by Brian Brett
ONE DAY I WAS cleaning up the offcuts thrown onto the lawn from our framing when Seb charged down the first sheets of red tin laid on the roof and flew off the low eaves, right over the narrow front deck and onto the lawn, where he did a couple of rolls, rose to his feet, and calmly walked off. I was horrified. It was at least a twelve-foot leap. “don ’t jump off the roof!” I roared between gritted teeth.
“Who jumped? I fell,” Seb said casually as he crossed the lawn to the back deck to return to the roof. Danger lives with us everywhere.
I lost a finger to an accidental, self-inflicted shotgun blast in my twenties, and faced logs rolling off a hillside when I earned my living as a logger and saw enough to convert me into an environmentalist for life. In White Rock, shortly before we moved to the farm, I balanced my chainsaw overhead and sawed off a chunk of rotten deck until I hit a nail. The chainsaw kicked back, striking my face. I could feel the blood trickling down my cheek as I made the slow walk into the basement and its bathroom mirror, assuming I’d taken a chunk out of my face, afraid to touch it. In the mirror I saw only a tiny cut, bleeding profusely. The saw must have stalled on the kickback and struck my cheek during the brief moment when the chain stopped, because by the time it was back at arm’s length it was fully revving again. How’s that for luck? I still bear the tiny, near-invisible scar as a symbol of foolishness and survival. The hazards of the working life walk alongside the laughter, and only the wakeful among us survive, and sometimes not even them. The grace of work is beautiful, joyful, and dangerous.
Ever since we moved to the farm on that winter day and discovered the one lonely piece of punky alder in the woodshed, I’ve been obsessed with accumulating firewood and kindling. Luckily, within days we’d found a woodcutter with a load of firewood that was—unbelievably—dry. Unscrupulous woodcutters claim they have cured, dry wood, whether they do or don’t. Once you’ve worked with firewood for a few years it’s easy to tell from the grain, the checks, the weight, and the bark not only the type of wood (balsam fir, for instance, is useless compared with Douglas fir) but its dryness and age. Since the house is enormous, it consumed twelve cords a year for the first years until I developed alternative heat and reinsulated and sealed up the holes. I practically became a high priest of fire.
Woodcutting is a great unsung calling—these days a religion known only to rural communities. Loggers used to be mythic heroes in a dangerous profession, but because of the greed of the multinationals, their honest, dangerous labour has been tainted by the environmental degradation caused by bad logging practice. Also, surprisingly, burning well-cured wood in today’s high-tech stoves is not environmentally dangerous, unless you live in a populated valley prone to air inversions, where some regulation might be necessary.
My favourite wood is arbutus—called ironwood by the locals, with good reason—but big-leaf maple and Douglas fir are fine, and alder is usable. How many people can recognize the difference between a standing fir and hemlock? Fewer can recognize these trees by their wood. How many chop their own wood today? Like farming, chopping wood is becoming a lost art. Will our grandchildren be living off algae and synthesized proteins, dwelling in homes heated by solar arrays or distant power-creation mega-projects? Will a thermostat be all they know about that human essential—warmth?
Once, a citified friend was cooking on our wood stove, and her stir-fry began turning into a stew. She gasped, panicking. “How do I turn this thing up!” There were no knobs, of course. My father used to say: “If you want a fire, you have to burn wood.” And there’s nothing like a bin of cedar kindling to set the stovetop glowing orange. Chinese stir-fry and coffee are natural allies of a wood stove. My favourite sound on a cold morning is the clanking of a kitchen stove being cleaned and fired up.
Those who live with wood spend hours, days, perhaps years in front of the chopping block. The art of the axe must be learned through long practice. Chopping wood only looks easy. In the old days, children learned to cut kindling and, if they kept all their fingers and toes, graduated to the axe. Mike, as a tyke, had to stand in a zinc washtub to protect his toes. Some woodchoppers prefer a single-bitted axe, others the classic double-bitted blade—a tool of beauty, but like household knives, it’s impossible to keep sharp if helpful friends get hold of it. As much as I love a good axe, I shifted to mauls long ago because enthusiastic guests kept ruining my axe blades. Also, I have to take down our giant big-leaf maples when they go punky. Splitting a knotty, four-foot round with a double-bitted axe is no fun. Besides, you can reverse the maul and use it as a sledgehammer on your steel wedges.
