For Those in the Back

Adventures in cow-herding, a self-diagnosis, and even an actual, bona fide update

Dear friends,

It’s a rainy Sunday morning here in our bustling verdant metropolis. The weather is damping down what would otherwise be some very buoyant early summer energy. I can almost feel the frustration amongst Kyiv’s many bikers, runners, and walkers, who find themselves often beating the sandy trails covering the cluster of islands at the heart of the city. This rainy June reminds me of June 2015, 11 years ago, when down in our corner of southern Ohio, hard rains fell every day of the month. They drenched the fields, swelled the streams and rivers, and ruined many a farmer’s corn harvest.

I was particularly attuned to the weather at the time because it was in the thick of my time as a want-to-be farmer. I wasn’t growing any Glass Gem corn that year, or the oilseed pumpkins I had brought back from Austria the year before, as it was to be a year of much transition and movement; but I had entered into a short-term beef venture with my former landlord, and together we were raising a young steer in the fields down by the river. Clyde was the name we gave this gentle beast of black-and-cream fur. We had bought him in the late winter at the Athens Livestock Auction—the only time I’ve had chance to go. Ever since, Clyde had been living in the little barn near the boxcars which was very soon to burn down on account of a heat lamp for some young piglets. Following this, Bob, my partner in the venture and a retired train man, would make a place for Clyde and his pair of mules to stay dry in the boxcars.

The call came at work. I was helping to disassemble a chimney on the Cantinos’ house in one of the old, classy suburbs just outside of town. That day we were preparing to patch the roof. It came in the form of a voicemail, wrapped in Bob’s sweltering backwoods drawl: “Hey there Big Ben. Clyde’s on the run, buddy. Gonna be needin’ yer help. APD (Athens Police Department) got a call there was a loose cow over by the ball fields. That’s our boy, all right. Welp, you know what to do. Alright, we’ll see ya.” Click.

Bob didn’t seem particularly concerned, but I just imagined our young ox running down a couple of Little League ball players, tossing them into the air for sport. I told Grant, the lead carpenter on the job, what was happening, and he told me to scram. He grew up on a farm in west Pennsylvania and knew it couldn’t stand to wait. He lit a cigarette and wished me luck as I threw my tool belt into the trunk and raced away.

I drove like white lightning down the famously scarred Armitage Road, zipping over and around the legion of pot holes, which were quite close to sending that ribbon of flagging tarmac into an all-out rout. I skidded into my parking spot near the metal pole barn and flung myself onto a black bike, which stood waiting faithful in the rack. Then back down the road a spell, left onto the access road, across the train tracks, and onto the smooth asphalt bike path. I turned my nose towards town and pedaled furiously. I felt the wind whipping across my face and wondered what was to be our fate.

I crossed the bridge over the Hocking and passed the west side of town on my left. I saw the little peach tree that Jaymee had planted back in high school, still struggling along to make a life for itself there; it later died, to tell the truth. I took the right hand curve at the Y and saw the green fields open up before me. The research meadow covered in yellow and purple. Art’s circle garden ringed with tall clacking bamboo. The driving range smattered with polos. The community garden, populated by a handful of toiling folks. And the ball fields beyond.

From what I could see, no cow in the ball fields themselves. There was the first good sign. But there were a few games on: the season seemed to be already in full swing. Larry’s Dawg House would be slammed with muddy, sweaty, ice-cream smeared faces in but a few hours. I bounced down the rough access road to the community garden and gained West State Street. As I turned onto its well-worn cement surface, hanging right, my eyes caught sight of my quarry. Two police cars, a gaggle of cops, and Bob; Clyde stood eating from a rubber feed bin a little ways away, unbothered. A short pink rope hung from the his neck and lay in the grass like a sunning snake.

“Hey there Big Ben! Good thinkin’ with the bike, that’ll be handy.” I dismounted and shook hands with my grinning, tousled business partner.

“How’d he get out, Bob?”

“Oh, Christ,” he chuckled. “Tree came down up on the hill field. All this damn rain, there’s trees coming down every which way up ‘er. We got a mess of work to do after we get him home, Big Ben.”

“How do you reckon we’ll get him back? That’s a pretty long way. Over a mile.” The policemen leaned in to listen to our plan.

“We was just discussing. I’ve got my Gator here, and you’ve got your bike. These gentlemen here offered to help us as far the bridge, but I’m not sure we’ll even need ‘em. Once he’s on the bridge we’re golden, doncha reckon?”

I wasn’t so sure, but a lack of confidence here and now seemed ill-placed. “Sure, Bob. I think it won’t be too much trouble.”

“Trouble is this ground is so damn wet, I don’t think the cruisers’ll be too much help. He’s probably not gonna stick to the roads, know what I mean?”

“Yeah. Well, let’s see. Not much use in waiting, is there?”

