A few weeks ago, I moved to Peru to learn Spanish. I have several hours of lessons each weekday with my professor, Marta. Seeing as we’d be seeing a lot of each other in the following months, she and I spent the first day just getting to know each other. She asked why I came here, why for so long, why Spanish.
Marta doesn’t speak English, so I explained to her – in the roundabout way you explain things when your vocabulary in a language is extremely limited – that I had spent my entire adulthood doing what I thought was all I ever wanted, until it wasn’t. I told her how burnt out I’d become, yet how hard it was to walk away. I told her how I was terrified that at 24 y/o the most exciting thing I’d ever do was behind me and that I had no clue what to do next… Sooooo in the meantime, might as well learn another language.
I finished my choppy explanation, feeling like I was all over the place, just like I am in English. She just stared at me. Great, she didn’t understand any of that, I thought.
“Te voy a contar una historia”, she said. I’m going to tell you a story.
The story, from what I understood, went like this:
One day, a teacher and his disciple were walking through the countryside. They came across a small shack, in which lived a large family. The teacher asked the father of the family what they did to make a living, as there were seemingly no industries in the area. The father showed them to the yard, where a skinny cow was tied up. “This cow gives us a few liters of milk each day”, he said. “Some of it we drink, and the rest we exchange for flour and eggs to make bread”. The disciple was dumbfounded as to how they managed to survive this way.
They visited for a while and slept on the floor of the family’s home. Before dawn, as the family was still sleeping, the teacher and his disciple woke up and went to the yard where the cow was tied up. To the disciple’s horror, his teacher pulled out a knife and slit the cow’s throat. They continued home.
A few years later, the disciple returned to the countryside in search of the family. The shack was no longer there, but in its place stood a beautiful home with a garden and a car parked out front. He knocked, and to his surprise, the same man he’d met years ago opened the door. He and his family wore clean clothes and appeared very happy. He told the disciple that (coincidentally) the day after they’d visited years ago, he woke to find his cow dead in the yard.
The man went on to explain that the death of this skinny cow forced them to think of other possibilities. With no money to purchase a new one, they began planting seeds in their yard. At first, they barely grew enough crops to feed themselves. However, with practice and patience they began to harvest more than enough. They sold the excess crops and bought more seeds, expanding their business and building a life for themselves that they had only dreamed of.
The disciple listened in amazement as he finally realized the lesson his teacher had set out to teach (why he slit its throat). That cow, in addition to being their only possession, was the ball and chain that kept them stuck in the same mode of existence year after year.
Martha finished the story, looked at me and said, “Chica, tienes que matar a la vaca” (you have to kill the cow). My throat got real tight.
******
Around the same time that fire season in the U.S. kicked off this year, I moved to South America. My friends are being dispatched to incidents around the country, cutting line in the sweltering heat, hiking ‘til their legs shake, eating MREs, sleeping in the dirt… and I’m not. I’m in South America – unemployed, uncertain, learning a new language, trying to plant some sort of seed.
The end of the 2021 fire season – which I’d decided would be my last – came to a screeching halt. Suddenly the cow that had sustained me for 6 years lay dead at my feet, and I had no idea what I’d do next. All I knew was that staying where I was had stopped being a viable option long ago. The intense friction I felt against my career in fire was trying to tell me something, and I ignored the signals until they screamed.
I knew I no longer wanted my life to comprise of sucking smoke, grinding my body into dust, being away from the people I love for weeks at a time, or regularly wondering whether I had it in me to get up and work another shift like the one we’d just finished.
It wasn’t always like this. My first few fire seasons, I genuinely believed I’d found my thing. I was one of the lucky few –18 years old and would have to look no further. I loved sucking smoke and grinding my body into dust. I loved being away from home for weeks at a time. I loved the way my Nomex would stiffen with salt after days of profuse sweating. I loved cracking jokes with the crew, coping with the way our bodies felt. I loved working deep into the night to tie in a burn. I loved the rush of putting in hot line while fire licked at my skin and singed my eyelashes. I loved the way my bones throbbed in my sleeping bag at night because even laying horizontal was not an adequate form of resting – I needed to melt.
None of that changed overnight. There was no earth-shattering light switch moment. Little by little, pivot by pivot, brief moments where something felt off, accumulating like snow. My body rebelling, my enthusiasm diminishing, panic attacks in my sleeping bag at night that I muffled as best I could so the crew wouldn’t hear. It took days, months, years for the message to grow loud enough.
I spent a long time constructing various narratives to convince myself to stay. I’d come this far. It was plastered all over my resume. I was totally interrupting my character arc. The plot no longer made sense. Who would I be instead? What if the only alternative was sitting at a desk sending too-polite emails about shit I couldn’t even pretend to care about?
It’s tough to walk away from the thing that has dictated every aspect of your life for so long. It’s tough to feel as though you are betraying your younger self – to have everything they’d dreamed of and abandon it. You are witnessing the collapse of so many plans. The slow passing of time between the death of your cow and the first sight of something growing where it once stood. And yet, you owe your past self nothing. You are who you are in this moment only. You cannot live out your days as the handmaiden of your old desires.
I’m still grieving that chapter of my life. I feel like I’m walking in circles through its ruins. “Bittersweet” isn’t the right word. “Bitter” nor “sweet” do the opposing feelings justice. I will think about each of those fire seasons for the rest of my life. They were glorious and excruciating and magical and miserable. I miss it. I think some part of me will always will, despite everything.
“Todos tenemos una vaca”, another thing Martha said. We all have a cow. You hear a fable about a maestro and a vaca and your chest gets tight because of something. Something you’ve continued to feed because although it does not give you much, maybe at one point it did, and old time’s sake is keeping you alive. Something — A false assurance, a relationship, an image, a vague sense of self-worth or control, a story you think other people might want to read…
I believe there is a long enough runway within the bounds of uncertainty to take off. We scrap, adapt, revise… plant and plant and plant, praying to one day walk outside and see some small green thing in the dirt. That’s what I tell myself I’m doing down here. Eventually we harvest every seed. Eventualllllllllly.
Whatever your cow, no one is coming to kill it for you in your sleep. How does it feel to consider doing it yourself? You don’t need more motivation. You know what you want (or at least what you don’t) and probably know what needs to change. It’s scary and hard and it might not immediately make sense, but tienes que matar a la vaca… and if you haven’t been told yet, you have permission.