by Brian Brett
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.
THERE WAS A CEDAR blocking the tractor’s route to the lower fence and the road, and I regretted having to slay it. This is all part of the circle. In order to pick up your firewood you need to make a road, and to make the road you have to fell a tree. It’s an endless circle, the worm eating its tail. Construction and reconstruction. This tree had lived at least a century longer than me, but it had to go. There was no route around. It was almost five feet in diameter. Regretfully, I made my back cut. When I started my finishing cut, the trunk settled curiously on my saw. I hammered in a couple of wedges. They didn’t make any difference. I trudged up to the house and roused the boys, who were busy lunching on a crown roast, a big jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. I’ve long given up questioning what a hard-working young man will eat, and I didn’t even grimace at the sandwich of beef slabs and peanut butter Jason was wolfing down.
I needed help. I’d met a strange tree.
For the young, challenges are what the world is about. Along with Roben we had four of them staying with us that summer: Paul, Jason, Seb, and Joaquin. They trooped down behind me to the tree, where I shot an arrow with a string attached through the branches near the crown of the cedar, and we drew up a thick hemp rope and cinched it tight. Four of them stood in line at the end, ready to yard on the rope when I gave the word. Meanwhile, I’d directed Seb to the road beyond the fence, where he could warn any neighbours if anything went wrong and the tree fell backwards while they were driving by. I sledgehammered more wedges into this fat cedar. It settled further, now leaning towards the road, threatening to crush my big new saw. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’ve felled a number of trees in my life, and I’ve never seen one behave like this.
A turkey vulture glided across the pasture. Everyone watched in awe as this normally shy traveller of the thermals backflapped and landed gently on the crown of the tree I was cutting.
A vulture?
On my tree?
There was an unearthly cracking groan, and the vulture lifted into the sky as the tree reeled backwards. Seb was so enthralled by this piece of theatre that he forgot to check for traffic. My neighbours were driving up the hill as the cedar hit the road with a crash, taking out the phone and power lines of every house beyond our farm, only narrowly missing their car. The boys stood in the grass, mouths agape, the useless hemp rope yanked out of their hands, the vulture circling above us. “That was a show,” I noted angrily, retrieving my chainsaw, miraculously untouched by the mishap.
“Wow,” they kept repeating in their best stoner voices, impressed, as I thumped up the hills to call the power and phone companies to inform them I’d cut everyone off the grid. Worse, the tree had taken out the lines after they divided to go to our house and up the hill, so we still had phone and power. It was two days before my neighbours finally got their telephones back. bc Hydro, the power company, was quicker. When the Hydro crew pulled up we’d already bucked the tree and removed the pieces and cleared the road. I’d discovered the source of the disaster (aside from the fortune-telling vulture). Decades ago the cedar had been struck by lightning, topping it. A lateral branch then became the new leader, shooting ten feet away from the original trunk, on the side facing the road. The tree later regrew so bushy that it looked normal from the ground. The tree was also rotting from the mishap and was ultimately doomed, and there was no way I could have known it was off-centre, but that didn’t make me feel much better.
The Hydro crew were annoyed, even though I’d saved the twisted crown to prove nature’s duplicity. I took some serious abuse and financial threats but Hydro never billed me for the damage I caused. I had to stand on the road in front of my smirking gang of helpers and abjectly accept the lecture I deserved. I was told later that it’s the custom to allow every islander one tree across the lines, at least if it’s an authentic accident. I’ve used up my tree.
18
THIS NATURE
OF THE ABSURD
I’M USUALLY IN my study by dawn and outside in the afternoon, doing my chores, because I can’t take the heat emanating from the attached greenhouse. The parrot loves the heat and his perch, especially because it commands a view of the road. If he sees cars approaching he starts shouting, “It’s party time!” Tuco has been living with me too long. Twenty-four years now. Today I’ve returned, suddenly haunted by work, and slipped upstairs before dinner.
