There, By The Shore, A Putrid Beast

An Afternoon without Classes

Note: Although I am posting this story now, I actually wrote it one year ago after this event happened.

“Students will be released from school only as a last case scenario,” announced our school coordinator to a group of 12-odd gray-in-the-face docentes and scores of high school students one Wednesday early this spring. Exactly why releasing students would be considered the “last case scenario” in this situation left many of us with quizzical looks on our faces. Or maybe that appearance was merely discomfort owing to suppression of the gag reflex.

            Bachillerato (highschool) in my little Colombian town runs off a schedule prescribing school from 12:15 to 6:00 Monday through Friday. This schedule, however, serves more as a rough framework for our institution, changing weekly or even daily as determined by national holidays, community needs, power outages and – most commonly – rough water. Students can be released from school for many reasons: A death in the community; a plumbing issue resulting in the entire institution smelling like raw sewage; their last period teacher not coming to school that day; or all the teachers leaving early to catch a boat back to the city before the wind and waves create a precarious ride. So we were all bewildered that school would not be cancelled when a dead cow washed up on the shore right next to the school, covering the neighborhood with the foul stench of rotting flesh.

            With the start of the rainy season here on the Colombian coast, the Río Magdalena has begun its annual surges, pushing increased amounts of water up through a nearby canal and into the bay adjacent to my site. At farms further down the river inland, every now and then the occasional cow strays too close to the river, gets washed into the churning current by a rainstorm, drowns, and gets pushed out to the bay. Meeting the ocean currents, said water-logged, bobbing, bloated animal may sink to the floor of the bay, continue out further into the Caribbean, or – every now and then – wind up on the shore, as happened here a month ago, burning the lungs of anyone unfortunate enough to be downwind.

            For the uninitiated, the acrid stench of putrid animal not only singes your lungs, but burns itself into your olfactory memory, tightening the stomach at the simple remembrance. Once experienced, it cannot be forgotten. My first real taste of this horrible smell came several years ago living in Washington, D.C. when, during a particularly harsh winter night, a cat-sized city rat sought shelter from the bitter cold and followed the warmth of heat emanating from our clothes dryer after a load of laundry. Crawling horizontally into the slippery pipe, the rat plunged down the tube to the basement laundry room adjacent to my room, tumbling into the back chamber of the dryer. The cacophony of trapped animal ensued, with the rat throwing its body against the dryer chamber and scratching the metal until dying of hunger, thirst, or plain exhaustion several days later. (My landlords were not exactly the most responsive in attending to this situation.) Not long after the last scrape of the rat’s nails against the inside of the dryer, began the dispersion of a gaseous, chemical air that accompanies the breakdown of animal flesh, smothering any fresh oxygen in its path. I was harshly reminded of this event when I reported to school for the first class of the day at my site on this particular Wednesday, finding the students covering their faces with bandannas, handkerchiefs, their hands – anything that could provide even the slightest barrier to the reeking odor.

            “Por favor, profe” (“Please, teacher”) beseeched a student on the verge of jumping the school wall to run home and escape the smell, “if there’s ever a good reason to let us go early, this is it.” After about 40 minutes of ambling around the school yards with an increasingly uncomfortable and ill-looking body of staff and students looking on, the coordinator decided that instead of ending the day early and releasing the students, we would go to the main park while we waited for someone to address the dead cow. We all headed to the park, with groups of students sneaking off to head home not caring about the lack of formal permission to do so, some returning with sneakers and soccer balls, others finding a bench in the shade to talk, flirt, or simply sit alone for a while. Gradually more students trickled off, leaving only a handful of soccer players and the most conscientious students. Our group of teachers left any remaining students at the park to return to the school and arrange their daily return boat trip to the city.

            Back at school, most of the teachers gathered in the teachers’ lounge, enjoying a slight shift in the breeze that permitted easier breathing. Since no one else had yet responded to the situation in the meantime, two elderly men who live near the school were outside with large sticks pushing the enormous rancid cow into the water, against the afternoon current. I stayed outside the school to watch, along with one teacher whose professional motto may as well be “Any afternoon off of teaching is a win for the union.” With the cow now floating about 10 meters from the shore, the old men disappeared, showing up soon thereafter in a metal canoe and paddling toward the corpse. Reaching into the water to tie a length of rope around the hind legs of the beast, the canoe made its way to a Colombian Navy patrol ship that had finally responded to a call they received in the late morning when the cow first washed up on the shore of the town. After hitching the rope and its heavy, bovine cargo to the back of the patrol boat, the Navy officers headed toward the western edge of the island with the plan of cutting the cow loose in the open water to sink to the bottom of the bay or float out into the expansive, open sea.

The teachers’ return boat arrived and they boarded and headed to the city. The sun beginning to set to the west, shimmering off the water between the island and the mainland factories across the bay, I walked back along the dirt roads to my house. The afternoon having been filled not with classes but rather with the foul stench of rotten cow, I could find comfort at least in the fact that I still had class plans that would be useful the following Wednesday. And in the welcome site that my host mother was busy preparing fish for dinner, instead of the beef that I had previously seen in our freezer.

Several weeks ago I awoke to hear my neighbor yelling something to my host mom. A dead bull had washed up and gotten tangled in the grouping of mangroves that sits off the shore of our houses. Running, grabbing paddles for canoes came a group of high school students that live in the neighborhood. “Let’s get it loose and send it to the school” they yelled to each other. “Maybe we can get them to cancel classes for the day!”