is because, back in 19th-century Texas, all these young men (or boys, as in John Wayne’s movie, The Cowboys) would go on  long cattle drives where they were herding hundreds of cows north to the rail line (to Dodge City, for example, as in the early b&w western with Walter Brennan and John Wayne, Red River) to sell off the herd. Of course these poor cowboys … (hmmm, why are they called cowboys?) … spent day after day and week after week riding along on their horses and thinking about cute little Betsy they’d left back in Texas–and all the time they were forced to look at the rear ends of a bunch of cows. It’s not hard to guess what this led to. Pretty soon they were cheating on Betsy with good ole Elsie…. and it quickly became the habit of a lifetime. Texans always think that bigger is better, and Elsie outweighs Betsy by half a ton, so this is perfect for the typical Texan.

 

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