by Brian Brett
Whether you’re dealing with battlefields, computers, or tractors, the absurd is essential to life. What interests me is how we confront the absurd. When I consider honestly the two ends of the spectrum of modern farming, whether it’s the reductionist methodology of agribusiness or the traditional culture of the small farm, I can only recognize how absurd both are. Each style of farming resembles what Samuel Johnson called a man’s second marriage after a failed first one: “The triumph of hope over experience.”
Albert Camus tells us in The Myth of Sisyphus: “The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.” And he’s right if you consider cosmic irrelevance to be silence. The noisiness of life confronts death. The absurd is what brings us to the deep well of traditional knowledge behind the tricksters in so many aboriginal mythologies. How do we face our need for order and answers in a world whose order has no answers, only differing systems of survival?
In our human arrogance we don’t realize that animals have a lot to teach us about absurdity and desire. I see it every day as events unfold around the dogs and the sheep or in the uncanny manoeuvres of my parrot, contriving to figure out ways to surprise me. If you are a lazy thinker, and unobservant, you begin to believe that absurdity happens only to humans who drive tractors into fires. But if you contemplate the natural world you soon recognize stupid, blind fate and foolishness everywhere.
A couple of decades ago I was skiing a steep, snowy ridge when I saw something that brought me to a sudden stop. In a pine tree growing alongside the cliff, about five feet away, a handsome buck stared back at me with dead eyes, impaled on a branch fifty feet above the forest floor. He hadn’t been hanging there long. Did he panic at a noise and take a wrong leap? The natural world is full of false turns, which is why I’ve gradually learned not to become so angry about the stupidities of the human species. Absurdity is a constant, whether it’s two dogs bonking heads as they try to enter a gate from opposite directions or a gander attacking a horse. Guests at the farm often warn me with breathless voices that a lamb is limping. The truth is, the lambs are lways limping. These frisky little champions of idiocy have perfected every conceivable technique for falling into holes. Nor is foolishness restricted to domesticated animals—the poor dead buck was proof enough that blind fate thrives just as freely in the wild.
SMALL JOYS ON THE FARM
Winter came weird this year, as it always does—
cool and wet—rain after rain, the ponds flooding,
the sheep limping on rotten hooves.
Then the cold snapped its brittle fingers
and a sheet of ice shielded the ponds
for a week before the rain came again,
leaving a deceptive film of water on the slick surface.
I was sitting by the window drinking red wine
in the afternoon, depressed, lost in my life,
losing money on a farm, thinking about the large
destruction my race has engraved into the earth,
when the flock of mallards whistled through
the rock maples.
I was alone, except for the animals, the sheep
and the horse,
the audience of winter crows dotted like black
crescent moons
on the green pastures that were wearing me down.
The mallards hit the secret ice like a circus pouring
onto a stage, skulls driving into the earthen bank,
tangles of feathers, collisions, and sliding webbed feet,
a duck braking with its beak, leaving a white crease
like the track of a lost arrow leading to the shore as
fifteen mallards attempted to regather the honour
of a flock.
Even the crows rushed to the shoreline
to witness the relics of this indignity
while the last ducks waddled gracelessly
off the ice like miniature Charlie Chaplins.
And for a slender moment in the furrow of time,
on a farm in nowhere, everyone stopped to rejoice
and wonder,
horse and sheep and mallards and man and crows.
Yes, the ecology retains its own madness,
attended or unattended by us—
this strange planet overflowing with
odd carcasses skating on hidden ice.
Because so many of us live apart from nature today, it’s easy to lose our place in the cosmic lunacy of existence. Funniest-video shows on television are a riot, but they don’t carry the same otherworldliness as watching a mink cavalierly skip down the road while being stalked by a white peacock. Nor does a photocopier machine that won’t quit zooming or a video that dies in the closing scene of a dramatic film have the same immediacy as an animal nativity. Sure, we encounter daily drama and tragedy in ghettoes and work accidents, but while I’ve had my share of riotous times on the streets of our cities, I didn’t begin to understand absurdity in its fullness until arriving at the farm.
