It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous place to grow up than on a dairy farm. No farm kid would ever think of it in that way. The farm is just what it is. That you move in and out of 60 head of three-quarter-ton animals on an hourly basis never enters into the equation. The whirling power take-offs, the bull in the bullpen, the stampeding herd of yearling calves, the tractor wheels, the sickle bar, it’s just part of the landscape. Scottie did lose a fingertip.

 

Farm kids, therefore, usually have a higher tolerance for dangerous situations and are less likely to flinch given something out of the ordinary. A normal person might see the acceptance of the risk as foolishly unnecessary, while to the farm boy, what’s the big deal? In fact, a farm kid is as likely to view excessive caution as a hindrance to the acquisition of good fun.  

 

Such was the case with riding in the trunk.

 

Back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, big automobiles had big trunks, and cars could haul stuff. Not every farm could afford a truck, or a pick-up truck, and the car often served such a purpose as hauling eight or more bales of hay in transport to the distant heifer field across the state highway. Farmers knew how to stack hay. They knew how to get the most out of a small space, how to slap the bales together in such a way as the pressed stubble of the grass stems would lock one bale to the bale next to it and make a secure stack, secure even in the open trunk of the car. And often, if the trunk wasn’t full, my brother and I would climb into the open space next to the bales and ride with the trunk hood open as we held the bales. I can still smell the sweetness of the crisp hay.

 

Then there were the times we rode in the trunk with the lid closed. It was like an early training in sensory deprivation, studies of which became all the rage in the ‘70s. To us, my older brother and me, and later too, our sisters a few times (I wonder if they remember?), into the trunk, and, bam, the heavy trunk lid is slammed shut and, trust issues aside, the excitement was on. Of course it is pitch black, more soundproof than the car cab itself, and we were small enough to almost lie down. The coolest thing about riding in the trunk with the lid down is the feeling of the road, the rolling of the landscape, and that little flip of weightlessness achieved when the car goes over a bump, or a culvert, a certain feeling of like being an astronaut in the full blackness of outer space. 

 

This day, Dad was taking a salt lick, a large block of salt, like a one-foot cube of pink salt, to the heifers in the woodland field he rented for next to nothing from the famous baker, Houtman. Cows love salt and they need salt and minerals; even those not yet milking need salt for basic bodily functions. Later, when cows are milking, they drink a lot of water because they are processing their fluids into milk, of course, and they are shedding, or losing, that milk on a daily basis. An average Holstein produces 75 pounds of milk a day. That’s a lot of drinking. They need the electrolytes just like a sweating athlete needs their Gatorade. (I hate Gatorade.)  

 

The salt was in the trunk and my brother and I jumped in and Pop shut the lid and the world was spooky and dark and I liked to keep track where we were on the journey in my head, “Oh yes, that bump is the culvert below the mailbox.” And sometimes the old man put on a little speed just for our benefit and he was flooring it now and I could hear the gravel of Beer Can Alley and felt the full stop just before the clean pavement of the state road. He never took us through town or anything like that and he tried to keep our fun private, as he may have had his own reservations, but he did it anyway, as I think he would have like to have done it himself as a kid, and maybe he did, as those old cars had something called a rumble seat and, as such, shenanigans in the back of the car may have been different in those days, or the same?

 

The ground was dry. It was high summer and little in the way of rain. He drove the car along a dirt field road to the wooded field with the barbed wire fencing tied to tree stumps and dilapidated cedar posts and he stopped the car and popped the lid on the trunk. We climbed out, a little dazed-like and blinking. Pop grabbed the block of salt and carried it over to an iron stake in the ground and he slid the block of salt onto the stake, passing the stake through a center hole pre-formed in the salt block. Cows and calves have strong tongues and when a bovine licks something, what is being licked, a human head, a salt block, it knows it, and so the salt block is secured by the stake against the tongue licking force of the heifers. The earth around the stake was trampled and bare from the sharp hooves which had circled the former salt block.

 

Back in the trunk. The lid closed. The speed equaled. The weightlessness registered, the pupils dilated, the ride fast and over all too soon.

 

Except this time our mother was there.

 

Somehow she knew, and she had waited for our return, and the old man got blue in the face as he had no defense against her pure mother/woman logic and, man, we were sent to house so her more risk-averse countenance could prevail unabated, and that was the last time, for sure, the time with the salt lick, the last time we ever rode in the trunk with the lid closed.