Easiest thing

you do not have to be good. but you should probably try

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Somewhere along the way to the slaughterhouse, the cow ran straight through the trailer, scraped its weight against Route 9, and took off through the Appalachian wilderness, where it eventually came face to face with me.

I’ve been on a sabbatical from my life for the month of September. Or, I’ve been making way for my life to come into view. It’s common practice for entire forests to burn to clear space for new growth. If making this idea analogous to my own personal life strikes you as trite, trust me when I say that I wish I didn’t mean it. I wish I could have come across or come up with anything that strikes me as being more true. But increasingly I am finding that the true things are often simple (another sickeningly compact, sentimental idea!), and such is my desire to be in the woods.

The farm is thirty-one acres of beautiful, mountainous land stewarded by a couple of educators, James and Sofia, and their impeccably mannered children. There is no official work requirement (and thus my desire to be “good” and maybe even “perfect” becomes harder to measure). Kate and I are living in a converted RV near a vast trail network that’s an uphill walk to the nearest sanctioned bathroom. I haven’t pissed indoors since August.

The cell service is spotty enough to be non-functional, though I did press the top of my phone to the window screen to get a text to go through to my boyfriend. It didn’t work, and I soon abandoned the project of trying. Anyway, the attempt went against my stated mission, which was to clear away what was false to make room for what was true. My phone is decidedly False.

It occurred to me the other day, plucking grapes off the vine and eating them directly after, careless in regard to whatever pesticides may or may not remain on the surface, that most Americans have likely never experienced their food straight from the source. Plastic wrapped around the produce, that’s False, I thought.

I’d kick it around in my mind as a thought experiment, keeping myself occupied while weeding or looking into middle distance at trees. True or false. Over the last few years of my life, I’ve become uncomfortably acquainted with the False — the process of deflecting and covering what one knows to be true with alternative explanations, habits, or ways of being (up to and including plainly lying), all of which grate against the psyche painfully and, in the worst cases, subperceptually. I shored up the trail. Hoola hooping true, investment banking False, screaming true, sarcasm False. Infidelity, strangely, true, plausible deniability, False.

In the morning, I let the chickens out of their coop. It’s true that I have amends to make to their species, having spent a summer assisting in the routine killing, butchering, and vacuum-sealing on a family poultry farm as a teenager. There’s a Werner Herzog quote about the eyes of a chicken betraying no soul that I used to laugh at, but beneath the laughter was a knowing that chickens are more alive than most. They can purr like cats, and they have a sense of humor. They can be sneaky. They can make deals with one another, be tricky. They alert each other to incoming danger, even when it proves risky to be the one squawking out a warning. Once you know chickens, you know that plastic wrapped around the meat is False.

And in fact, even before I knew chickens, I knew that there were certain things I had to forget about in order to keep eating them. I used to be a bleeding heart vegan in my high school days (whether or not this lifestyle also conveniently served my eating disorder was neither here nor there for me back then). I watched horrific footage from the inside of factory farms. I knew that animal agriculture was the number one cause of climate change. I believed that all beings had the capacity to suffer and should be spared from suffering whenever possible. It became clear that every axis of animal agriculture caused immense, needless suffering to animals and humans alike. It seemed pretty simple to me what the moral choice was.

But life went on, and I forgot about these things. Or, I tried my very hardest not to remember, because remembering made me feel bad feelings like guilt and shame. When I did remember, I would think about the fact that just about every animal I’ve ever eaten has been bred against its genetics and to our tastes, forced to live in unnatural environments under abusive conditions, and suffered every day of its life until the day that it died, in many cases, slowly and painfully.

I looked at the chickens and wondered how it all added up. Every day, I tell a lie to myself about one of the most basic elements of my life — my food. The lie has been told so many times and has been reinforced in so many ways that to be reminded of the truth feels like a cruel attack. What has such a thing done to my capacity for reason, for feeling?

As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod:

“Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.”¹

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The cow doesn’t want to die, which is why it is here, on James’ land. I don’t think the cow knows that the family is vegan. I think it was just running.

For what it’s worth, James usually balks at the idea of land ownership. He’s deliberately opened his space to complete strangers, lets people come here and dry out from all manner of substances and situations for just about as long as they need to. He believes in sharing what is given and, one day, breaking down the barriers of private property altogether. But tonight, when he comes storming back into the kitchen, he says

“They better not shoot that cow on my land.”

The cow, which was being led with sweet feed by its owners when I came across it earlier in the woods, has since taken off, out of sight. It didn’t want to cross the creek, back to the other farm. The owner keeps complaining about the misfortune, and by this, he means his lost revenue. The easiest way, at this point, would be to shoot it.

