Trauma Farm (34 page)

Sometimes farmers get so carried away making gorgeous fences they forget their original reason for building them. Young Charlie Byron, a good man killed in a tree-falling accident several years ago, once bought a big prize bull, picked it up, and drove it home. Descending from the livestock trailer, it looked around, didn’t like what it saw, and walked right through his elegant split-rail fence. Charlie shot it on the road as it was grinding its way into the hood of a terrified neighbour’s car, and then he dragged its corpse onto the farm with his tractor and butchered it. So the unfortunate bull ended up spending its last day on the farm after all, and Charlie and his family ate tough, expensive beef for a winter.

Working rural land teaches you to look and then look again. It’s an unending lesson in the competition between the human drive for a linear, mechanical world and the natural world demanding complexity. Startling moments flash past and snap you to attention, whether it’s the heron suddenly flipping a goldfish as big as a plate out of the pond or a surprise guest at the gate.

THE FROG ON THE GATE LATCH

More brilliant than an emerald on wood,

the tree frog sat out the morning, taking its sun

the way some of us take our wages—

demanding only what we deserve and nothing more.

In the golden burn of the afternoon

it found the shade the latch provided.

Later in the evening, when I watered the orchard

and fed the sheep, I noticed it again,

still perched on that strap of cedar

which barred one world from another—

imperious, like a bright emperor, its hooded eye

studying me for false or dangerous moves.

There were none in my heart, not this night,

and I slid the latch home with a tenderness

the brittle wood hadn’t known for some time—
the gate an ancient victim

of the aimless battering of sheep, the escapes

a horse devises with its rubbery lips, or my despair

after a hard day making nothing out of stupid dirt.

This small green king offered grace and patience

while requesting only a perch for itself.

The gates might open and shut and we may

often find ourselves lost in our own homes,
but there is always someone else,
ready to embrace our crazy landscapes.

Gates are magical creations, and I try to construct interesting ones. I also make it a habit to have all our gates open away from the house; this way helpers with their hands full don’t have to fiddle around figuring out which way a gate opens, though one of the boys repaired a couple of gates and made them open the wrong way, which drives me batty. I dislike metal gates, but I can tolerate them. They are like Walmart farming—functional and ugly. And they’re hard to fix after you back your truck over them. With wood you can always jury-rig something. Though every fence must be designed for its use, whether to protect a garden against marauding rabbits and deer or to keep livestock in, there’s something about gates that makes us want to get ornamental in their construction. I’ve built a lovely moon gate out of wood scrap, along with a few other eccentric gates. And we had a friend weld us a small garden gate out of broken garden tools in a radiating design. It’s much photographed by guests.

If you’re a visitor, the rules for dealing with farm gates are simple, because there is only one rule. You leave them as you find them. If a gate is closed, then close it after you go through. If a gate is open, make sure it stays open. Farms have lost herds of cattle or sheep when a helpful duck hunter closed the gate that led to the water hole. More often the problem is leaving the gate open. Bev and Mike’s farm stretches to Stowel Lake and the swimming hole beside the road. A few adventurous kids know there’s a secret gate to his bottom field, hidden among the blackberries—a shortcut to the private wharf. The Byrons wouldn’t dream of putting up a no trespassing sign, yet they’re not keen about strangers wandering around the rickety wharf that projects their water intake valve into the lake, especially since so many south islanders are already using the swimming hole at the boundary of their land. It also makes Bev’s little grandchildren nervous when they go fishing and encounter big, shaggy strangers skinny-dipping off the dock.

I was returning from fishing on that dock one day when I encountered three young boys. I could see they’d left the gate open, despite the grazing sheep close by. After the usual farm-friendly hello, I got to the point with the head of the pack.

“You boys supposed to be in here?”

“Oh sure.”

“Who gave you permission?”

“Mike Byron,” he beamed. He was a cocky one. He’d have to be pretty dumb not to know this was the Byron place and that Mike gave permission to cross his property to everyone who asked. Only they were supposed to close the gates. The boy’s cheekiness made it obvious they didn’t ask, and the open gate showed they didn’t care. I decided to give them something to think about.

“Oh that’s fine, then. Have a good swim. By the way, did you see the bull?” There’s more than one way to deal with an aspiring delinquent.

“Bull?” The boy’s eyes widened suspiciously, and his voice rose. “He’s got a bull in here?” He surveyed the mix of pasture and heavy brush they’d have to traverse to reach the lake.

“He picked it up a week ago. It’s big—a touch mean if you piss it off.” His eyes grew wider, and his friends looked fearfully around. One hacked up a cough when he noticed the old milk Jersey lurking behind a tree. “Naw, that’s only the cow. The bull is big and black and all drooly-faced. If he takes a run at you, you have to grab the ring in his nose.” Mike’s gentle old bull had actually gone into the cooler a few days earlier, but they wouldn’t know that. “Have a good swim, boys,” I smiled and marched off toward the gate. By the time I had unassembled my fishing rod and put it in my truck I saw them leaving, carefully shutting the gate behind.

BEFORE WE THROW PARTIES
where there are going to be city guests, I move our livestock to the bottom pasture and hang a sign on the gate: bewar e of r am . To my knowledge, nobody has ever gone through that gate when the sign is up. Apart from our encounter with Mike’s ram, the only ram we ever had that showed signs of being grumpy was a notorious Suffolk ram a few farmers shared for stud use. He was gentle as sin, yet when you turned your back he’d hammer you. After a couple of gimpy backs he ended up as mutton burger.

