21/02/2024
I cradled the television camera in my lap and tried to block it from the spray. Beside me, a North Carolina Wildlife Officer stared through the windshield of the boat as it slapped at the dirty water. I tried to fall in synch with its rhythm and failed. The craft cut a path between a row of telephone poles and I realized we were traveling down Highway 11. Pulling the plastic cover tight around the station’s camera, I tried to find the horizon. All I saw was ugly brown water, the still rising result of a storm called Hurricane Floyd.
I turned the camera on, pressed the RECORD button and pointed it at the boat’s third passenger. An old man in overalls appeared in the viewfinder. He didn’t return my camera’s gaze; instead he stared into the distance and continued the silence he’d embraced since we left the flood’s edge twenty minutes earlier. I zoomed in on his weathered face, the shiny water strobing behind him. His eyes were dry, but they conveyed a quiet sadness I’d see a lot of over the coming days. He pulled a tattered rag from a pocket and dabbed his eyes, perhaps trying to wipe away the vision of the water all around us. The face in the viewfinder muttered something, but the roar of the boat’s engine drowned out the old man’s words.
After what seemed like forever, the Wildlife Officer made a sharp starboard turn, and we rounded a stand of battered pine trees. As he eased up on the throttle, the high pitch of the outboard engine dropped to a low, throaty rumble. I took the opportunity to dab water drops off my lens as the old man across from me uttered his first words of the trip.
“’Bout a half mile more, just past ’em trees,” he twanged.
The officer goosed the accelerator and the boat chortled forward. Up ahead, a box-like structure stood guard in the middle of what still looked like a lake. As we got closer, I saw it was a single-wide trailer, the water-line just below its windows. Large, indistinctive shapes bobbed all around the pathetic structure. I shouldered the camera and pushed in with the lens to get a better look, but the pitching deck offered little purchase. So I followed a glint of sunlight as it danced along the metal edges of a nearby road sign - the marker barely poking above the roiling water.
‘River Road’ it read.
Without a thought I steadied up and rolled tape. I was still congratulating myself on bagging my first important image of the day when I heard the old man’s voice break…
“Sweet Jesus…”
The smell hit me before my eyes found the source. A few feet off the starboard bow, the bloated carcass of a cow stared back at us. A pungent odor raced through my sinuses and I hid my face behind the viewfinder. Through it, I watched a green fly pull a piece of flesh from the dead animal’s swollen tongue. I looked away, only to catch sight of another dead cow floating alongside, followed by another, and another. The Officer pulled a state-issued bandana over his face and steered the craft through the swirling brown sea of drowned cattle.
“Never had a chance,” the old man said.
The worn creases around his eyes squeezed even tighter and he stared off into oblivion, addressing no one in particular. He seemed unaffected by the stench, his weathered nostrils long since given up on unpleasant odors.
“People’s got boats, a damn head a cattle ain’t got a chance in hell --”.
AT that, the old man’s voice cracked and he turned even further away, taking in his loss and nursing his pride. I watched the short speech through the blue haze of my viewfinder, punctuated by the steady red glow of the ‘RECORD’ light.
When the twin-engine pushed the boat forward, the trailer in the distance came into focus. As it did, the number of dead cattle increased. In a desperate lunge for higher ground, the panicking herd had apparently converged on the old trailer, Many of the doomed beasts choked on their own tongues as dirty water filled their lungs. Others had been gored and stomped in the closing minutes of the frantic stampede, their rubbery entrails now exposed to the midday sun. A half dozen more cows floated in the sludge surrounding the trailer, their lifeless forms rubbing against the metal walls and making a scrubbing sound that I’ll probably take to my own grave.
The officer pushed the boat in within feet of the trailer and turned to circle it. At the far end, the trailer’s walls lay splayed open, itself a victim of the storm and onslaught of frightened cattle. One cow in particular, seemed to have perished during the fight to get inside, his whole left flank ripped open by the sharpened metal. Holding my breath, I again pressed the RECORD button and tried to picture what it must have been like during those last few horrible moments. The great, lumbering beasts thrashing and kicking at each other, fighting to the death in a frenzy of adrenaline and instinct, as the ugly water rose, and rose, and rose.
“Well, I’ll be damned…”
The farmer’s voice snapped me back to reality as the boat rounded the far side of the trailer and we came face to face with the lone survivor of those last few minutes. Light brown with a blotch of white on his muzzle, the cow snorted with fear as he stuck his head out of the empty window frame.
The look in his dark eyes was wild and knowing, totally unlike the look of bored vacancy usually found in the breed. As the boat made a slow arc around him, he stepped in accordance - tracking the boat’s every move. Taking us in, the animal grunted lowly, seemingly pleading for help. I zoomed out to a wide shot and wondered if this simple beast understood his perilous state. He had, after all, watched his brethren die a horrible death around him. Bracing myself against the boat, I zoomed in on his dilated pupils, catching for a second the real (or imagined) guttural pleading within.
That’s when the old farmer took off his cap and ran his leathery fingers through a shock of white hair.
“Been livin’ on this land for more than seventy years, never woulda believed it. The good Lord may know what’s best, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out.”
With that, the man seemed to have seen enough and he asked the silent Wildlife Officer to take him back to the water’s edge. As we made our way back through the maze of drowned cattle, the old farmer slumped in a corner of the craft and pulled a plug of to***co from a pouch hidden in his soaked overalls. No one spoke a word the whole way back, and as the motor droned on, it once again occured to me that I’d better start writing this stuff down.
