(no subject)
Some people are just born into the right place. The stars align and bam! The early-to-bed, early-to-rise naturalist is born to Texas cattle ranchers, or bam! The stork drops a future Type A workaholic into the arms of Manhattan stockbrokers. It’s not a question of nature vs. nurture-they get both in abundant supply. These people grow up happy and comfortable and quite sure that life is perfect.
I was not one of those people.
My family has a century farm. Four generations of Knust men have breathed fresh air and plowed spring-dampened earth and come in after a hard day’s work to pork chops and hamburgers that were oinking and mooing in the backyard a matter of weeks ago. They drive trucks and they play football and by God, they’ll pee in the driveway if they want to, and do you know why? Because they can. And overall, it’s a great life.
The problem is, they all seem to marry and subsequently produce women who don’t agree. My grandfather married a “townie” and teased her for fifty years for having too many shoes. My father grew up a farmer to the core, but his sisters, my aunts, preferred heels to boots and skipped town as soon as they had their maroon and white diplomas in hand. And then, not surprisingly, he married a townie and teased her for having too many shoes, and before long they had a daughter who preferred jellies to boots and a son who happened to be a farmer to the core too.
Now, I could have lived with the muddy shoes all spring and the dust from the gravel roads and riding the bus 45 minutes to school every morning. I could have lived with the impossibility of rollerblading and always being quite literally the last neighborhood in the county to get electricity back after a bad storm. But the one thing I most definitely could not live with was the one thing I had to do every day.
I had to eat animals.
When I was about four years old I witnessed my first butchering. Every spring my dad and grandpa bought about 50 fuzzy yellow chicks, and every summer they chose a Saturday to butcher the full-grown birds. All 50 lost their heads on the chopping block, and then their carcasses went through a series of rending and plucking that was nothing short of nauseating. It had never connected with me that meat was the product of animals who are killed and cut up, and I never really looked at it the same way again. If you’ve never thought about where your fajitas come from, you too would probably decide within 10 minutes of this process that a diet of lettuce and refined sugar probably wasn’t so bad after all. As it happened, it was a good ten years before I could put the smell of chicken fat in July or the visual of a gutted hog hanging from the skid loader out of my sensory recall long enough to choke down any kind of meat at all.
An Iowa farm kid with a meat aversion is not unlike a journalist with an alcohol aversion or a politician with an aversion to adultery. It’s being the guy who orders a Pabst Blue Ribbon where cabernet sauvignon is the specialty. Quel faux pas! To survive, you’re essentially forced to do one of two things-fake it or fight it. Not seeing any real choice, I opted for the latter.
Starting when I was about 7, I begged my parents nonstop to let me go vegetarian. My mom laughed and told me not to be silly, then made me a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. My dad got angry and told me that I’d have to learn to eat what the rest of the family ate because that was what we had, and I shouldn’t have to have my own separate meal prepared every night. I never pointed out that she always made him a pork chop or steak when the rest of us had spaghetti.
Over the years we developed an evening ritual. My plate came to me with lots of vegetables and bread, which I ate like a normal person, and a few bite-size cubes of pork or beef or the tiniest chicken wing in the pan, which I promptly began negotiating.
“Do I have to eat all this?”
“Yes. There’s nothing there, sis. Four bites.”
“I can’t do it. I’ll throw up!”
“You’re eating it.” And that was the end of the argument.
So, masochist that I am, I left the meat until last. By that time it was usually cold, and cold meat is chewy meat. Pork was always the worst. By time I got to it, the fat and gristle had congealed, the breading had gone spongy, and my evening was pretty much ruined. I stabbed one piece with my fork, looked at it with disdain, squealed “Moooooom! It has big globs of fat on it!” and took a deep breath. I plucked it carefully off the fork with my teeth, held my tongue as far from it as possible, and chewed with a look on my face that I knew even without a mirror was not a pretty one. And I chewed. And chewed. And thirty minutes later, I swear this is no exaggeration, thirty minutes later I was still chewing that same half-inch cube of pork. Prime-time television had started, the sun had gone down, and there I sat, miserably wallowing a chunk of meat pulp that seemed to get bigger and more glutinous by the minute. Eventually my mom took pity on me and told me to just swallow that piece and then I was excused.
This battle took place almost every night for five years. By the time I reached junior high my parents accepted that I was just never going to like it and that I’d have to either find other ways to get protein or learn to enjoy kwashikor. As it happened, I got along fine. (Just like I told them I would.) I eventually made my peace with it, and even sometimes eat a hamburger without chewing it for half an hour. My family’s so proud.
In the end, growing up on a farm wasn’t such a bad thing. I learned fear and respect for nature, that four-wheeler rides are best when you look for the biggest bumps, and that not everybody has the luxury of turning up their noses at the things they need to get by, so you should consider yourself infinitely blessed if you do. It was a life I would never have a chosen, and a life that I may never return to, but that century farm will always be home in a profound way that precious few people in this day and age will ever know. I never did learn to pee in the driveway, but you know, at least my children will have Uncle Ted to lead the way for the next generation.