As a wee lad — and yes, looking at me today you'd never imagine I was ever wee — I attended what is now called Westwood Charter Elementary School in West Los Angeles. While I was there, it was just Westwood Elementary and from what I can tell when I now drive by the place, almost nothing still stands from when I was a pupil.
Every once in a while, some class I was in would get loaded into a bus and taken somewhere for a field trip…going somewhere to learn something about someplace. I believe I once wrote here about a time we went to the Helms Bakery in Culver City to see them make bread and cookies and all sorts of things that smelled heavenly. Hold on…let me check.
Okay, I'm back. I did a search and I was right. I wrote about visiting the Helms Bakery here. As I said, it was just about the best-smelling place I've ever been in my life. This article is about a field trip to what was certainly the worst.
We were told that on a certain day, we were to all bring sack lunches from home because the students who ate at the school cafeteria would not be able to go to lunch there. For much of that day, we'd be touring a dairy to see where milk comes from.
Even at the age of eight or nine, I knew the answer to that: From cows, you big silly. But there was apparently more than that to be learned so we were to be bussed to the dairy responsible for a certain brand of milk sold in Southern California stores. At lunchtime there, we'd eat our sack lunches and wash the food down with free samples of the milk — which was not a brand sold at any market at which my mother shopped and that turned out to be a good thing.
On that certain day, we were informed that the trip was off — no reason given. We plunged into the usual curriculum of spelling and arithmetic and the like and then, mysteriously, the school principal came in and whispered something to our teacher. Our teacher then informed us that the field trip to the dairy was back on. Not only that but the bus that would take us there was waiting outside at that very moment. There was a lot of scurrying and rearrangement but we all grabbed up our sack lunches and within minutes, we were on the bus heading for this dairy which was, as I recall, about an hour drive from the school. It was in Torrance or Carson or Gardena or one of those cities south of Los Angeles.
When we got there and disembarked from the bus, we got our first whiff of a foul, nauseating aroma. It came from several hundred bales of hay that were in a pen surrounded by chicken wire. The hay was infected with some kind of fungus and it was baking in the hot California sun. The smell was horrible. Absolutely horrible.
To get us away from that foul odor, our Tour Guide Lady herded us like cows into the first of a series of nearby barns but in there, the smell was far worse. The barns were full of cows that I guess had been eating that hay. We never got an explanation but all the cows had — to use a term that was not in my vocabulary at that age — explosive diarrhea. It made the aroma of the desiccating hay smell like a fine perfume by comparison. The Tour Guide Lady then hustled us from that barn to next one where, she hoped, the air would be a lot more breathable.
It wasn't. I think we went through three or four but in every barn, the cows were expelling the foulest-possible feces as men wearing hankies over their noses and mouths tried to shovel the output away faster than the cows could make more. It was truly a lost cause and I remember many of my classmates vomiting and I sure felt like joining them. Through it all, the Tour Guide Lady kept telling us over and over that though the cows were ill, their milk would be perfectly drinkable by the time it reached the refrigerator section of our local market. There was no way any of us were about to believe that.
Our teacher was getting pretty sick too and she finally called a halt to the whole field trip. She told us all to get back on the bus and those of us who could still walk ran as fast as we could. The rest staggered in after us and then our teacher did a fast head count which was interrupted as The Tour Guide Lady ran up. She reminded our teacher that she had individual cartons of milk for us all, whereupon out teacher turned to the driver and said, "Get us as far from this place as you can — NOW!"
The driver, who looked sicker than any of us, was only happy to comply. The Tour Guide Lady was ordered off the bus, its engine roared and we heard its tires make a noise I have only heard since in real bad movie car chases.
Once we were out of smelling range of the dairy, all of us — my classmates, my teacher and your truly — crowded around open windows, breathing hard like we'd just come up from a near-death underwater experience and were gasping oxygen to save our lives. The driver was doing seventy-plus on the freeway and he had the front door to the bus open so that a welcome tornado of air filled its center aisle.
No one — need I add? — felt like eating their sack lunches.
When we got back to our classroom, our teacher didn't try to teach. We just sat around recovering from our ordeal. The principal came by and said that the head of the dairy had phoned to apologize and to make it up to us, he wanted to send everyone a free half gallon of their milk and a gallon of ice cream and I think other products from that dairy. One of the students — and I'm fairly certain it was me — yelled out, "Tell him we never want anything that comes out of a cow again!" The other students laughed and agreed and then we all tried to put the whole experience out of our minds and noses.
But I still think about it now and then, usually when there's a Breaking News story on TV that some armed criminals holed up in a building somewhere and the S.W.A.T. Team has them surrounded. I think, "They don't need men with high-powered rifles. They just need to send in those cows. The criminals would instantly surrender." I told that to someone once and they said, "That would be cruel and unusual punishment!" I said, "No, it would be extremely cruel and extremely unusual punishment! But I guarantee you it would work!"
