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Robert Barron column: Sometimes you just find yourself in smelly situations

Few things strike up as many memories for me than the smell of cow poop.
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Robert's column.

Few things strike up as many memories for me than the smell of cow poop.

When I was just a youngster, an old farmer who operated a dairy farm across the street from where I lived paid me $10 a week to come by every day after school and shovel up the cow dung that built up in the long concrete trench behind the shackled bovines in the barn during the day.

While $10 a week doesn’t seem like much pay for such a task these days, keep in mind that this was 50 years ago when I was just 10 years old, so the pay was a lot for me at the time.

It was smelly, messy work and I suffered the indignity more than once of having a cow poop directly on my back as I cleaned up the mess behind her.

I remember walking home to supper after work and meeting my mom, who passed away last month, and she would be standing there with a garden hose ordering me to strip to my underwater and prepare to get a soaking before I was allowed to enter the house.

I can’t recall what would happen to my discarded clothes during these run-ins with my mother, which were common, but if she had anything to do with it, the clothes likely went up in flames, never to be worn again.

At the time, I thought mom was being more than a little unreasonable, but I get it now as an adult.

I don’t even allow kids in my house with their shoes on, so I don’t see myself being overjoyed if any of them came running in my home covered in cow dung.

Even when I wasn’t shovelling up the cow poop, I still managed to find my way into the middle of it anyway.

During the summer months, the cows were let out into the many acres of fields that the farmer owned at the time (it’s all built up with housing and shopping malls these days) where they would munch on grass all day until they were given grain in the evenings after they were rounded up and brought back the barn.

I was responsible for rounding them up each day and I regularly walked across several fields before I finally came across the herd. They were well practiced with the routine and would start to meander toward the barn when they saw me coming.

After walking for up to an hour to find them, I would often hitch a ride on a cow’s back for the journey to the barn.

The cows were quite tame and used to me (and I weighed a lot less than I do these days) so they didn’t seem to mind me hopping up on their backs for the trip.

I often tell people that I rode cows for years before I ever got on a horse.

But one day, the usual ride didn’t turn out so well.

The herd and I were slowly plodding along next to a fence that marked the boundary to a neighbouring farm and, unlike the farm where I worked that only had dairy cows, the one next door also had bulls for a breeding program.

A bull was trotting along parallel with my herd on his side of the fence and I noticed some of the cows were getting excited with the presence of a male member of their species.

Then the one I was on began bucking, something that I hadn’t experienced before among the usually placid cows, and I went flying through the air and ended up coming straight down on top of a pile of cow poop.

So I had to endure another hosing down by my mother that evening, and she commented with a shake of her head that she had no idea how I could have gotten cow dung on the inside of my clothing.

But the most egregious incident, the one after which my mother insisted, unsuccessfully, that I find some other, less smelly, kind of work, happened shortly after that.

I was riding my pedal bike near the holding pen for all the cow poop at the rear of the barn, from which people would come from all over to get dung to use as fertilizer, and my rear tire slipped on something slimy and I toppled into the holding pen on by back (fortunately).

I was on top of the dung, but I was slowly sinking with every movement I made in an effort to free myself and, soon, my head was pretty much submerged except for my nose, mouth and eyes.

I began desperately calling out for the farmer before I finally slipped completely into the dung and, sensing the fear in my voice, he came running pretty quick.

Then I had to wait until he finished a spasm of laughter at my plight before he finally got around to pulling me out.

Needless to say, I was completely covered in poop from head to toe, and I heard my mother yelling at me the minute I came into sight on my bike at the end of the driveway.

The hose came out one again and I had to listen to my mom asking me why can’t I get a normal job, like mowing grass or washing cars, like her friends’ sons.

It was interesting times and I chuckle to myself every time I catch a whiff of cow poop.