I was at the Way-Out-West paddock with my father, and I was as young as I can remember being. It had been a day in a long sequence of wet days, and I was wearing improper shoes and an improper coat because improper is simply what I always seemed to do.
I do not remember what had brought us to these designated pregnant cow barns, or why I was with my father at all on a workday. Did he want to show me this? Did he think I would enjoy it? I just remember that I had wound up here, and that my feet were cold and wet, and I was watching a birth happen right in front of me, separated by only metal fence and food chain.
The cow was very large and oily brown, pacing the paddock in a large circle, her breath flowing out of her nostrils like a ghost. A handful of men stood in the center of her circle, waiting. She seemed brilliantly aware of all of us, her eyes stretched so wide I could see the whites of them from where I stood a dozen feet away.
The waiting seemed to last forever, the cow’s feet catching and sinking into the same mud my own feet were catching and sinking in. But before I could notice that it had started, a sack of long brown legs tumbled out behind her.
And then, all within the same moment: the sack popped, the mother cow moved to meet her young, and the men pushed her aside to grab the calf. The men put the calf immediately into a blue tub, and the cow into a trailer. I knew, even then, the former was destined to live many miles away and be raised as stock, and the latter was moments away from moving back to the milking barns next door. In these barns, men would harvest the milk that had just then begun biologically producing for the cow’s calf so we can, instead, sell it to ours.
I wanted to hold my father’s hand as we walked back to his white pickup, but I didn’t. The sound of the mother cow’s cry followed us home.
•
Veblen, South Dakota, circa 1960–’94, was best known for its cheese factory. Resident Alfred Tobkin had purchased the Veblen Home Creamery in 1945, where he dealt also with eggs, poultry, wool, and scrap iron. Tobkin and his sons switched to producing only cheese in 1969 after a regional decline in farm-separated cream. By the 1980s, the company’s operation and production had doubled to over three million pounds of cheese annually. A cheese distribution route was established, servicing one hundred and fifty stores over three states. It won the top award in the state for cheese four times, and by the time the ’90s came with their acid-wash jeans and windbreakers, the plant had been expanded twice to keep up with demand.
But at this point, milk production sank exponentially in the Dakotas. The small family dairy farms that were most prevalent in the state were outdone by the “happy cows” in California corporate dairies. Without affordable local access to milk, the cheese factory was unable to continue producing, and it left Veblen in 1994. Many saw this as a kind of end. A kind of end that could not be repaired.
But if it was milk production that was needed, then milk would be produced.
Multi-Community Cooperative Dairy (MCC Dairy) in Veblen came together in 1997, backed by nearly forty shareholders, including my father. The dairy cooperative built its barns on borrowed land from the local Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Indian tribe, trading initial trust land for a $40,000 interest. The original goal was to milk sixteen hundred cows, but this projection ramped up in stages. By the time the cooperative opened in 1998, MCC housed nearly five thousand dairy cows in three barns — forty-five hundred in the two main milking barns and roughly five hundred pregnant heifers rotating through the third Way-Out-West barn. All together, these numbers made MCC the largest dairy operation in the state of South Dakota.
And all because of mavericks like my father.
All because of the mavericks born at Way-Out-West.
•
The term maverick, a noun, has two distinct meanings. And these meanings vary according to species:
1: an unorthodox or independent-minded person; one who does not go along with a group or party. An individualist.
2: an unbranded range animal; especially: a motherless calf.
The word has a history, as all words do. But the etymology of maverick does not come from a Greek or Latin term recycled through time; rather, maverick was born from a name.
Samuel A. Maverick, a nineteenth-century south-Texas lawyer, was offered four hundred cattle by a client in the 1860s to settle a $1,200 debt. Maverick had no use for the cattle, so he left them unbranded and allowed them to wander relatively unsupervised. Neighboring stockmen took advantage of Maverick’s carelessness and seized stray cattle and branded them as their own. Maverick’s name became synonymous with such unbranded livestock, as well as with the people who saw an opportunity to seize them.