“Right. Now, Big Ben, you just keep this in mind. I got that rope on him when I first gave him his sweet feed, and he didn’t mind me gettin’ close. We’d be in good shape if we got that rope tied up to the Gator, but now I reckon he’s too spooked. But if you get th’ chance, grab that rope, y’ hear?”

I nodded. Clyde had finished licking up the molasses-covered oats and was nosing the empty rubber tub out of frustration. It was time. The cops got in their cars. Bob revved up his Gator. I gripped my handlebars. His furry ears turned furiously, listening, sensing a change in us. “Let’s go, Clyde,” I hollered. Our little cowboy convoy formed up on his leeward side and he began to walk, slowly, back towards the farm. Bob on one side, the cruiser behind, and me on the far side from Bob. We had him walking. But then he started running.

Clyde felt that his recently won freedom was in jeopardy. And he wasn’t ready to give it up so easy. He saw his opportunity and took it. He began to lope out ahead of us, and before we could all catch up to his new speed, he busted a sharp left, out across a soggy emerald field—exactly where the cruiser couldn’t drive. I pedaled hard to keep up with him, and I could hear the Gator off somewhere to my right. The field was juicy, and sucked at our tires. He ran straight through an empty ball field, but on the far side of this was my nightmare: an active T-ball game full of uncoordinated and unsuspecting kids. I took to whooping and hollering at him from the left side to push him away from the game, and doubly to make the kids notice that unforeseen danger was looming. I started to hear shouts and screams from up ahead as the situation suddenly dawned on them. The kids took to flight.

Clyde trampled an empty second base. The kids were running for the dugouts. Parents were filming with their phones. I was doing my best to cowboy the rogue beast with only my voice and presence. He started to curve a bit right, back towards the bridge, but I could sense his resistance. He pretty well knew that that was where he didn’t want to go. Bob got behind him at his 4:00 o’clock and we started to push him on. That particular memory of hooting at him from my bike as we raced across the June-green fields towards the bike path are deeply etched into my cortex.

We reached the bike path and made a lot of progress rather quickly. The thickets to the left, which separated the path and the river, were too dense for him to break through. I stayed behind him, whooping, and Bob was on his right, a nice dense chunk of growling steel for him to feel hemmed in by. We ran him that way right up to the river, and got him on the bridge. By this time I was feeling pretty hopeful that the worst of it was behind us.

A couple cyclists stopped on the far side of the bridge and quickly got off the path. I waved at them to move way back, and get further out of the way, or they’d spook him. They did their best, but just as we got across the bridge, the cunning creature noticed a hole in the briars and launched himself through it, down the berm to the right—straight at the swirling muddy Hocking. There was nothing to do but drop my bike and run after him. The path was too steep and narrow for Bob’s vehicle, nor was he in any shape to run after on foot.

“I’ll go up ahead, Big Ben!” He yelled at me from his 4x4. “Keep pushing him, we’ll catch him in the field!” I could hear the shouting from behind me, from up on the old railroad berm. But I had entered a new world—the steaming Ohio jungle, moist with a month of rain, fragrant from the crushed plants ahead, thick with gnats and mosquitos and flies and the swishing black and white tail of Clyde up ahead, plunging through briar patch after briar patch. The blackberries were filling out just then and were starting to turn midnight blue. Everything was wet and green and hazy. Thorns grabbed at my exposed legs. I followed him and his wake of crushed foliage down a steep hill towards the river. My eyes grew wide with the thought of him jumping in and swimming away. But I could do nothing against that possibility—he was much faster than me on foot, and we were in unmarked, unmown jungle. Without a trail, I was helpless in the density of that exploding forest. So I kept following.

My eyes began to fixate on the little pink tale which dragged behind him. It was short and seemed to taunt me. There were only five feet or so dangling and bouncing behind his rear legs. But I felt it was my only hope. I watched for an opportunity.

He turned away from the brown river of his own acord and started to work his way back in the right direction. As he picked his way back up the slope, his purpose unclear, he slowed as he pushed through the thick, grabbing brambles. I surged forward and grasped the bit of rope, slick with mud and covered in burrs. He sensed my presence and launched himself up the hill and through the brush. My left hand latched on too and I clamped down with all my force. He began moving faster than I could run, and I was pulled forward and down, and found myself sliding over the ground, across the rough forest bottom, mere feet behind his stamping hind legs. I flew after him through the brambles and felt my stomach weeping. But I had no choice but to hang on for dear life. He burst through the brush onto a mown path and Bob was there, waiting, hollering, laughing, cheering on my brazen heroics.

