Jamie Lyons

The Fifth Circle

Interstate 5. The great American scar tissue running through California’s gut. You want to know what we are? What we’ve become? It’s all right here, stretched out under that merciless Central Valley sun for mile after goddamn mile.

You smell them before you see them. That’s the thing nobody tells you. The reek comes through your air conditioning, through your closed windows, through whatever mental defenses you’ve constructed to get you through the five-hour slog from LA to San Francisco. It’s the smell of ten thousand animals living where ten should, standing in their own shit, waiting to become the burger you’ll eat without thinking about it at some rest stop another hundred miles up the road.

And then you see it. The feedlot. Harris Ranch, or any of its brothers in industrial-scale animal misery. It goes on forever, a sprawling, dusty, Hieronymus Bosch nightmare of black and brown bodies packed into pens that stretch to the horizon. This is where your food comes from. This is the sausage factory. And yeah, you really don’t want to see how it’s made.

So I pull over. Because someone should look at this. Someone should bear witness to what we’ve decided is an acceptable price for $.99 hamburgers and all-you-can-eat steakhouses.

The white pickup comes fast. They always do. Guy gets out, young but sun-damaged, radio on his hip, and that particular American combination of authority and aggression that comes from a few years of telling people to move along, nothing to see here.

“You need to move on.”

I don’t. I’ve got my camera up. I’m framing it just right, the cattle, the pens, and there, in the distance, the fire. Because of course there’s a fire. California’s burning, has been burning, will keep burning, and here we are, raising methane factories in a tinderbox, because we’ve decided this is fine. This is all fine.

“I need you to leave. Now.”

He’s closer. The radio crackles. He’s letting someone know there’s a problem. That I’m being “difficult.” That’s what they call it when you refuse to look away, when you insist on seeing the thing they’ve spent millions of dollars and countless man-hours trying to hide from the Interstate, from the public, from anyone with a conscience and a camera.

I’m not moving. Not yet. I want this shot. I need the fire and the cattle and the sheer apocalyptic weight of it all in one frame. This is America. This is us. This is what we don’t want to see when we’re bombing down I-5 with our cruise control set at 85, our minds carefully blank, our music loud enough to drown out the cognitive dissonance.

He’s really close now. Close enough that I can see he’s not a bad guy. He’s just doing his job, a shitty job and he knows it. Protecting the brand. Protecting us from having to think too hard about where our food comes from and what it costs, not in dollars, but in suffering, in water, in dignity, in climate futures we’re pissing away one feedlot at a time.

Click.

I got it.  The shot. The cattle. The fire. The whole rotting gorgeous horror of it.

The thing is, I’ll eat beef again. Hell my fingers still smell of the In and Out Double Double and French Fries.  I’m not preaching. I’m not better than all this. But I saw it. I stopped. I looked. And for one moment on that burning highway, I refused to let someone tell me to move along, to stop seeing, to participate in the collective delusion that none of this is happening.

Not being able to escape is the most awful thing. I know, in my soul, that to eat a creature who is raised to be eaten, and who never has a chance to be a real being, is unhealthy. It’s like…you’re just eating misery. You’re eating a bitter life.
Alice Walker