Words are interesting in the way they are built, in the way they come to be, in the way they bend and swallow and cunningly disguise their roots. The term cattle, for example, has its etymological roots in the Middle English chattel, meaning property. First referring to property like real estate, but later meaning human property. Slave property. Chattel, slave, and the less common bondman and thrall are all synonyms for a person held in servitude by another.
It’s strange how words aren’t as commonly discriminated against for their lineage the way people are — the way animals are — when it is words that build us. It is language we speak or bellow that so shapes our foundations, our perspectives.
•
You can identify their houses by the boots. The pairs stand in lines on the front stoops and porches, their soles caked in the customary mix of mud and manure.
You’ll never know for sure just how many bodies each of these houses hold. With feedings and milking required around the clock, including weekends and holidays, never is everyone home together. This schedule may sometimes allow the owners of these houses to double their occupancy, two people on opposite schedules rotating shifts on a bed.
There are few other places besides these houses where the dairy workers will congregate during their off hours. One is Grobe’s, where you may see them waiting in line to wire money home to Mexico or to buy calling cards to reach their families. Another is the abandoned tennis courts in the summer, where they’ll often play soccer.
Which is exactly where I spent many of my nights in middle and high school, protected by the dark. My best friend Mariana and me, leaning against her Ford Explorer with Antonio and Carlos.
I don’t know exactly when Mariana and Antonio became “a thing.” The earliest memories I have of them together were in seventh grade. We were twelve, and he was at least thirty. But the age gap never felt like the main reason why Mariana kept this part of her life desperately hidden from her family, from her mother. The greater divide was always that he was a Mexican worker and she was a white girl — the worse crime.
Once Mariana obtained her learner’s permit at fourteen, and free reign of her mother’s Ford Explorer along with it, the pair of us spent night after night driving through Veblen’s streets, waiting for the sun to go down when it would be safe to meet Antonio. Most of these nights, I’d be left to stare quietly at Antonio’s friend Carlos, who came with him for many of the same reasons I came with Mariana. We were lost followers, powerless to our leaders.
“Mariana, how much longer?” I hollered behind Carlos to where Mariana leaned against Antonio and his teal green pickup, spending their time that evening in equal parts make out and argument in broken Spanglish.
“God, just hold on,” she said. “Talk to Carlos.”
Carlos perked up at his name and nodded at me. Again. “Yes, talk to Carlos.”
“Please go away,” I said out loud, because I knew he wouldn’t understand me.
He laughed, smiled, and took another sip of his beer.
This was never what I pictured my youth would be, when I was even more of a child and daydreamed images of first dates and first cars. But this was my reality, and the reality was that I came to know these men. Know them and yearn to protect them.
•
There are so many faces. Black faces and white faces and brown faces and tie-dye faces. Hair swirls on their foreheads in the shape of a heart, giving off a notion that love lives here, right between the eyes.
These faces watch you in a way only they can, their heads hovering steady and parallel to your body. Their legs moving equal to yours, keeping the space between you static. You cannot gain an inch until their space is used up, their backs trapped against the wall. That space then travels into their eyes, making them grow.
I spent years of my youth with these calves, perfecting our dance. Working at the Shortfoot Calf Ranch — where the calves born at Way-Out-West were raised — was my first job when I turned thirteen. Shortfoot is home to nearly fifteen hundred heifer calves at any given time, separated into three distinct age groups, from newborn to upwards of fifteen months old. When they reach this age, what is considered by the industry to be reproductive maturity, the calves move on to a future based on their sex — shipped to a dairy in need of “production replacements.”
The bull calves never make it to Shortfoot. They’re sold to beef farms at birth, raised to twelve hundred pounds, and then sent to slaughter.
My job at Shortfoot was to keep track of the calves as they moved through these growth stages. To, on every Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning in the front office, cut, paste, and transplant their ear tag numbers into spreadsheets. My fingers flew atop the surface of the keypad, typing five-digit number after five-digit number — 78451 to Barn 7, 74092 to Barn 18. Erase 79032, because she was dead. She was lying on the ground now, in a pile of gangly unsure legs, just outside of the barn door waiting for the weekly pickup.
