To Be a Cow

Photographers love the light an hour or so before dusk. When the shadows are lengthening and the sunlight softens, skin tones look beautiful, old buildings look magical, the world can turn into a gleaming rosy place.

Tonight on the way to some friends' house for dinner, I looked back over my shoulder in the car, and found myself gasping at the beauty behind me. The lowering sun was doing astonishing things to the landscape. Steel-grey clouds, mounded upon each other, hung low in the sky. Silhouetted against them were tall trees, bare of leaves, fine branches almost feathery in their supple thinness, and glowing pink with the light of the sun. The trunks near the earth sat in shadowy muted tones, hardly differentiated from the earth in its wintering cloak of drab. But the top two-thirds of every tree looked alive, blushing, sun-kissed as if lit from within. If the trees wore fiber-optic twigs, lit with peachy light, this would have been the effect -- so brilliant, so startling against the heavy, leaden sky.

180 degrees away, I could see the actual sun itself just sinking beneath the horizon. A line of trees along the crest of a hill stood sharply black against the backdrop of molten gold and orange and pink that was the sky. Light shone in gleaming streaks through breaks in the clouds.

We passed a cow. Large, placid, brown and white, she stood with her head down, munching the grass, oblivious to the splendor of the sky, to the torch-like pink trees flaring behind her like glowing sentinels, to the pure orange that tinged the edges of the clouds that kissed the earth. In spite of all this, she simply munched. Moving slowly across the dull field, seeking out her dinner, she neither knew nor cared that the vision of this sky, these trees, this magnificence moved me. She was not moved by anything beyond the call of her belly.

And yet.

I could not help but wonder.

Would it really be possible to be a cow, standing amidst all this glory, and not notice? Could you really live on the land, be a part of the land, knowing the rhythm of days, the taste of winter on the grass, the smell of cold in the air, and be completely unaware of the magical light that splashed itself across the tops of trees on those rare perfect evenings when clouds and sunset and seasons conspired to create a canvas of perfection?

I want to think, NO. I want to think that it was a vista so wondrous that even a cow could not have ignored it. But then, she did have her back to the trees that glowed so magically pink against the billowing blue-grey clouds. And cows may be colorblind. And yet, even her munching, placid, disinterested, color-blind, bovine self surely must have felt the presence of such ethereally perfect beams of light.

Even a cow, I hope, must sense when it is in the presence of the extraordinary.