Horizontal Movement 1: 10 White Cows

I should ask Ellen to tell me the story again, but it goes something like this: A man in her neighborhood, back near the Sutep Hills of Chiang Mai, needed to make merit. Making merit, tham boon, is a Thai Buddhist practice of making an offering, usually at a temple, but in other ways as well, of money or other desirable things, as a kind of atonement. Making merit is a way to restore something out of balance, and hence to burn away bad karma, and perhaps even a way to accumulate good karma, which then goes in the karma bank account, of sorts.

So, this man needed to make merit, and a lot of it.  From this strong need, it’s logical to assume that whatever he did was pretty bad, or at least, in his mind, it was pretty bad and demanded a lot of balance-restoring. It was bad enough, worth enough weight, that he purchased 10 white cows. These beautiful creatures, when you see them wandering through the neighborhood, make you think, if you know the story behind their presence, a plethora of dark thoughts: What could have happened? It must have been something terrible. Did someone die? Was it worse than that? The cows, as they wander, make you wonder.

Even in modern Chiang Mai, a cow is a costly and valuable item, and 10 of them, purchased as recompense to God, is impressive. In fact, Ellen said, people would probably like to kill those cows. They would like to eat those cows (even though it is a Buddhist country, but you would never know it from the amount of meat Thai people consume.) A cow still has a lot of meat on it, even in modern Chiang Mai. But no one would ever harm these animals. To kill a cow, especially a white cow, bought for the making of merit, would be a terrible deed – possibly worse than whatever made the man buy the cows in the first place.

So, now, the cows wander free. They wander in the neighborhood, and through wandering free, the process of nature and the passage of time, they have become a sizeable herd of cows numbering close to 30 strong, from what I can count. I can’t remember certain parts of the story. The man may have kept the cows somewhere for a while, on a piece of land that belonged to him, and then died and now the cows wander around in this humorous and wonderful way, but I’m not sure, because when Ellen sees the cows, she often says “those are my neighbor’s cows,” not like someone talking about a dead neighbor.

In any case, the cows move around in the neighborhood, but prefer places with lots of sweet greens, like a defunct palm tree farm with big leafy plants that crunch with juice when bitten, which is where Ellen and her husband Joe live. In the mornings, when I sleep in their sala covered with a beautiful white mosquito net that creates a kind of Thai Bedouin tent lit by candles in the evening, I sometimes open my eyes to them just beyond me, taking large and noisy bites out of anything green. They have soft eyes, and the young ones have spindly legs. As soon as they see me, a kind of alarm goes through the herd. I can feel it being passed through glances and the change in the rigidity of ears and skin. If I move anything more than my eyes, they back away. If I move a hand, they start to run, stirring the still morning air with animal movement, hurried, frightened, moving themselves to a place they consider to be just out of human reach.

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