I knew so little about these calves — know so little. Nothing but where they were housed, where they were moved from, the date they arrived. From the moment their ears were tagged, these animals became entries on an inventory.
The barns and enclosures where these calves lived were organized in neat and tidy rows behind where I worked, behind the main office at my desk. Concealed and out of sight, it was easy to forget the numbers stood for bodies. For lungs and for hearts.
•
I don’t remember a world where the dairies didn’t exist. I don’t remember a life where my father wasn’t on the phone, talking about milk prices and feed, listing off quantities and expenses and yields.
I remember when Veblen West was built, the original MCC barn site, more than I remember Veblen East, even though I was much older when the latter was erected. This is because Veblen West was a quarter mile from the edge of a piece of fenced in grassland that was a part of my elementary school’s playground. When Veblen West was put up, our landscape changed forever. The large metal buildings blocked our view of the rest of South Dakota beyond us, our view of the Coteau des Prairies that towered over our western edge. And, when the wind was just right, the dairy bathed us in the smell of manure. The “smell of money.”
Money is what these barns raked in by the truckload. Very quickly, the original goal of resurrecting our deceased cheese industry was eclipsed by the realization that these dairy barns could create something better — these barns in particular, because these barns were special. Rick Millner, MCC’s manager and my father’s best friend, was doodling on a bar napkin one night and ended up inventing the Low Profile Cross Ventilated (LPCV) dairy barn. Until this barn was created, high capacity dairy barns would use the popular system of ventilating from end to end. LPCV barns, instead, feature large fans installed along one side that suck air through damp lattice panels on the other side. The system keeps barns fifteen degrees cooler during the summer than conventional barns, and the added insulation of the system allows the cows to also stay ten to twelve degrees warmer during the winter.
As a result of these dairy barns, Veblen, for the first time since the ending of the cheese factory, became revolutionary — a place to see. The design received the “Dairy Industry Leader Award” in 2008. Charter busses full of dairy executives from as far away as Russia and South Korea came in their business suits and tried to use their useless BlackBerrys in our deep dead zone and shuffled their shined shoes through our South Dakota mud. They took profuse notes and photographs.
These men, Rick and my father and the other collection of revolutionaries who made up the MCC board of directors, were changing the face of the worldwide dairy industry from the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. Or, at least, they got to take the credit.
•
I’ve always wondered about the term search party. Just how, exactly, the word party wound up included. Nine times out of ten, party carries with it a connotation of fun.
We were fifteen when, under the cover of darkness, Mariana and I drove through the MCC campus searching for José while Mariana’s older sister, Mia, stayed back in case he came home. Mia and José had been together for close to two years at this point. Mia, who was significantly older than her sister — nearly fifteen years older — had enough safety in that fact alone to be open about her own relationship with one of the dairy workers. But the whispers and the murmurs remained. The community’s consensus about the wrongness of her choices still followed her. Nonetheless, they moved in together. They got engaged. They imagined their future. And when José didn’t come back from his shift that day, Mia, understandably, panicked. It was very easy to think the worst when your partner is living life undocumented in America.
Mariana and I decided to park and search inside. Up to that point, I had only seen MCC’s milking barns from the highway as I drove past. I may have taken a tour with my father when it first opened, but I would have been much too young to remember it. Mariana, however, seemed to know exactly how to get in. She led me to a side door that opened into a metal staircase. After climbing a couple of floors, we exited onto an observation deck that looked out over the milking room.
A group of cows was just filing into the large circular room, with a worker in the center waiting for the animals to fill all the stalls so he could attach the robotic pumps to their udders. It was eerie to watch — everyone, both animal and man, so accustomed to this routine they seemed almost bored. Or unalive.
The worker we saw through the window wasn’t José, so we continued on out to the long barns. The garage-like door to one was open halfway, and we crouched down to slither under it. Row upon row of dairy cows stood before us, eagerly sticking their heads into their freshly filled troughs.
