Donovan Kelly

I hadn't thought about that wild cow in 40 years. But there she was in the middle of a vanity search last week to see where Google might find my name on the web. Who would have thought that Penn State has a web page for its geology field camps that reveals how, for the good of science and Dear Old State, I attacked a cow with a pop bottle?

It was not love at first sight, that cow and me. It was war. That summer of 1963 our honor was at stake. We saw how the good old boys of Montana looked at us geology students from the East. They in their tall boots, blue jeans and long-sleeve shirts laughing at us in our eastern shorts and tee shirts.

Maybe they thought we were after their women, but all we wanted was their geology. Just enough to draw a map, write a report and pass the field geology course, my last before graduation.

The class wasn't just about rocks. Our professor, Rob Scholten, said that winning over the local citizens was an important lesson for all field geologists to learn. We would always need to win the cooperation of the locals if we were to get our work done.

That lesson, making the world safe for geologists so that geologists can go about doing their job, became the single most important lesson I learned in college. It became the core of a 31-year career in public affairs at the U.S. Geological Survey. But first I had to discover that I was not really a geologist, that I was a writer of science not a doer of science. That lesson didn't sink in until after a few years spent trying to do science, while looking for oil in Louisiana, Texas, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

But that all came later. Back at summer field camp, Dr. Scholten suggested that we enter the local rodeo to show the citizens of Lima, Montana, that we geology students were really regular people, despite the funny shorts and baseball caps we wore.

So three of us entered the rodeo. For a number of sound reasons, we passed up bull riding. The only rodeo event we were remotely qualified for was the wild cow milking contest. Turned out that I was the only one who had ever actually milked anything. True, I had mostly milked a pet goat, but one high school summer I did try my hand with dairy cows.

Forget gentle Pennsylvania milking cows strapped in a barn and happily munching hay. What we faced in Montana were devil cows fresh off the range who trusted no humans. Fire-breathing 800-pound Mama cows running loose in a loud arena, franticly looking for their lost calves and for relief from painfully swollen udders.

Rules were simple. My two classmates, Lynn Brant and Mitch Smith, had to grab any available parts of the bucking cow and hold her still enough and long enough for me to get some milk into a tight-lipped Coke bottle. "Got to see some color, " the judge explained.

Our cow never got what I would call still, but when she stopped to kick somebody besides me, I squeezed some milk into the bottle. I raced back to the judge. He looked at my proud grin, my cow-trodden and plop-plastered feet and then at the bottle. "Looks like real milk, " he said. "Most people just spit in the bottle. "

Maybe it was just another Montana put down, and maybe we weren't the swiftest wild cow milkers around, but at least now we could wear cowboy hats and drink beer with the locals. I learned a lot that summer. Like sometimes all you have to do to get by is wear the right hat, look busy and spit.