When I was eight years old I told my parents I didn’t want to eat meat anymore. My mom, raised in the heart of Kansas, preparer of most of our meals and a firm believer of the 1980’s dietary guideline for healthy meals being one source of meat protein, one starch and a side of veggies, promptly replied “not while under my roof.” Being a cunning eight year old, I decided to interpret this statement literally and that weekend, when my parents and I stopped at a restaurant on the way home from an outing, I ordered a salad.

Fast forward twenty-seven years, and I still don’t eat meat.  It’s a personal choice, based on compassion and one that has defined my identity. When I was younger I spent my allowance on memberships to environmental organizations; Greenpeace, World Wildlife Foundation and others. I had a plastic briefcase which I covered with the stickers of all the different organizations I belonged to. This was my badge of honor, and it symbolized my dedication to an ideal I believed in and to the adult I wanted to become. The older I got the less my mom was able to strong arm me into eating the meals she made.  By the time I hit nineteen, I went vegan, bringing home a package of tofu, plopping the foreign spongy cube in front of my mom and declaring this my new diet deity. I’ve suffered through dinner parties hungry and I’ve sat through hours’ worth of bacon jokes. I’ve accepted this lifestyle without regret, empowered by the idea that I was doing something honorable, and until one faithful Easter Sunday, three years ago, I thought I’d confronted and conquered every trial placed in front of me.

I was fostering a dog for my friend Carrie’s rescue organization; a neurotic creature that was terrified of people from years trapped in a crate at a puppy mill. When needed, I would coax the dog into my Subaru and take her to whatever event my friend had found, hoping to find some understanding soul willing to adopt her. The “event” my friend had found turned out to not be what she had expected. It was Easter Sunday and a local family was putting on an egg hunt and celebration for the kids in the community. When we arrived we were directed down a muddy road into a wooded section of land. She was told she could set up her booth in a grassy section at the edge of the trees near the place where everyone parked. After getting the dogs situated I was off duty, and had a few hours to kill before I had to pick up the dog and return home. So I waved goodbye to Carrie and followed the muddy tire tracks into the woods to check out the festivities.

It is strange how some moments in your life become burned into your memory, your mind places a bookmark between the pages of your experiences saying “this is something to come back to from time to time”.  It’s as if your subconscious marks the moment as a preliminary to something important, the memory becomes the title for the next chapter of your life, an important chapter.  I can open the book and feel that moment still, as if I am there; from the way the watery mud splashed up the side of my legs as I walked, to the way the trees stretched above my head to close in around me. I can still see the patterns of sunlight on the ground, dark holes punched through the light where the leaves above danced. As the trees thinned into a shadowy clearing, the warmth of the sunlight and the pleasant Easter day drained from my body and sunk into the mud at my feet.

I first watched the movie Deliverance when I was in high school. The movie’s protagonists encounter some back-woods mountain people with apparent hygiene defects and manners befitting an abused dog. They are actually really creepy people; people so beyond normalcy they are perfect as villains. Characters I applauded the movie’s director for inventing. Characters I was certain did not exist in the real world, but still gave me the chills when I pictured them. I bring up this movie because when I attempt to describe the scene before me nothing comes closer. I’ve witnessed some really strange things in my life that still felt “real”, this however, dropped me straight into a movie. The people around me looked meticulously costumed, the props methodically planned. The scene staged before me seemed straight out of the movie Deliverance.

The “egg hunt” was a small segment of land, roped off with bailing twine tied to trees, with plastic eggs scattered around on the trampled vegetation as if someone had just thrown them into the air and let them fall like brightly colored hail stones upon the ground. Children with dirt caked faces were running around, shoving each other aside to snatch up eggs while a horde of adults stood behind the twine screaming encouragements. In another area roped off, I saw a man in overalls holding a baby pig in front of a group of adolescents. Only later did I see the outcome of this tutelage; a terrified greased pig trying desperately to avoid being tackled by a swarm of greedy children.

One of the strangest things about the landscape were the random piles of tree saplings, unearthed from the ground, root balls exposed, placed in stacks around the clearing next to signs that read “trees for sale”. I could picture the landowners coming down from their mountain dwelling to this clearing to prepare for their annual Easter event and forlorn to see all the little trees that has sprouted during the year. After hand plucking the saplings to tidy up the area and thinking it an economical solution, they piled them up and placed signs to sell them. Of course any person with a small amount of plant knowledge would know that leaving the roots exposed all day long to the warmth of the air would kill the trees.

I was in awe. Not the good kind of awe either.  A woman passed me holding a toddler with hair matted and a filthy ring around his mouth from days of eating and no bathing. An old man, perhaps one of the land owners had a cardboard box of chocolate candy bars which he was throwing at people. When one of these chocolate projectiles hit me in the arm I picked it up and was astonished to read an expiration date of two years prior! On the other side of the clearing sat an old 1960’s pick-up truck, the bed held five rusty wire cages, each one containing a poor rabbit to be handed out as a prize for the most eggs collected. The memory in my mind becomes hazy at this point. My ability to recall the details of this place is muted by the overwhelming shock and dismay I was feeling. I walked around in a daze taking in this bizarre scene, until my memory suddenly focuses in again when I see the pen.

