Bull in the chute

the creative spark

Hot steam from the great trembling animal’s snout wetted his red knuckles as he crouched and extended a crispy corn cob to its muzzle. The bull buffalo took it. Then with his free hand, he scratched its bushy forehead, and the bull reared in terror, taking the boards with his horns, exploding the fence up in the air.

Internal monologue for the wild animal that is the creative spark.

Place setting: a small farm, just off the teardrop turn-around at the house and out-buildings .. specifically, the gap between the barn and corrugated metal shed. A teenage boy stood at his newly built fence of creosote-soaked cedar posts fitted with two-by-sixes, nailed into place with six-inch spikes.

A bull buffalo’s gotta eat. The west wind in December never quit, and it stayed between the buildings in little cyclones of hay and manure dust. When the old boy approached behind his heifers, huffing with his big head swaying, the girls heighed away. The skinniest buffalo heifer, always hungry and lagging, sometimes missed the hint that he was close, and he slammed his front hooves and horned her butt good. She galloped past her sisters. Once they scattered off to the hay rack in the middle of the barnyard, and she to the wooded lane outside it, he took over the fence, but stopped, aware of the boy.

He chewed, stopped, blew steam, and shifted his feet.

The boy studied him, this 2,000 pound animal with fat horns inserted gingerly between the boards fresh from the lumberyard. The bull licked wafers of un-baled alfalfa into its mouth, the whites of his eyes red. Buffalo have calm, gentle eyes often lowered in self deprecation at their domination of the land, unless they are spooked, scary. Farmers used “scary” reflexively, meaning having fear and causing fear. Both were true in this standoff at the sparkling new, wood fence.

The boy watched the yard, squatting at the fence within feet of the bull, the two buffalo heifers leaving their rack and joining the third outside the barnyard in the lane, looking back at their leader, seeming concerned for his safety. In his hand the boy held a tough cob of yellow corn.

He extended the corncob to him, inch by inch, over minutes.

Hot steam from the great trembling animal’s snout wetted his red knuckles as he crouched and extended the cob to its muzzle. The bull buffalo took it. Then with his free hand, the boy scratched his bushy forehead, and the bull reared in terror, taking the boards with his horns, exploding the fence up in the air like kindling, with clunks and smashes. The boy fell back on his hands, freaked out.

“Easy, Jesus Christ!” He rolled and jumped up.

Huge gray spikes bristled and slowed the boards rolling in musical clunks over frozen manure. The bull was gone into the lane, the heifers ahead of him, all spooked.

The boy scooped the boards back up to the base of the cedar posts to deal with later, pulled on his leather choppers, and ran around the barn and barnyard to check on his animals, on their spook level, hoping they were done, show was over, they wouldn’t break anything else. Nothing stops a buffalo.

While barbed wire fence on iron posts lined the lane, ancient oak trees shrouded it too, in some spans absorbing wire into their trunks. The boy hustled alongside the lane, tiptoeing and searching for the shadowy animals, cooing, “Easy, guys. Easy, guys.”

He crept through the tall grass outside the barbed strands. “Where are you, guys? You okay? Come on.”

Shadowed before him, the bull emerged behind a thick oak, walked past and puffed.

“Gah!” the boy yelped. The bull started again and dashed with shivering rump muscles directly into the opposite fence, stretched it mightily and shook tree branches. Then it tore diagonally into his side of the lane, and hammered the fence once, twice, and with the sickening moan of a piano knocked over onstage, it snapped barbed wires whose tension drop made a wowing tremolo.

The bull thundered free with heifers behind him up the hill of alfalfa straight into the west wind, their toy tails high and bobbing.

“Jesus God!” he yelled. “No. No. Easy. Shit-t-t.”

“Shit,” he hollered, emerged from the bushes onto the grassy road, and ran back to the farmhouse to get his dad.

This is the creative process at its nut. It’s a bull in the chute. It grabs you in your vasovagal nerve, at your sphincter; it bosses you around, and makes you its minion. You must answer, Theo. Even when you’re not hauled down to ground by your nether regions, and you can’t feel the cramps of creation, you have to pound through until you can span the whole chute, and catch the bull. This is a note to myself to pay attention.