I always thought the world was strange. Maybe that’s why I can smile at the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s flippant remark “It never got weird enough for me.” But it’s gotten pretty close for Sharon and me—such as the time we decided to drain and excavate the biggest pond, enlarging and deepening it. With the increasing droughts of the recent decade the pond had begun to fall dangerously low by the end of summer. The loss of irrigation water in late August is no fun on a farm. Before the excavator dipped into the bottom muck remaining after I’d pumped out the last of the water, I grew suspicious. “I think there’s fish in that mud,” I told the operator. “Empty your bucket on the ridge between the ponds, so if there’s fish, we can scoop them into the lower pond.”
He hooked the bucket into the mud, and when he opened it above the green field a multitude of golden flashes poured forth in a muddy blob of slithering leaping, twitching goldfish up to a foot long and six inches deep. The dogs went crazy, snapping up the smaller fish, tossing them into the air, and swallowing the fish whole, while Sharon and I yelled them back and madly scooped fish into the lower pond. Even the quiet, dignified excavator operator was soon on his knees in the mud, scooping up fish (at $120 an hour, I might add) and heaving them into the pond.
I decided there could be money in these fish, and I didn’t want to choke the lower pond with too many, so when the excavator dumped the next load we scooped them into water-filled garbage cans, hundreds of fish to a can. Goldfish can gulp air and, even though confined, could survive while we finished the pond work. Only a half-dozen perished, but I was still desperate to get them out of their overcrowded containers and either back into the pond or sold. Naturally, we discovered there was no market for pond fish in the fall months, and I ended up returning them to the redug pond once it began quickly refilling. They’re still out there, feeding the herons and the ospreys, and me occasionally, if I decide to scare a guest by serving up a giant deep-fried goldfish with a sweet-and-sour sauce.
THE MOST ABSURD MOMENTS come suddenly. Mike and I had been slaughtering pigs all morning, and we were covered with gore. We finally got the carcasses into the cooler. While we were working we’d made a deal on five laying hens I wanted to take home. We were walking down the roadway between the barn and his utility shed when I slipped on a big clump of goose shit. My slide was stopped by a rock. I glanced at my foot. It was twisted weirdly— pointing left while my legs were straight ahead. We both looked at it.
“Oh man,” I said. “I twisted my ankle on that goose shit.”
“Just like that?” Mike asked, befuddled by how quickly it had happened. I hadn’t even fallen. I lifted my leg. The foot was practically hanging.
“This is not good,” I said. “But I’ve never broken a bone in my life except when I shot off my finger twenty-five years ago.” Since I wasn’t worried about it, I just grabbed the foot and straightened it out. The thing clicked into place. The pain was tolerable, but I have a high
pain threshold. “I better collect my chickens and get out of here.”
Mike was confused. “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I must have ripped a muscle. Catch those chickens. I’m not leaving without them.”
We got the five chickens crated and in my truck, but the leg was starting to throb. “It’s hurting. I have to leave before the shock wears off.” The truck had a heavy-duty manual transmission and clutch, and every gear change was excruciating. I managed to drive home, the last half-mile in first gear. At the inner gate I pulled up and stepped down from the truck. A lightning bolt of pain shot up my leg and hit my head. I almost fainted. I was on the ground. The shock had worn off. I wanted to vomit.
“Sharon?” I called like a child or a dying man wanting his mother. “Sharon?” I crawled through the gate because I couldn’t stand anymore. The fifty-foot deck leading to the kitchen was now a mile long. “Sharon,” I whispered. “Sharon, I think I’m in trouble.” I vomited over the side of the deck, into the flower garden, where it wouldn’t be seen, and crawled forward. By now my calls were only whispers. So much for my high pain threshold. “Sharon. I need help.”