But no matter how good your gates and fences and sign-age, people will still find ways to ignore them, sometimes at great cost, and farmers have to resort to more innovative methods to keep people out of dangerous fields. I have two favourite farm signs that I once saw in a magazine:

DON’T CROSS THIS FIELD UNLESS YOU CAN DO IT IN 10 SECONDS. THE BULL CAN DO IT IN 10.1 SECONDS
.

THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CROSS THE FIELD FOR FREE, BUT THE BULL CHARGES

Fences aren’t the only subject of construction on a farm. The story of barns is so complex that it needs its own history. Farming is a permanent form of construction and reconstruction—widgets that won’t widget, doors that stick, and the designing of thingamajigs to hold whatchacallits in place—cams, links, gears, bearings, and gadgets. I love farming because it’s all fuss and little finesse. You get it done with whatever is handy. In ancient days the technology was wood, leather, and some home smithing. Now we reinvent our world daily with gadgets of moulded metal, plastic, baling twine, and duct tape. One of the most common phrases heard on a farm is “That’ll hold it for now.” This can lead to some hilariously improvised devices. Fear of messiness is a modern psychosis. Yet messiness is the badge of the farmer’s lifestyle, except for those few individuals with a neatness fetish that leaves the rest of us standing at the entrance to their workshop with our mouths agape. Their sterile though very useful methodology has, unfortunately, evolved into the factory farm, where technicians can now operate in biosecure environments that belong more to the laboratory than to the land.

Shortly after we bought Trauma Farm, I was driving my aged father home for his first visit. He glanced out the truck window and said, “That looks like a real farm. You should get to know that guy.” It was the Byron homestead, glorious in its unfinished fencing, sheep wandering across the road, geese on the driveway, the sheds in various stages of collapse and rebuilding, constantly changing, organic, alive.

We try to keep a neat house, except for my study, which is a free-for-all of dreams and clutter. That’s how I write. Like the puppy in the yard, I need my fetish objects—on the walls and the counters—bones, books, paintings, tools, sculptures, and photographs. They bring me to the zone where the words begin. The rest of the house is a different matter. However, over the years I’ve watched with amusement the accumulation of junk in the barn and mud room, attempting to invade the house itself where we are making our last stand, especially Sharon, who has good design taste when it comes to a house and is determined to keep it.

But a farm has few tidy zones. Everything is in active movement. Sharon once brilliantly housed a hundred newborn chicks in an old playpen she pushed up beside the wood stove during an electrical failure. And over the years several struggling newborn lambs had the life warmed back into them beside the same stove. Although it’s a lovely, enormous log home with a handmade thirty-foot-long adobe divider separating the stoves, emergencies always take precedence over house pride.

The barn workshop turns clutter into an art form. A farmer lives a magpie life, accumulating objects “ just in case”—seduced by the harmony of gears, the simple intelligence of step valves. I’ve got irrigation sprayers, copper tubing, bags of lime, uncounted tools (wrenches, saws, files, drivers, hammers, nail cutters), Big ‘O’ connectors, screws, brushes, tar, sterilizers, fencing nails, electrical connectors, netting, brushes, Vaseline, udder unguents, organic fertilizers, soap solutions, mineral oil. Farmers thrive on this kind of junk and know that if by some chance they are missing a two-inch step-down pipe connector, their neighbour will have it. The only thing annoying me is that I still can’t find my expensive fencing pliers in the mess.

MORE THAN A FEW
tools are fondly cursed when you live on the land. A tractor is a universal instrument of torture for farmers. If it’s not breaking down it’s getting stuck, and when it’s not doing that it’s tipping over and crushing its driver. But I can’t think of a tool that’s enraged me more than the chainsaw, so necessary to our farm carved out of a forest only two decades before our arrival. After I went through five second-hand chainsaws, I bought a new, small “professional” model, which was rated to handle our workload. It burned out in a year, and reduced me to tears. So Sharon bought the big model for me as a Valentine’s Day present. Maybe she was hoping I’d fall on it and finish this farming dream once and for all. That saw has survived more than a decade.

Observing how much work firewood is, the fencing, the clearing of deadfalls and diseased trees in our forested acreage, I recognize the intrepid skills of our ancestors—their days spent chipping stone tools so cleverly, so distinctly that enemies could identify the makers of a spear tip pulled out of a corpse. Then I look at the spotty photographs of last century’s axe-wielding loggers, standing on springboards, felling fifteen-foot-thick trees, and I understand why our species has so vastly increased the pace of its damage with its avalanche of new tools and weapons being created daily as our technology evolves faster than us.

Over the years I’ve removed a number of sick trees for various reasons, almost killing myself when an alder rolled over a fence after it kicked backwards off its stump. My neighbours watched in horror while I pretzelled my spine beneath the overhanging rail and the trunk rolled over me. If the rails hadn’t held, I’d have been crushed. It was such an easy tree to fell that I hadn’t paid due attention. The trick about felling timber is remembering that the easy trees can also kill you. When I was a logger in Haida Gwaii during the foolish days of my young manhood I witnessed several rogue trees in action. Monstrous widow-makers, they’d split up the middle, walk off their stumps, and chase you for fifty feet. Torque can create wild dances once you sever a tree from its roots.