“I’m going to go talk to him,” Mariana said, pointing at the worker who was operating the feed truck several feet down the expanse of the barn. I nodded but hung behind — Mariana’s Spanish was getting to the point that I wouldn’t understand any of the conversation.
I walked in front of the nearest row of cows, waiting for them to jump back. But these older cows were much more used to humans than the calves I was familiar with — they all but ignored me. Staring at them, I remembered the birth I had seen so many years ago in the paddock of Way-Out-West next door, and I wondered where that calf lived now. I scanned all the faces, trying to register some recognition among the brown ones. But I could see nothing behind their eyes — nothing distinct to tell them apart.
I heard Mariana running back to me. “They found him!” she said.
But I didn’t look up at her. My eyes were, instead, suddenly locked on a pair of deep black irises. She looked at me so fiercely, I could have sworn she knew my name.
•
In the beginning of its operation, the inhabitants of the Shortfoot Calf Ranch broke free of their enclosures much more often than my father would have liked. Of course, he would have preferred no escapes, but my father is a realist. A realist who has worked with farm animals for much of his life and accounts for unpredictability. But while the occasional jailbreak was to be expected, what was happening at this time felt like an epidemic.
The calves, having slid through wires and slipping past workers’ arms, would wander into neighboring yards and fields. They would travel for miles along the highway. Veblen country-dwellers would step out to their porches in the morning to find gangly three-month-old calves playing with their golden retrievers. Or, at other times, would discover these children standing solitary on the grass and screaming to the sky as if asking for something.
The procedure was always the same. These neighbors would call my father, my father would call the Shortfoot manager, and together they would venture out with their electric cattle prongs to bring their investments back where they belonged.
•
I’ve always been proud of my father, always honored to call him mine. But doing so was easier earlier in the MCC Dairy timeline than it became later. Seemingly just as quickly as the corporation rose to the top of its industry, it sunk down to the very bottom, taking its men along with it.
It all began with suspicions that Rick was stealing funds from the dairy corporation for personal use. In 2002, the South Dakota attorney general’s office executed a search warrant with the intent of finding evidence of grand theft within MCC’s executive board. Although the search came up dry, with no official charges filed against Rick or MCC, irrevocable damage was done. Suddenly, these men no longer appeared to the public as revolutionaries who were going to save our small community from a ghost town fate. Instead, to many, they became men with independent, selfish interests in this massive corporation.
By 2007, MCC was bankrupt — unable to pay business-related bills, or legal fees associated with lawsuits with a past business partner, or fees associated with a staggering number of environmental violations that only continued to grow. The dairy was eventually disbanded and acquired by the state. And despite multiple attempts by the then-MCC board members to reincorporate with new names and titles, the banks that had control over MCC refused to do business with any group that included Rick. His reputation was damaged beyond repair.
But that’s the risk of being a maverick. Driving the ideal of individualism so far that the term morphs into abandoned.
•
It had never really dawned on me that ICE was an abbreviation in the way that FBI and CIA are. I suppose because this was an abbreviation that made a real word — a word that fit the work of the organization so exactly. The bitter coldness required to do what they do.
All I remember about the day was the chaos. A Thursday of my freshman year, the day before Halloween, when our only concerns were our plans for the weekend. The air was cold, but I don’t remember any snow on the ground — a first in a long time for a South Dakota Halloween. Things were looking up.
But then Mariana got a text that morning while we were at school, thirty miles away from everything.
“ICE is in Veblen,” she said to me. “They’re doing a raid at the dairy.”
“Ice?” I asked.
“Immigration,” she said. It looked like she was about to cry. I knew she was thinking about Antonio. About José. About Carlos. About their friends. About ours.
We stayed close to each other and to Mariana’s phone throughout the day, waiting for updates. “Mia got José out,” she whispered to me in Algebra. “They’re hiding him at her place.” She was relieved when she said it, but I know that wasn’t the person she was waiting to hear from.