Wedging is another art. For a start, like the axe or maul, the wedge requires finding the key spot at the rim of the round. Amateurs will whomp an axe into the centre of a wet green round and then spend an eternity wriggling it out. Learning the art of “seeing” the split point in a round is a lifelong quest. As with a karate punch or chop you aim for the bottom, not the top, of your round. The blow is achieved by seeing your way through to the other side.
It’s been remarked of the lumberjack: “He makes all his love in the forest and chops all his wood in the whorehouse.” The woodcutter walks in and out of history and mythology, whether it’s Gilgamesh, humanity’s first recorded work of literature, which takes its impetus from logging a sacred forest, or Paul Bunyan, or the heroes of fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Japanese have long known the special quality of woodcutting, and it is a mighty woodcutter in The Seven Samurai who’s one of the first to come to the aid of the stricken townspeople.
Finding yourself outside on a cool autumn day, shimmering with sweat in a red plaid shirt—the dogs lying behind you, the peafowl dancing suicidally in and out of the flying chunks of wood as they race for black ants and the fat, glistening bodies of termites—is as satisfying as pausing on the way into the house and admiring a full woodshed. Cutting wood means losing yourself—the way you do in meditation. That’s why electric or gas-powered wood splitters are an abomination. “It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine,” according to Aldous Huxley. The Woodchopper is a famous yogic posture, a continuous-motion exercise, used to release tension and “to energize and stimulate the whole body.”
Zen monks long ago learned the meaning behind woodcutting. “I pump water, I cut wood. How wonderful!” Their texts are full of such quotes: “When chopping wood, chop wood. When breathing, breathe.” My favourite is attributed to a particularly venerated sage: “Before enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water.”
Perhaps we woodcutters are all students of the Catholic monk Saint Benedict of Nursia, who said, “To work is to pray.” Cutting firewood, moving fluidly yet living inside the cave of the body, is a kinesthetic meditation. Every log holds the possibility of enlightenment—the moment the blade drives through, following the grain, splitting its linear universe. It’s the poetry of the everyday, the kind those monks preach; the ability to find the extraordinary in ordinary life—like a wolf on the hunt, at perfect attention to the world.
17
FENCE BUILDERS
AND TOOL USERS
IF I DON’T WALK our fences in the morning I walk them in the afternoon. A good farmer knows fences are a blessing and a curse, and demand regular scrutiny.
There was a careful man who raised emus and built his fence to the specifications of a government bulletin, complete with a strand of barbed wire on the top to discourage dogs from leaping over and attacking the emus. The fence seemed sturdy and sensible until the man realized the emus were entranced by cars and would race alongside the road, often with their heads over the fence as they tried to keep pace. It took only one mistake for an emu to slit its own throat and die, flopping beside the fence.
Animals have impressive techniques for killing themselves with fences, or wrecking them, mostly because fences are designed for our pleasure and not theirs. Our horse, LaBarisha, is a master at tangling herself i
n page wire or snake fences that she’s knocked down trying to get at the neighbour’s pasture. She’s such a pro that she recognizes immediately when she is in trouble and will patiently stand there until we discover she’s missing, search her out, and unsnarl whatever mess she’s gotten herself into. This afternoon in our eighteen-year-long day is no different. Extricating a horse from a pile of crossed rails can be disheartening, yet she’s so trusting she will allow me to lift her hind leg and back her foot up five inches, following it with the next leg. She taught me that snake fences look picturesque but they’re near-worthless with large livestock.
Robert Frost’s neighbour in “Mending Wall” said, “Good fences make good neighbours.” I don’t fully believe this. Fences are traps for stealing your time and crushing your fingers and have caused their share of feuds. In many early tribal cultures it was an insult to your community to fence a field. When we fenced our lower field across from where the new neighbours were building their house, we didn’t realize they’d sited their house to enjoy the view of our “wild meadow” instead of the generally more preferred water view of the strait. Our sheep soon created a bucolic, grassy pasture, grazing down the invasive weeds, and our neighbours were hugely disappointed because it was no longer a knee-high flowering meadow.
AFTER MIGRATORY SOCIETIES SHIFTED beyond hunting and foraging but before they succumbed to property ownership, they gated not their world but only garden crops likely to be damaged by either wild beasts or wandering livestock. The livestock—fowl, pigs, goats, cattle—lived alongside, tethered or free, depending on the local conditions.
