Discovering our First Speed Bump
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Watkins Glen, NY
Want to know the best way to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
When Drew and I drove away from our sticks and bricks home in State College, PA, we had every intention of immediately driving north. We wanted to make it to Acadia National Park, a goal we still hope to achieve, and be back in Pennsylvania for our godson’s baptism which is scheduled for October. I had recently gotten word that my Nana was in the hospital, and so we scheduled a layover in our hometown to give me a chance to visit with her, a bon voyage before we set sail. I was able to see her once in the hospital, a short stay where she enjoyed vanilla ice cream and orange sherbert for lunch, and we spent an entire day together after she was released into comfort care at my mom’s house. On that day, which I’m sure was gifted to me by an angel which I will remain eternally indebted to, I combed the knots out of her hair, I brought her cheesecake for breakfast, I picked her strawberries, and I kissed her goodbye as she sat on the porch with my grandfather, smiling at the fresh-cut roses that he had brought to her from her garden in Philadelphia.
My Nana passed away the following day.
Most of us have a person who they feel deeply connected with, someone who understands the way of your soul and hears the words that you are never able to form on your tongue. To me, that person was my Nana. “We were born under the same star,” she would say to me as a child. We both were admirers of nature and wildlife; We were both assigned to the Sagittarius zodiac at birth, a sign I recently learned is known for worldly travel; And, oddly, both of us thought the tremer of our vanity mirrors during the 2011 Virginia earthquake was caused by a ghost in our bedroom. She played a large part in making Drew’s and my voyage across the country possible, always encouraging me to chase my happiness no matter where that finish line was.
I sat in my grandparents home a few days later, overwhelmed by echoes of the person who was no longer with us. I reached for a sweatshirt hanging in her closet, a Penn State hoodie that I had given to her for Christmas, and the smell of her embraced me as I put it on. I reached into the pocket and pulled out a half eaten fortune cookie, smiling because I could imagine her enjoying it after a cup of egg drop soup. It was just as I was about to throw the remnants of her dessert in the trash when a small piece of white paper tickled the side of my finger, the fortune asking to be read. Blinking away two pools of tears, I made out the sentence, “You can either follow your fears, or be led by your passions.” What excellent advice, Nana. I think I’ll choose the latter.
I have yet to wash that sweatshirt, knowing full well that this resentment is irrational. Every once in a while, I find a silver hair stuck in it’s fibers, never sure if it belongs to her or if it is evidence of my prematurely greying head. Still, it brings me comfort.
Shown above, is my Nana and I sharing a hug on my wedding day.
Setting sail - for real this time
After what I am certain was the least enjoyable delay of plans possible, Drew and I did eventually make it to Watkins Glen, NY about a week later than planned. We started our adventures at two Harvest Hosts, the first being a scenic vineyard where I medicated my broken heart with a healthy dose of Lake Seneca wine. Our second stop was at Sunset View Creamery, a dairy farm where Drew and I impulsively signed up for what was advertised as “30 minutes of cow cuddling.” Despite the uncomfortable nature of having to request such a service, lying in a pile of cows ended up being exactly the recharge of love and all things good that my soul had craved.
We met a kind woman who introduced herself as Jess outside the farm’s storefront. She led us down a gravel driveway and into a small, picturesque, red barn. “Go on in,” she said as she held a near infant baby daughter in her arms, certainly no more than a few weeks old. “They’re like big dogs.”
And right she was. The herd of five Holsteins all liked to be scratched in what Charlie would rank near the top of his all time favorite places: behind the ears and under the chin. A few times, if I lost my vigilance, one of them would lick the side of my face, although this felt much less like the silky, delicate kisses I was used to and more like a wet, palm sized, Brillo pad. One of the ladies, whose ear tag told me was named “Flobie”, kept sucking on the bottom of my shirt and I would have to then tap her on her wet, leathery, whisker-tickling nose to get her to stop. As a heifer named Pearl stood up and peed right next to where Drew was sitting, the look on his face, as his bubble of relaxing bliss was instantaneously popped, made me laugh for the first time in days.
One of my favorite pictures I took that day, when one of the cows had just tried to lick me on my face! Jess told us that the rough texture on their tongues helps them pull up grass and roots to eat.
I had known about the relaxing effects of gentle touch before. The act of cuddling, as placebo weighted as it sounds, triggers your brain to release what the scientific community very professionally refers to as “feel good hormones”. Oxytocin, for example, after being produced in the hypothalamus and then released from the pituitary gland, can decrease stress levels in mammals through its suppression of cortisol.
I asked Jess how she selected this group of five cows who were tasked with greeting the cow cuddling patrons of the evening. “Well all of our cows like people, but this group here spends all day with one another. They’re best friends so they do everything together.” Just like that, our time was up. We patted the heads of each of our hooved compatriots as we let Jess get back to some of her more normal obligations on the farm.
This particular cow, Flobie, was especially affectionate during our visit, often coming up to me and laying her head on my lap.