Guns are mostly False, engaged as last-ditch efforts to maintain control in fundamentally wild situations. The guy who wants to shoot the cow has heretofore strangled each and every aspect of this animal’s life — what it eats, how often it sees the sun, where it can move, how long it lives, how and when it’s going to die. But the bare fact is that the cow is fucking massive and, despite all of this, when it wanted to get away, it could. The gun can overcome the truth, which is that a human alone cannot fully subjugate such a large, fierce animal. No one has seen the cow for a half hour. Maybe she’ll get away.

For a moment, I can see it — the cow finding an undisturbed patch of land to rest for the evening, making it until morning. This night becomes one wild hiccup, which bifurcates her life into before and after captivity. For the first time, she experiences freedom of movement, fresh grass. Outlasting the cops and the cattle ranchers and the other inevitable men with guns, who will just as inevitably go home once the mission becomes too expensive and thus worthless, she manages to make a life for herself in the woods until that life reaches a natural conclusion.

And then I remember her belly, how it swelled grotesquely at the sides like a balloon full of dry ice. I remember her wheeze, breath only narrowly escaping her gaping mouth. I remember that this animal was not meant to run or breathe or fuck or lie down. This animal was meant for us to eat, and for that reason, she has been bred to be just able enough to amble around. If she evades those who are looking for her, she will not live peacefully in the woods. The unnatural weight of her body will buckle her legs. She will starve slowly and painfully. I begin to wish for the sound of a gunshot.

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I’ve heard it said that you can’t get hung up on every small thing that could potentially be immoral because the world is immoral, capitalism is immoral, and one would drive themselves crazy in an attempt to be fully pure. I’ve said this myself many times, but it’s not as though I had reached a breaking point with my valiant attempts, trying to catch myself in every corner, finally becoming exhausted with being just so good. No, usually I’ve said things like this when I’m doing nearly nothing, though I am crushed with guilt and looking for a way to easily release it.

Here’s another dichotomy I’ve been thinking about — easy versus hard. Smoking a cigarette is easy, but a wheezing cough is hard. Eating pork chops is easy, but knowing a poor family lives right next to the hog shit lagoon that is disabling their children is hard. Spending 4 hours on Instagram is easy, but disassociating from your life is hard. We all live difficult lives in some capacity. It makes absolute sense and feels right that we should look towards the easiest way of doing things. But I don’t think the easiest thing is actually easy.

The easiest things can happen with no conscious effort, but the truth of experience remains where I cannot see it. The easiest things often involve a kind of deception or forgetting, a convenient story that the brain believes even when the body doesn’t. The easiest things stacked up over time inside me. The easiest things made me feel empty and claustrophobic. The easiest things made me afraid to seek out the truth, because I was afraid that it would be hard. But it’s hard to feel crushed by an inner knowing that something is wrong. It’s hard to disagree with yourself over and over again.

When I left my job, many people around me seemed dumbfounded that I would walk away from a well-paying position in a creative industry. Staying would have been the easiest thing. But doing something hard made my life so much easier — it alleviated the gap between knowing and doing, stopped the incessant whirr of my mind which, in its discomfort, created other obstacles for me to confront in lieu of the one I was avoiding.

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Quitting smoking seems hard. Quitting smoking at 30 rather than 24 seems harder. It’s been a week, and I’ve taken to breaking out into a sprint whenever the cravings get bad. People here know what’s happening. Sometimes I take off mid-conversation. Quitting smoking is hard. Straining to walk up a modest hill is harder. Making eye contact with a baby while polluting their direct environment is harder. Knowing you’ve been wanting to quit smoking for years and still haven’t is harder.

No animal products, no smoking, and no phone… I’m practically a monk these days. Who knows what will happen when I go back to the city, where everything is available and easy. Maybe I’ll slip back into my old ways, make another excuse, tell another story. Maybe I’ll continue being brave, looking things in the face. The most intolerable experiences of my life have involved obscurity and dishonesty. Right now, I want to rip the mask off of everything. I don’t want to be lied to and, more importantly, I don’t want to lie to myself.

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It’s the morning now, and the cow hasn’t come back. Today, the owner will take off into the woods with other men with guns and shoot it. They will tie ropes to its body and drag it uphill through the woods, past the creek, and to the trailer whose back door is smashed in, but it won’t matter now because the cow will not be alive to kick it. I wonder what the men will feel while they schlep this body. I wonder if they can feel its weight. How heavy.

1. This is a quote from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals — a book I highly recommend