The news had spread to the other students, too, and we had to endure their bullheaded, ill-informed comments. Mariana, who was never one to hold back from swinging a punch, was eerily quiet, which only seemed to make it worse.
“They’re saying it was Harry Williams. That he called ICE in,” Mariana told me in choir. The image of the several-generation’s-old Veblenite’s face flashed in my mind — round and wrinkled and always frowning. It’s a strange sensation — to feel sad, angry, and sick all at once.
It wasn’t until after the final bell and we were on the bus, a full six hours after hearing about ICE, that Mariana was able to call Antonio’s house and learn that he was safe.
But nothing was the same after that. Not Veblen, the dairies, the workers, us. Not after it was made so clear how quickly people can be claimed like unbranded cattle.
•
Language is important — its power looms over every way we live. The words we choose can make us feel big. The words we choose can make us feel small. Sometimes that word is the same — its meaning changing based on what, who, the word is applied to.
Take maverick. The word can be an honor. Prestigious. Reverent. But often only if your place on the societal food chain already dictates such power and distinction.
Because maverick can also mean powerless. Can also mean weak. Can also mean defenseless against any force that strives to seize you. Free for the picking.
Everyone I’ve ever known in my life has been a maverick, I have been a maverick, and our distinction of which maverick has always mattered. Because where we stand always counts for more than who we are.
•
On the first weekend of October in 2013, rain was forecasted for western South Dakota. A rain that would eventually turn into the state’s first snowfall of the season. But suddenly, with no time to brace for its impact, the forecast shifted. This near harmless rainy mix quickly turned into one of the most devastating blizzards in the state’s history — the now infamous Winter Storm Atlas.
Wind gusts reached up to seventy miles per hour. Over the span of three days, upwards of fifty-five inches of snow pummeled the state, with the majority falling in the first twenty-four hours. Life came to a standstill, as no one could leave wherever they were on Friday evening until Monday morning. Nearly everyone was rendered powerless.
What made this blizzard so devastating, what gives it its myth, was its effect on the South Dakota livestock industry. Being early October, animals did not have their winter coats and were still out in their summer pastures. Since the storm manifested so fast and without warning, ranchers were unable to bring in their stock. It was the perfect storm.
The final tally was that forty-three thousand cattle, sheep, horses, and bison died, either from exposure or suffocation, as many animals were buried alive by the quick and heavy snowfall.
The economic damage inflicted by Atlas was such that it was predicted a whole generation of young ranchers could be lost from one night of snow, as family herds can take upwards of fifteen years to rebuild even for established ranchers. It would be nearly impossible for new ranchers of the time to recover, earning the storm its nickname: The Cattleman’s Blizzard.
I drove home from college in the Black Hills two weeks later for the Native American Day long weekend, and the scene I encountered was something out of a post-apocalyptic film. All along western South Dakota’s stretch of Highway 212, the lifeless bodies of cattle were piled in lines, waiting to be collected by whoever was responsible for the daunting task.
It felt so wrong, just driving past the animals without stopping. Like I was cruising through a cemetery, crushing headstones with my tires.
By the time I reached the town of Faith, over one hundred miles east of Spearfish, I was crying. In the year that I had been gone from Veblen and had taken this statewide highway back and forth, I had grown attached to the pasture cattle along the western end of 212 as my roadside companions. I loved to watch them, free in the grass, no metal bars holding them back, calves allowed to stay by their mothers’ sides and weave through their legs. They were so foreign to the cows I had known in my youth, yet familiar. Losing these animals felt like losing something else along with them. If only I could find the right word.
Editor’s Note: Names have been changed to protect the identities of those involved.
•••
Caitlin Hill is a writer from South Dakota. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Midwestern Gothic, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. Excerpts from her memoir-in-progress, The Veblen Effect, have received a notable entry in The Best American Essays 2018 and have been longlisted for the First Pages Prize at the Stockholm Writers Festival. Caitlin earned her MFA from the University of Idaho and currently teaches writing at Black Hills State University. Learn more at caitlinhillside.com.