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of horseshit.
    Our buckets clattering, Bill and I marched up to the edge of the pile. My method was to cradle a bucket in my arms and scrape the side of the manure hill until a mini avalanche filled the bucket. Bill used a shovel to scoop from the very bottom of the pile. Red worms came along with the black dirt, which was warm to the touch. It steamed a little in the chilly night air. Bucket after bucket until we filled the back of the truck. It was our third trip of the day, it was night, and our arms were aching from the schlepping.
    We paused in our bucket filling and noticed the silence. No highway noise, no car alarms or ambulances. The hills unfolded off to the east, little farms marked by a light or two. We were truly in the country.
    Driving away from the stables, the truck’s suspension nearly buckling under the load, I looked back at the massive hill of manure. It looked untouched.
    “Man, Willy’s going to be pissed when he finds out how much manure we loaded into this thing!” I said.
    “Let’s not tell him,” Bill suggested.
    Farther down the road, a fog had rolled in and enveloped the hills that looked out over the East Bay.
    “Well, we’ll just give him some tomatoes or—”
    “Look out!” Bill cried and grabbed the truck’s Oh Shit handle.
    We had almost veered over a cliff. I’m a horrible driver, once almost launching us into the Pacific Ocean while driving along Highway 1. I braked and slowed down and started to really concentrate on the road.
    “God,” Bill said.
    “Sorry,” I muttered, and we fell silent as the truck rattled down the road. With the low visibility, everything suddenly felt treacherous. A strange loneliness filled my heart, and I thought of my mother.
    The road to our ranch in Idaho had been similarly treacherous, and I remembered her story about the day I was born. It was late December, and my parents had hoped to win the New Year Baby contest put on by Les Schwab Tires in Orofino, Idaho. The parents with the first baby born on January 1, 1973, would win a pair of tires and a side of beef. My parents thought they had timed it perfectly, but I was a restless little baby and emerged instead on the snowy night of December 30.
    When my mom tells the story of my birth, which has become part of the popular lore of my family, she paints a colorful picture. There was three feet of snow on the ground, and the truck barely avoided sliding off the steep ravine near the ranch. Then the truck threw a rod, destroying the engine, so they had to hitchhike to the hospital. She always tells the story with a smile, as if it had all been a great deal of fun. But now that I’m an adult, when I hear her story, it sounds dangerous, frightening, cold—distinctly unfun.
    I cracked open the window of the truck to stop the condensation on the windshield and braked slowly around a hairpin turn.
    The country had taken a toll on my mom. She was lonely up there on the ranch. My dad, who eventually went semiferal, would often go on weeks-long hunting trips, leaving my mom to tend to the ranch duties: milking the cow, watering the garden, and locking the duck pen at night. She missed her friends, her exciting life when she had attended be-ins in Golden Gate Park, danced at rock shows, and traveled the world.
    I still regard the country as a place of isolation, full of beauty—maybe—but mostly loneliness. So when friends plan their escape to the country (after they save enough money to buy rural property), where they imagine they’ll split wood, milk goats, and become one with nature, I shake my head. Don’t we ever learn anything from the past? And that’s probably why I avoided rural places and chose to live in the city—but, of course, my modified, farm-animal-populated version of the city.
    The fog broke once we hit the highway. Propelled by the weight of the manure, we swooped down the concrete mainline of Highway 24 back into Oakland with a fine dusting of horseshit trailing behind us. My