Two days of truck-stop food, car camping, and bickering children is hard enough, but with a traveling circus of stressed-out animals, it took grueling to a new dimension. We consoled ourselves that our animals had the most to gain from the trip. These backyard ponies would have sixty acres of Oregon pasture to find their inner mustang. The dogs would have endless woods full of verdant smells to delight the canine nose. And the cat would have an actual leafy, green tree for plotting a full-on, feline ambush. Maybe this move came with some costs for us, but for our animals it would be a return to Eden. Our animals were going home to the country.
We arrived the morning of the third day. The sun was just starting to peek over the mountains, casting long blue shadows. It was chilly in the shade, but where the sun hit, there was promise of a beautiful day. We led the horses, wild-eyed and snorting, out of their dark trailer and into the abundant green of Oregon. We loosed their halters and watched them run—in sheer panic. They looped the field several times at a full gallop until they could no longer sustain the pace and slowed, frothy and sweating, to a hoppy canter. We realized we were going to have to catch these two hot-heads and walk them off to prevent them getting chilled. Catching them with sixty acres of sprinting room would take some doing.
Before we could put that plan into action we heard the agitated screams of our girls. Cisco, the bad dog, was making for the woods with a chicken in his mouth. Both girls were in hot pursuit. Patches, the good dog, had dutifully dropped her chicken when commanded but was now accompanying Cisco in his flight from justice.
And Bezel, the cat, who complained incessantly about riding in a car, was balled up under the front seat refusing to come out. It would require heavy-duty leather gloves to overcome his objections.
Thus concluded the first hour of our new life on the farm—and with it came the puncture of another delusion. We assumed our animals would be at home in nature. Instead, they were unbalanced and frightened by it. Like us, they were “at home” at home. It’s familiarity that instills comfort. It would take them weeks to get their bearings, and months to become country animals. Until then, their lives were in peril. Coyotes and owls consider city cats the country equivalent of fast food. Dogs that run at livestock, including chickens, are shot on sight. And thousand-pound horses can tangle in barbed wire and shred themselves to the bone in minutes. We were naive to presume to know country ways for our animals.
Green is the color of Oregon. It reflects the botanical abundance of the state and is represented in everything from the license plates to the football team at the university. It is also an apt description of new immigrants to the state. That day we learned the truth of Oregon green—it applies to animals as much as people. And for both, it takes lots of experience to replace the green with bark.
DAY ONE
People sell homes because they want to move, usually to better digs. People sell small farms because of personal tragedies: sickness, bankruptcy, divorce—the reasons are never good. And while it would seem that selling a farm should not be much more complicated than selling a home or a business, it is. Since farms are both residences and businesses, the models for calculating valuation are thrown into flux. And without reliable valuation, banks will not lend money. The smaller the farm, the less profit, the more difficult the valuation, the harder to get financing and, ultimately, the longer the farm is on the market. Bottom line, most small farms come to new owners having languished through long periods of disrepair and neglect.
While our animals were getting acquainted with the farm, the farm began to introduce itself to us. And like any jilted lover, we were about to encounter its scorn. The electricity was on, so we had lights and water, but that was about it. No phone, TV, computer—no access to the wider world. The stove and the refrigerator were shot, so meals were largely PB&J sandwiches.
Farmhouses, especially old ones, were not intended to keep nature out, more like slow it down to a manageable level. There was a good sampling of the rodent population in various stages of decay randomly distributed through the house. Removing them only seemed to invite their living relatives to return and re-populate. We had hoped our cat would be a deterrent, but in protest to the move, he had made off to the darkest corner of the house and curled into a “do not disturb” ball. From deep within that black fur ball we caught the glimmer of half-cocked eyes and exposed fangs. Clearly we were on our own for staring down the rodent horde.
The farm itself was “free range,” not by intent but by default. Chickens and sheep went where they pleased, much to the consternation of our dogs, who were now either locked up or leashed. We made a mental note that fence repair would be among our first priorities. While the sheep roamed, our horses hovered at the barn. They were in danger of dehydrating less than one hundred feet from a stream. Being desert horses, they had never heard rushing water and were terrified by it. They had to be hand watered from a trough.