In the corner of the clearing tucked among the trees, in a tiny pen made from shipping pallets, stood a scrawny black and white calf. Being from Chicago, I’d never actually been up close to a cow before, and so I felt drawn to the pen, curiosity mixed with a sense of marvel. The calf was hip height, boney, with giant soulful black eyes embraced by long elegant lashes. It stood in mud, wobbly, sickly and weak, staring miserably out at the waves of people that passed by. My heart, as if I could truly feel it, seized into a tight ball. My mind transported for a second into the body of this helpless creature. Just a baby, with a child’s view of the world, placed by uncaring hands into a wet and dark enclosure, looked upon by cold eyes that saw only my flesh as a commodity. How scary it must all feel.

A young man, perched on a stool sat beside the pen in front of a tall table, a coffee tin placed in front of him. He was selling tickets to raffle off the calf. People were buying stacks, one dollar a piece, hoping to win this cheap food supply. Each ticket he would tear from its counterpart and drop it into the coffee tin. The calf was obviously not getting fed enough, and was to spend the entire day with no water and no food. I thought about leaping into the pen, fighting off the boy barehanded and carrying off the calf into the sunset. This of course was not an option and I knew I was helpless to save this poor creature. I pulled out five dollars and waited in line behind a man who bought one hundred tickets to purchase my five. Why did I waste five dollars? In my heart, as silly as it sounded, I wanted just a few of those tickets inside the coffee tin to represent kindness towards the unfortunate animal. Those five tickets were powerless to save it yet maybe they would somehow tip the balance toward compassion in this cruel world. Yes, I am an idealist.

My friend Carrie purchased twenty-five tickets and asked me to stay for the announcement of the winner. She’d already decided that this was not a place to find good owners for her rescue dogs and was busy packing up. As the crowd gathered to hear the winner of the cow and also a pet goat, I found a spot at the rear. I squatted down to lay out the raffle tickets on the ground in front of me, my back against a huge Douglas fir. I can still feel the sharpness of the bark on my skin through my t-shirt as I waited. When the number was called I scanned through Carrie’s tickets carefully, my heart heavy at this whole process of raffling off a life, angry that I was unable to change it. When the tickets did not provide the corresponding number I folded them up and tucked them in my pocket to throw away later. At the same time I glanced quickly at my five tickets but stopped after reading the first one.

How do you text your husband to tell him you just won a cow? It’s not a task one faces very often. Needless to say he wasn’t too happy with me. “Where are we going to put it?” He asked, “We don’t have any fencing, or knowledge of taking care of a cow, we can’t keep it.”

I knew all of this to be true, what was I thinking? The sadness and helplessness that I had felt moments before had turned to complete and utter panic as I realized what I had gotten myself into. Carrie, found this whole thing to be very amusing when I told her my dilemma. She had finished packing up and was waiting by the cars for me to return, her arm draped over her head to shield her eyes from the sun. She told me it all had a simple solution with a monetary gain for me, even. Calling out to the people heading to their cars she promptly sold my cow for fifty bucks to a tall man wearing a white tank top, with long arms and a goatee.

My memory of this time seems to be stuck on fast forward. Fueled by my distress and surprise at actually winning the cow, I was swept along by the circumstances of the moment. I followed the man, back down the muddy road toward the clearing to inform whomever it was that owned the cow that I would be exchanging the winning ticket to the man. My thoughts on the other hand, felt thick like the tree sap seeping from the bark of the trees around me. The forward movement of our walk seemed to unclog my thinking and I began to process what had just happened. At the same time an unsettling feeling of what I was now doing began to creep up. I’d bought the tickets to symbolically save the cow. Although I had fantasized about winning, I had felt safely tucked behind the microscopic chance that I would actually win. Now I was selling him, making a profit, becoming exactly what I had bought the tickets against. My husband’s voice rang in my ear, he was right; we were not set up for a cow. How long did a cow live? Did they just eat grass? How much space did a cow need?  We were not ready to take on something like that! This was the only option. I turned to the man and said “Take good care of my cow,” in which he replied with a sly grin, not even bothering to look at me, “Oh I will, until I eat it.”

The words were like spikes in my sides, jabbing me out of the trance I’d been in. A thought slowly surfaced in my mind. This was one of those defining moments in one’s life. A rare divergence from the main path, where everything you had carefully built around your identity is thrown into a mirror and set defiantly in front of you. This was a moment, like a weary traveler who comes to a fork in the road and must decide which path to take. It was a metaphoric fork in the road with two choices; the hard or the easy, the right or the wrong path. This was a blatant slap in the face by life, daring me to be the brave, compassionate person that from a little girl I dreamed of being. If I stayed the path, handing over my ticket, nothing harmful would happen to me. I would go home and eat my tofu and continue my life. However if I stopped right there in the mud and made the insane and ridiculous choice to keep the ticket, and the cow, I would forever alter the course of my life. I would be heading down a new path, one that perhaps I had this one chance to jump on to. It would be hard, it would be crazy, but it would be right.

I told the man I would not sell him the cow. And I will not go into the brief ten minutes of insanity after this, in which I ran around yelling “will anyone take my cow and just milk her for the rest of her life,” before being informed it was a “boy” cow. In the end, I faced myself in that mirror, and I gave her permission to be. I took the hard road with unbelievable challenges ahead. I knew my husband would feel the same once he looked into those deep and gorgeous eyes. Call it destiny, fate or random chance, whichever it was; it changed my life. So I crammed the calf into the back of my Subaru and brought him home.