He was bored and I was wearing the letters off my keyboard, already sweating in the heat pouring in from the greenhouse, when I heard a buzzing while I answered a few overdue emails. I glanced up as the wasp zigzagged through the open greenhouse into the study, making an impressive dash past a snapping Tuco, although Tuco is so fast he can bite you twice before you realize you’ve been bitten the first time.
I watched these manoeuvres with a dumb curiosity, until the wasp made a sharp turn and dived into my open shirt, stinging me above the heart, before stinging its way down my belly as I leaped to my feet, cursing, ripping my shirt open, slapping at my chest and belly until it tumbled out and flew past the bird, now so impressed that he only glared balefully at it. The wasp exited the bright greenhouse while the stings reddened my chest and my heart started pounding.
“Where did that come from?” I whined to Tuco, numbed and throbbing.
It came from the world. The way it always does: like the day I was working on the coop while Sharon mucked about with her burn pile of blackberries, old prunings, paper feed bags, and broken-up lumber far beyond recycling. I use my wood thirty different ways until I finally give up and accept its ashes for the garden. She had an epic pile smouldering, but the fire wouldn’t take, which was surprising, because Sharon is a closet pyromaniac.
She found me and said, “Why don’t you heap it up with the tractor?” Give a man a tractor and a fire and you’ve instantly created a dangerous combination. Soon I was using the bucket to fluff up the pile and make it burn better. The smouldering mess caught and began to flame. Then the tractor died in the pile. There was an exquisite moment of quiet terror as the motor coughed out, counterpointed by the crackles of the growing fire under my bucket. “Oh shit,” I gulped, after checking the fuel gauge. The tractor is so old and trustworthy and so seldom used that I couldn’t recall when I’d filled it up. For a moment, I couldn’t even remember where the gas tank was. The last time I’d lifted the hood I’d discovered a mouse nest on the filter. I had no diesel fuel anyway. The fire crackled louder, and a whoosh of flame erupted under the bucket.
“What’s the matter?” Sharon shouted.
“I ran out of gas. We have to push it out of the fire.” I set everything in neutral and climbed off.
Sharon looked at me with that kind of resigned contempt you never want to see on the face of your wife. “Push it out of the fire? It’s too big!”
“Come on, it’s almost downhill,” I said, leaning into the big back tire. The thing wiggled slightly, which inspired her enough to lean against the other tire. I had the bucket lightly resting on the fire pile, and the hydraulics were holding. If the bucket was down we’d have been finished. I rammed my shoulder into the tire and shouted, “Heave! Fast!” The fire was growing larger by th
e second. There’s nothing like desperation to triple your strength. The adrenalin was throbbing in my blood vessels, and the tractor inched backwards. “Heave!” Six inches. “Heave!” A foot. “Heave!” Two feet. Heave!” Four feet. We were on a roll! “Heave!” My backside was getting hot, and the fire six feet high. “Heave!” The tractor was out. We sat down on a couple of firewood rounds, watching the beautiful licking flames soar into the air. “That was a thrill.” I beamed encouragingly at Sharon, while she looked at me with a bright-eyed, breathless astonishment.
“We actually pushed that big tractor out of a fire!” she said. Sometimes she gets a real thrill out of the hare-brained stunts I invent.
ABSURDITY HAS LIVED WITH the planet since the first cell divided. The mutations that led to the platypus and the nuclear bomb are the ultimate theatre of the absurd. That’s why cultures need their tricksters as much as they need their heroes. Looking at the American Heritage Dictionary definition of absurdism, I discover its roots come from ab (away from) and surdus (silence). It’s the noise of the world. “Ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable.” And we all encounter it in our daily living.
Because I’ve been living in the impressively varied kingdom of Trauma Farm, I suspect I see more of the absurd than many people. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my life hauling hay in the rain. But human encounters with the strange and the nonlinear carry greater weight when lives depend on them, as any soldier or pistol-toting gang kid in the urban wastelands will tell you. Fighting with a computer for ten hours only to discover you failed to tick a software function doesn’t carry the same visceral impact as a tractor running out of fuel in a fire pile, or a bull falling into an abandoned well. This could account for the rising need for extreme adventure tourism among urbanites.