After taking stock of our surroundings we began the ordeal of unpacking. By mid-afternoon the heat and sore backs had slowed our pace and must have suggested our vulnerability. A beaten down pickup hovered on the county road, then eased down our driveway. In the cab was an older man constructed of knotted cables and burlap. He had an erratic gray beard, wore a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, and supported his faded jeans with red suspenders. After surveying our move-in, he announced in a voice accustomed to talking over chainsaws, “Looks like someone threw a hand grenade in the middle of a yard sale.”
Greg’s initial instinct was to suggest another place where the visitor could stick his hand grenade, but one look at the big man’s goofy grin and we were disarmed. After introductions, the visitor swung out of the cab and headed for the tailgate, which he dropped. We had just been invited into his parlor.
“You’re supposed to welcome new neighbors with an apple pie but I thought you might appreciate a cold beer even better.”
And we did.
“Name is Rick Reahl, but everyone calls me Brick. I like to think it’s because I’m solid built, but could be ’cause they think I’m thick in the noggin.” He thumped gnarled knuckles against his bald dome, made a goofy face, and laughed.
Brick and his family lived at the end of the road in a little cabin built by his grandfather some hundred years ago. You knew you were at Brick’s place when you came upon a dozen signs, posted at varying eye levels, warning of dire consequences for the sin of trespassing. This means you! There were not a lot of people who made it to the end of this obscure road, but those who did were properly warned.
A bad back eventually retired Brick from logging and now he did odd jobs between fishing and hunting seasons. We learned later that in Oregon there are no days between some form of fishing or hunting season. Brick’s real occupation was the mayor of Hopping Frog Road. Everyone knew Brick and everyone liked Brick. In small towns, where casual slights can build into generational animosities, that was a real gift. He moved fluidly between the redneck logging clans and the eco-hippy tribes, and he did this largely by keeping confidences and engaging the positive side of each individual. And he made it seem just that simple. For us, he gave leads on people to help with farm repair and a brief orientation to the town. Then the tailgate shut and off he went to other mayoral duties. We went back to moving boxes.
That night we rolled our sleeping bags out in the living room and polished off our PB&Js. Another night of camping, but at least we had lights and running water. My reward for the long day was going to be a hot bath to ease aching muscles. When I opened the tap, it spit out a dollop of red water followed by hissing air, then silence. I just stared, then I cursed and banged the pipe, then I cried, and then I stared some more. The horses! I had left the water running in the trough, draining the holding tank. We were out of water. No water to wash. No water to drink. No water to flush.
For city dwellers, light and water are taken for granted. When you open a tap there should be water just as when you get up in the morning there should be a sun in the sky. In
the country, water and lights are more a hope than an expectation. What you can “expect” in the country is that at some point in the near future you will be without one or both.
Flashlight in hand, I trudged to the barn and turned off the valve at the trough. As I would soon learn, I did not need to do this because the pump had lost its prime and would need to have the air bled out of the pipes before water would move through them again. Before that, the spring would need to refill the holding tank. With luck we’d have water by tomorrow.
Well, at least we had lights. Naturally, the lights began to falter just as this thought occurred, warning me, “this too can go away.” Yes, I was making the acquaintance of Mr. Farm. He could be insistent.
As I drifted to sleep that night, a dull thought bubble percolated up from the mud of misgivings in my pre-conscious mind: What have I done? Just as it burst, I realized it wasn’t me. What has my malcontent husband done! This could be a terrible mistake. And before these thoughts could rouse me from my slumber, another thought bubble dislodged from the muck: my parents!
I remember the phone call when we announced our plan. The long pause. My father clearing his throat. The polite inquiries into the state of our sanity. My mother’s silence. My father’s strained attempts at support, followed by his attempts to solicit my mother’s support for this plan that neither of them could understand. My mother’s continued silence cloaking her secret thought that my husband would be the ruin of me. And what could be more ruinous than the isolation and drudgery of a farm? It all culminated in my father pledging they would assist us with the move—perhaps to force my mother to a more supportive role, perhaps to signal to my husband that their daughter was not lost to them, perhaps to help us find the mental health services we so desperately needed.