The RV was parked in an adjacent field, Charlie napping in wait, and so we retired to it for the evening, treating ourselves to a smorgasbord of fresh cheeses, washing it down with a bottle of wine that we had stowed from the previous night, and watching the sun set behind the farm’s rolling pastures. Still, my mind was elsewhere. I had always thought that human friendship and personal bonds were aspects that set humans apart from other animals, and so this casual comment that Jess had made about cow friendship wouldn’t let me be without further exploration.
Cow Friendship
As it turns out, there is actually quite a bit of scientific evidence for cows having friends. Cattle ranchers seem to universally express observations that cows who are reared together display behaviors which indicate strong social bonds which persist over their lifetime. These relationships are never emulated to this magnitude if cattle are introduced later in life. In 2013, a study published by Krista McLennan at the University of Northampton showed that cows had significantly lower heart rates when being around a cow that they knew in comparison to one they didn’t. A 2014 study coming from the University of British Columbia additionally showed that cows who were allowed to socialize with a friend demonstrated a better rate of problem solving than cows kept in isolation. For animals that tend to be described as little more than walking hamburgers, they certainly show a level of social complexity that I did not expect.
Upon a bit more digging, I uncovered articles that suggested friendships can also exist within groups of primates, horses, elephants, and whales. These types of bonds create a social dynamic much more complex than what is present in a herd of antelope, which, showing no evidence of friendship, graze side by side across the savannah. Just as Shrek poetically pointed out that ogres are like onions, you can think of friendship packed social groups much the same way. They are layered, with an individual at the core, surrounded first by the individual’s best friends, then close friends, and so on and so forth until you peel back the layer composed of acquaintances. Navigating a social circle like this requires a high degree of intelligence and also provides these animals with delayed benefits. In a case of “I scratch your back, you scratch mine,” Susan Gaidos wrote an essay in 2012 which noted female baboons are more likely to defend someone who recently helped to groom them.
It seems clear, even after just a bit of digging, that friendship and strong social bonds are frequently formed in non-human animals. Much like the stormy sea I had just survived, wild animals are also known to mourn. It was in the 1970s that Jane Goodall described how she watched a chimpanzee named Flint become lethargic and refuse to eat after the death of his mother. Thus, in all the ways that we try to justify the distinctive nature of the human experience, it seems to me to be painfully non-unique.
These two besties, Darla and Fannie, were taking a nap together while they were there.
The human distinction
In a slightly disappointing turn of events, the 2013 study by Krista McLennan was also able to demonstrate that after separating a pair of best friend cows for several weeks, they often lose their previously strong social bond upon their reintroduction. It seems less clear if this happens to all non-human animals, and at what rate this may occur within different species if it does. What I do know, and what many of you reading this know, is that despite how overwhelmingly unimpressive the human memory is, I will never forget the person that was my Nana.
The truth is, and I sincerely hope that this experience is not limited to human primates, but we as a species have remarkable ways of keeping our loved ones alive, even after their heart stops beating. Whether we know it or not, they live in our facial features, in the old photographs that we show to our children, within the relationships that they were around to help to foster, in the lessons that they taught us which we use to guide your everyday decisions, and in the creation of art and music which touches us all in ways only known at an individual level. I’ve never found access to that part of my brain which produces art. All I know is writing. And in this way, doing the only thing I know how to do, I choose to write about my Nana, on a travel blog, currently sitting in the countryside of northern Vermont. I write to keep her memory alive.
After all this explanation, it seems a shame to ignore that the first thing I really learned on my quest for worldly knowledge through travel, I learned right on the porch of my grandparent’s Philadelphia home. Go ahead, tell God your plans. I'm sure you’ll make him chuckle.
Uncover your own discovery
This is usually the part where I encourage you all to “Discover it for Yourselves”, but there is no doubt that my experience at Sunset View Creamery was shaped very heavily by the fact that life had just recently knocked me flat onto my cheeks. Some experiences cannot be recreated, and as hard as we try with every bit of technology that we have accessible to us, we cannot capture them. They must be lived in as they blossom.
My Nana’s name was Martha Helen Hunt. She was one of the best people I knew, a straight shooter, a fierce friend, and my greatest supporter. She was hard not to love and nearly impossible not to be loved by. She was not perfect. She was stubborn, and picky, and spoiled, and often too blunt to not cause trouble. She was also lovely, and she was beautiful in every definition of the word. My grandfather told me as I sat beside him after she had passed away, “You know, when your grandmother heard about you and Drew taking your trip across the country, she told me that she wished she was going with you.” I looked down at the golden “M” which hung around my neck, the one that used to hang around Nana’s neck until she bestowed it upon me. I knew, just as I am certain now, that she would be with me for the journey.
Martha, shown here in her high school portrait, was affectionally called “Curly” by my grandfather.
Thank you for joining us at Discovery Detour, where the destination is always unknown.