As villages and their livestock populations expanded, the surrounding area was usually treated as a commons for all. Once the grazing around villages grew deficient as populations swelled, the animals would be herded even farther away and brought to their corrals nightly for feed or defence, breeding or birthing—if at all. Since the fields were open, to fence a house garden was regarded as merely self-defence. With further growth, good grazing could be found only so far away that families began to “own” certain areas, and eventually they moved out to work and live near their livestock. Thus began the rural life we know today. Around the world, these various stages of farming still exist, though they’re diminishing rapidly.
Grazing is an evolutionary characteristic inherited to protect herbivores from parasites and predictable actions that will attract predators. The grazing instinct also discourages overgrazing (as long as too many herbivores aren’t confined in one area) because it makes the animal constantly seek new pasture. Actually, grazing is not restricted to herbivores. Everyone, at some point, wants to graze beyond their fences, whether it’s for money or sex. With livestock, at least, grazing creates a balanced and healthy diet, especially if pasture land is not all in grass. That’s why cross-fencing and rotational grazing work better than feedlots.
Fencing ranches and farms became a legendary subject of dispute in North America, horrifying the free-roaming Native tribes. Sitting Bull noted about the colonialist farmers: “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own, and fence their neighbours away.” The fencing conflicts with the Native cultures culminated during the invasion of the American West by settlers and farmers; and then, shortly after, small herder-farmers also found themselves battling the big cattle ranches when they began fencing their land.
Barbed wire, “the devil’s rope,” is a monstrous creation. We picked up a couple of rolls of barbed wire in our early years, mostly to wrap around the base of the cages (animals go under, through, and over fences) built to protect our fruit trees from deer and livestock. My history with barbed wire consists of five years of putting it up and ten painful years of untangling it and taking it to the recycling yard— and I have the scars to prove it. Barbed wire will grow right into the ground, wrap around anything moving (including sheep or me or the horse), generally endangering lives, temperament, and skin. It can spring the fencing nails out of a rotten cedar post and attack you from thirty feet away. The dogs love watching me wrestle a length of old wire into a roll. Dogs are secret sadists, and they will leap barking around me as the wire slowly eats me alive.
UPON OUR ARRIVAL, Trauma Farm was an abandoned goat ranch with only one distant neighbour. As in the early days of settlement around the world, the goats freely roamed the fields cleared by the original owners. There were corrals for milking and separating the billy goats, and a deer fence around the garden and the house, but that was knocked down. Without goats the meadows were waist-high in places. I wandered through the grounds and discovered many exotic introductions: Magnolia stellata trees chewed to the ground, rare pines and roses, a few fruit trees. It doesn’t take more than a couple of years in this climate for a garden to return to the forest. Sharon was thrilled (that changed later as the workload increased) because this was her opportunity to garden on a large scale.
I set our nineteen-year-olds to the firewood and fencing immediately. I’m still grateful for their energy and what they taught me about being young again, despite the near-constant head-banging rap music at full volume on the ghetto blaster, which Sharon once threatened to throw into the pond during a particularly misogynistic song. It’s said rail splitting made Abraham Lincoln into the man he was. I believe that. It’s hard work and an art. Those lads made more than 2,300 cedar rails for the snake fencing that we erected to cross-fence the acreage. Joaquin, wide and muscled, was a great rail splitter, but our boy Roben, smaller and wiry, had both the eye and the strength and could split thirteen-foot-long rails so fast it would make Lincoln spin in his grave. Roben often made as many seventy-five cedar rails in a day. I got chainsaw elbow from bucking up all the deadfalls and sick cedars I felled for fencing.
FENCING IS NECESSARY, BUT gates are the pathways through the world of the farm. Livestock soon learn to wait by the gate at dinnertime. I watch them amble up the field in the afternoon, moseying along, grazing as if the dinner bucket were the furthest thing from their mind, but they know where it all comes from, and they look upon the house as a temple and me as a capricious god who mysteriously appears with the grain they covet. This does not stop them from attempting to help themselves. Our first horse, Stonewall Jackson, was a master gate cracker with those rubbery lips like fingers. He’d draw back the bar on a gate before you could turn around and yell, and then he’d rip a bag of feed out of the pickup in the driveway. I finally had to put spring-loaded latches on the gates—as well as the pull bars.
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 th
at 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.