That was the final, cold thought that streaked across my pre-conscious brain. My parents were arriving in forty-eight hours. We had two days to get the farm sufficiently presentable to allay their worst fears. Yeah, that’s likely.
DAY TWO
Our first farm chore was to get the sheep off the lawn, which meant repairing the fences. The trick to fencing is having a secure base to draw the wire tight. Posts only augment the stability of the fence and maintain the spacing of the wires. The H-bar is the most common solution for a secure base. It consists of two heavy posts sunk three feet in the ground with a board nailed between them (forming an “H”) and two loops of wire diagonally transecting the two posts. A stick is used to tighten the wires, which brace the posts against each other, creating an immovable object. The fencing is secured at the H-bar and then stretched across the row of posts until it is secured at the next H-bar, usually at a gate or bend in the fence line. Stretching the wire can be done with a tractor or a come-along. It’s best to use two people, especially if one of them doesn’t know what he is doing.
Greg hired Russell, a young, beefy farm kid, to help string the fencing. By midday, Russell was looking down a long row of posts and decided to pick up the pace if he wanted to keep his date with his girlfriend that night. With the vigor of young love, he drove his shovel through a four-inch irrigation pipe that wasn’t supposed to be there, creating a geyser and a whole new work priority. When the irrigation goes down, the grass stops growing and the sheep start ranging beyond the unfenced pasture. This will not please your neighbors.
The irrigation repair requires digging up the pipe buried two feet in the ground, cutting the break, slipping a coupler over the repair, and gluing it. Bending large pipe, buried in the ground, sufficiently so a coupler will slip over it, requires a lot of digging and some engineering. And there’s the trip to town to get the supplies. Tick tock. Grass is dying. Sheep are ranging. And the farmer? Well, this farmer is having an existential crisis. Surveying the geyser, his only response to Russell’s spontaneous “oh shit” was, “What have I done with my life?” He’s been farming less than twenty-four hours.
My assignment was to get the farmhouse operational. I had driven to town to procure a stove, refrigerator, and phone connection (no cell phone service in a slot valley). It’s easy to buy appliances. Getting them delivered to a rural address requires a week’s notice, a cooperative retailer, and a substantial delivery fee. Cooperative retailers proved to be in short supply.
First Law of Country Living: The first thing you give up by moving to the country is convenience. There’s no pizza delivery down a gravel road.
The phone company was the most receptive, probably because it’s a rural cooperative and has empathy for the plight of rural folk. The petite older woman at the front desk took one look at my unwashed hair, dirty jeans, and desperate face and guessed the rest.
“New in town?”
“Just moved to Hopping Frog Road.”
“Not the Spences’ old place? Well, it is beautiful out there.”
I would learn later that this is Oregon code. Oregonians live by the rule “if you can’t say anything nice …” “Beautiful out there” meant there were no other redeeming qualities. She moved my name to the front of the work orders if I agreed to be home by mid-afternoon. I swore a blood oath.
“What number would you like?”
I was perplexed. “What do you mean?”
“What number would you like for your phone? We find it’s easier for people to remember if they pick it themselves.”
I had never been presented with that option. Come to think of it, I had never actually talked to a real person when it came to any dealings with phone companies.
“Uhh, I don’t know … given the day I’m having, anything with 666 seems to fit.”
“Oh no, the headbangers got that locked up till the second coming. How ’bout 9966? That’s kind of easy.”
“Sign me up.”
There’s nothing like the isolation of country life to make you appreciate a phone. For me, it meant fewer trips to town. But for my girls it meant a return to civilization. So the lanky young lineman was greeted as a hero by the twenty-somethings in the family. When he realized he would be crawling under an ancient farmhouse full of nasty bugs, rodents, and possibly a rabid skunk or coon, he began to feel entitled to the laurel-leaf crown. When he viewed the tiny, dark spider hole he had to squirm through, his mood darkened considerably. We agreed to leave him to his task and take the dogs for a walk.