Once on the mown path, Claude really got to running. And perhaps, spooked by Bob’s Gator, his bowels loosened as he ran, and I found my stomach and chest suddenly well-lubricated by excrement. Holding onto him at a near gallop became too brutal and I had to let go. I lay, face down, breathing hard, in the fragrant grass of the path, and heard Bob drive up from behind, hooting with excitement. “Hell yeah, Big Ben! You almost had him! That was a hell of a ride! Yer sure earning those steaks, buddy! Now, let’s stay on him, we just gotta get him tied up to this Gator. Take a minute there, Big Ben. Don’t get up too quick. Oh yeah, you’ll be feelin’ it tomorrow, that’s fer sure. That’s it, take a little rest. We got him now.”

But we didn’t have him. In the few minutes I needed to rest, we lost track of him completely, and Clyde hid himself well amongst the towering silver maples and cottonwoods. He disappeared into some thicket, up against the berm of the old railroad, upon which they had laid the bike path. He got himself real quiet and waited, hoping we’d drive on past. It was a tense half-an-hour. Bob parked himself at a little rise in the field and watched and waited. I picked my way through the brush and looked for any sign—some fur, some hoof print, some crushed plants. Nothing.

I climbed up the berm to see if I couldn’t see down from above. At the top, I popped out of the forest, surely a sight to see—my shirt torn, my legs shredded by thorns, my chest covered in the green-brown of fresh manure, my eyes full of fire. A little way down the path there was a grey-haired gentlemen with a walking stick enjoying the muggy forest air. “Excuse me!” I hissed to him. “Have you seen a loose cow anywhere along here?”

His eyes twinkled just looking at me. “Well, yes, I did, young man. Black and white, right? I can just make him out down there, in that little thicket of trees.” He pointed down the berm. And there he stood, motionless save his heavy breathing, waiting. I thanked the man and ran further down the path, to a break in the trees, waving furiously at Bob who sat in the field below. He saw me and I pointed towards Clyde. He started rolling over slowly, as stealthily as the Gator allowed.

The little thicket was good for hiding. But it wasn’t good for escaping. In fact we were able to close him in there like a cage. He turned away from us and tried to run, but the big trees and the steep berm held him firmly like a cattle run. I grabbed his rope, now covered in digested grass and sweet feed, and pulled him back towards Bob, who parked the Gator at the opening of the thicket. We just barely had enough slack to get him tied to the cage of the vehicle, as low down as we could. And then Bob put it in a low gear and dragged the poor cow from his refuge.

We drove him back to the evening field where the barn would soon smolder, and Bob would have to set it ablaze a second time to clean up the charred detritus. Clyde fought the whole way, pulling this way and that against the thick leash, wild like a criminal on his way to death row on false charges. In fact, that was pretty much the long and short of it. We set him free in the field and the mules came over to see. His ears flattened against his head in defeat. Bob gave him some more sweet feed from a sack in the bed of the Gator. We stood at the fence with a foot on the bob wire strand and watched him eat.

“Boy, that was fun. You got a future in the cow-wrangling business, Big Ben, tell you what. Reckon you’ll want to get cleaned up, Big Ben. Want a ride to your bicycle?”

“Sure, Bob.” My adrenaline was starting to flag. I didn’t have a lot of power left. I began to sense with dread the immense amount of poison ivy oil smeared across my chest, stomach, and legs, which would soon cause me to break out in a brutal rash, just in time for my wedding day. He dropped me at my bike, which I rode back slowly, watching the gentle waving of the oak and maple crowns above. I parked it in the rack next to the pole barn. My body was sore and I could think of nothing but a hot shower. I walked over to the farm house where I had lived the year before, and from which we had only recently moved out. Janice was coming out of the house as I walked up and she looked at me in shock. “Ben! Oh my god, Are you okay?! Have you been chasing Clyde?”

“Hi, Janice. I’m fine, just need to go home and shower. We just got him back. How’d you know?”

“My friend was down at the garden working. They filmed you on your bike chasing Clyde down by the ballfields.” She started giggling uncontrollably. “Look!”

Sure enough, a low-res phone video of me on my bike, corralling Clyde towards the bike path. A video for the ages. A day for the books. I drove home, to the Woodcock Nature Preserve, cleaned my body and dressed my wounds. I lay down and slept soundly to the sound of birdsong out the window, and an ancient Pete Seeger singing on Helen and David’s TV downstairs.

---

Well, I know this isn’t exactly about Ukraine or Kyiv or my life here. But I’ve been struggling this year to write about my experiences here in general, and that’s why my letters have just about dried up.

Still, for some reason, quite a lot of you are still subscribed, and still paying subscribers, even. And I’ve been feeling awful guilty that I haven’t had anything to show, for you folks especially.

Fact is, I’ve been writing. A whole heck of a lot. But it’s been tricky to write about Ukraine. I played around with journalism, but it’s not really my thing. It’s too hard, too unnatural to pull myself out of the story.

But I know that you’re not here for journalism. You’re here for stories, for experiences, for thoughts—for whatever I have to share. I can see that because of your silent patience and dedication. Thank you for that.