Since we were walking through the woods and away from the livestock, we decided to unleash the dogs. At last, they were free to engage the leafy abundance around them! It added to our joy to watch their excitement. That is, until they caught a scent and bolted off. We hadn’t realized the sheep had already started to range beyond their pasture. We raced through the woods following the sounds of bleating and barking. The rout ended in the creek. An old ewe was in the water up to her belly and backed up against a steep bank. One dog had hold of her ear and was pulling her down while the other was lunging at her with vicious snapping jaws. When pack mentality takes over, dogs readily convert to their wolf archetype. We had to use sticks to drive them off.
Free from the dogs, the ewe just stood in the creek, earless and bleeding profusely from a number of wounds. She was in shock and would not move, so we were forced to drag her up the embankment. A full grown ewe weighs about 150 pounds, but with wet wool you could add another 50. She lay on the bank, limp, in utter resignation of her impending death. We cleaned the wounds as best we could. Annie, kneeling beside the ewe, began to sing a gentle lullaby to soothe her. The sound of the creek and Annie’s soft, clear voice shifted the tempo from crisis to comfort. A small clutch of ewes lingered nearby. I drove them over, thinking the herd might inspire the ewe to get up. Sure enough, she hoisted herself up onto quaking legs. We pushed the group up to the barn. There, we were able to isolate the injured ewe in a stall. Good. Now all we needed was a vet. Well, a phone and a vet.
The hero lineman had crawled out from under the house looking exhausted and relieved. We now had a phone. I searched for the name of the farmer down the road that Brick had given me and placed a
call. So, this is how we meet our neighbors—through crisis. The farmer’s wife answered.
“You don’t know me. We just moved onto Hopping Frog and our dogs attacked a ewe. We need a vet.”
“A ewe?”
“Yes, she’s bleeding pretty badly.”
“A ewe costs fifty dollars. Just to get the vet to your door is a hundred. Clean the wounds. Tomorrow the ewe is either alive or dead. Either way, you’re still fifty dollars ahead of a vet visit.”
And there it was: the Second Law.
The Second Law: You probably can’t afford experts, so improvise. If that doesn’t work, call a few people and improvise again.
We took the advice. The ewe was still alive the next morning, so we released her back to the herd. She became our earless (deaf) ewe and went on to lamb for many more years.
SHEEP SHORTCOMINGS
To prevent more earless sheep, we decided to drive the herd into a temporary pen. It is said that sheep are the leading cause of divorce in rural America. Hard to believe, when looking at the bucolic scene of sheep grazing serenely in a pasture. But try moving them toward a goal. Pushing sheep is roughly akin to pushing water with a sieve.
It is also said that sheep are among the dumbest creatures on God’s green earth. It is usually said by a farmer being out-maneuvered by his sheep. And if your spouse is helping you move the sheep, it becomes abundantly clear that the only thing on that field dumber than the sheep is … well, that’s probably why shepherds have dogs as companions.
So what’s so hard about moving sheep? They’re prey animals, which mean they have almost 180 degrees of vision out of each eye for viewing threats. Anything moving toward them that signals a threat causes them to bolt. If they’re packed in formation, they bolt in all directions, circling around until they pack up again. The sheep’s strategy is, if you’re in a pack, maybe the guy next to you will get eaten and you’ll get away. Unless the predator is too close, in which case, you’re the sacrifice. Then, better to just bolt. So the pattern is pack, bolt, pack. The trick, from the sheep’s perspective, is detecting a predator from the casual passerby, and that has to do with speed and singularity of approach. Of course, any human approaching a herd looks a lot like a predator, causing the herd to bolt, circle, and regroup behind them. Now, walk in a large circle around the herd, then approach, and watch the process repeat. You can spend many hours of your life playing the circle game with sheep. They don’t mind.
Country Grit: A Farmoir of Finding Purpose and Love Page 2