The truth of the matter is that I am a seasonal animal. In my most productive artistic form, I follow the inspiration of the moment. My best form of discipline is noticing what is inspiring me at a given moment and encouraging myself to follow that—rather than to only do what I had planned, or what I had hoped, would inspire me.

For me, discipline is at its most powerful and effective when it aligns itself with a genuine inspiration—which can come from anywhere, or anything, or anyone. And it rarely comes whence I’d expect.

I have often thought, actually, of this particular moment—clinging to Clyde’s little bit of rope, being dragged and dashed through that sweltering late-June forest—as a wonderful metaphor for my own creativity. You never know what’ll bring the inspiration, but when it comes, it’s a heck of a job to just hang on and see where the thing leads. And it may well not be comfortable, but it is exhilarating.

---

A bit of an update, finally, especially for those in the back:

The school year is nearly finished. I’ll be done at the end of June with my third year as the English Department of the French Lyceum.

I’m planning to return for a fourth year. I continue to enjoy the work and feel I’m getting better.

I have also been working as a private English teacher for a whole year now, teaching adult students at an IT company here in Kyiv.

I’m still recovering from a knee injury which happened at the end of September. While crossing a tram track with my bike, I slipped and fell thanks to the rail being wet from rain.

Somehow, my knee came down onto the track itself, with the full weight and force of my body, and the kneecap was gouge through and smashed apart.

I went in for an emergency surgery that night, which was only somewhat successful at clumping all the bits of bone back together in relatively correct places.

Now I’m fully functional, and even was dancing quite intensely last night at the first iteration of Kyiv’s first festival of traditional music and dance, called Rukh (which means “movement”). But it does from time-to-time hurt, or rather ache, and I’m still recovering the fullness of my athleticism and energy.

That unfortunately was probably the biggest single piece of news this year. It defined the whole school year. But I’m almost through with it being a defining feature of my life, I think.

Another defining element of this year is the fact that, increasingly, things feel rather hopeful here. We have weathered a couple of really nasty, brutal missile and drone attacks recently—as I’m sure you’ve seen. The market which was destroyed at the end of May was a place where we used to walk and buy vegetables and fruit. It was one of the loveliest and truest places in the center of Kyiv, frankly. It was a monstrous thing to destroy it. That neighborhood in general—called Lukianivka—has really taken a pounding of late.

But all this aside, things do feel somehow hopeful. The news from the frontline is all rather good, relatively speaking. Russian advances have slowed to a trickle or been reversed. Russian losses continue to be above 30,000 individuals per month, and over 60% of that are mortalities. I know—a grisly thing to celebrate. But then again, they could just leave and live their lives in their own country, like normal people…

It has been an emotional rollercoaster of a year especially thanks to Washington’s policies, or lack thereof. Actions in Iran have far overshadowed the latest news in Ukraine. Any desire to broker peace has apparently dried up. Sanctions against Russia have been peeled back, even while they materially support Iran. The madness of these interwoven situations have achieved their goal, which is to make me and surely others, too, less cognizant and attentive.

But in spite of that, the Ukrainians are doing increasingly well. Washington’s instability has encouraged Kyiv to be increasingly self-reliant and to focus on its European partnerships. These have their own complexities and difficulties, but Orban’s loss in Hungary and the increasingly public conversation around Ukraine’s EU accession are all positive signs. The defense deals Kyiv signed with Saudi Arabia and other nations near Iran were a massive windfall that no one could have expected. Ukraine is in the process, in my opinion, of emerging as an increasingly self-reliant regional power, whose mil-tech industry will ensure its relevance into the future.

Thanks to my injury and my increasingly successful and busy life as an English teacher, I have had a little less time to focus on music this year. That’s not to say there’s been nothing: I started a country band, organized a handful of big square dance parties, and have continued to perform around Ukraine with Olha. I also helped organize Carpathian Spring this year, a micro-festival in the mountains that just enjoyed its fourth iteration. But the gigs, especially in Kyiv, have been relatively few, and we haven’t recorded anything recently. I’m hoping to change these facts this summer.

What’s brewing for the future? Well, most immediately, I’m preparing myself to go train and compete in the Atlantic Challenge international competition of rowing and sailing. The training will be in France and the competition at the Roskilde Viking Boat Museum in Denmark. So I’m quite excited for that. I’ll be competing on the mixed International team, with folks from around the world.

Afterwards, my only plans are to return to Kyiv and do some traveling here. I have no current plans to reach the States this year. The prices of travel are high, and also I have achieved a solid momentum of improving my Ukrainian language. Achieving fluency is a serious goal for me, and every summer poses a challenges to this. So, perhaps, unless something serious changes, I’ll be Europe-bound for 2026.

Hope you enjoyed this little update and a story from bygone days. Thanks for reading and supporting me from afar!

Benya