I crawled to the kitchen door and pushed my way in. “Sharon? I’ve hurt myself.” Finally, she heard me and rushed into the kitchen. She got me into a chair, where I lolled about in excruciating pain. “I think I broke my leg. We have to go to the hospital.” She tried to touch the obviously damaged foot. But I wouldn’t let her.
“I’m disgusting. I can’t go in like this. Take my clothes off.” Since Sharon worked at the emergency ward, she immediately knew what I was thinking. Pride is one of the absurd wonders of human life. I hadn’t shaved lately and I was covered with pig’s blood and guts and feathers. I was a spectacular sight, and I knew it would embarrass her among the people she worked with. Somehow we got my clothes off, and Sharon brought a bowl of hot, soapy water. Together, we washed and shaved me, and then I tenderly dragged clean clothes onto my carcass. I put my arm on her shoulder, and we limped out to the car. I was drooling with pain by the time we reached emergency.
They put me on a stretcher and hauled me in and X-rayed me. It turned out I’d broken my fibula on that goose-shit slide. But miraculously, I’d put it back into place. The doctor was impressed. “I’ve never seen anyone set their own broken leg so beautifully.” Normally, with a break like that they’d have to carve me up and insert pins. However, the swelling had locked it into place. The doctor didn’t need to do anything. I’d done his job for him, though I probably caused myself more pain. “Don’t ever try that again, you lucky fellow.” They slapped a cast on and shot some Demerol into me, and in an hour I was good to go. By then I was woozy and cheeky enough to ask for a doggy bag of Demerol, but they weren’t amused. So I cheerfully waltzed out of the door with my new heavy-duty cast and my blood full of narcotics.
I was a lucky boy indeed. Farming accidents are not always so minor. On June 8, 1948, Cecil Harris was repairing his tractor when it fell on him. The old boy couldn’t haul himself out and he knew he was messed up internally. He managed to free his pocket knife and carved on the fender: “In case I die in this mess I leave all to the wife.” Then he signed it before he lost consciousness and eventually died. He had the presence of mind to recognize that without a will Canadian law would put the family assets into a temporary legal limbo, which would have hurt his beloved wife financially. The fender is now in the University of Saskatchewan College of Law library—as an example of a legal will, and a testament to forethought in the face of death and the absurdity of life. When I consider how weak and craven I had become after a mere broken leg, I’m ashamed of myself.
HOW DOES ONE LIVE consciously? Only with praise, I think—by celebrating the landscape of life that we don’t understand and never will. What do you do when, as Camus discusses in The Myth of Sisyphus, you finally acknowledge your inevitable death, the death of all things? You can become a hedonist like Don Juan or a conqueror, seizing what you want before you die. You can hide behind organized religion and take instruction from preachers who insist there is a creator designing your life. You can accept defeat and commit suicide, perhaps the weakest of those choices. Or you can live with all your senses alert to the world. Live in beauty and then die an artist. That was the best answer Camus could devise, and it’s a good answer. In the end Camus argues for neither science nor God, and despite being tagged an existentialist, he is one of the most optimistic of philosophers. He argues for existence. That’s what he meant by existentialism.
For him the story of the Greek trickster Sisyphus provides a clear example of a man living life at his fullest, doomed by the gods to forever push a rock up a hill only to watch it roll back down, over and over again. For Camus, that’s the moment Sisyphus is most alive—watching that damned stone roll back down. That’s when he understands the comedy of the world, and so he turns and goes to fetch the rock, fully self-aware and conscious of the comedy inside his personal tragedy. You could call this the story of farming.
WE WERE WATCHING A trashy Hollywood film on television. Suddenly, the cat went strange and began yowling. Tara, the black Labrador, was under the table sucking up the popcorn the parrot was throwing from the dish attached to his perch. They both stared at the cat. We tossed the annoying cat into the mud room.
After the film, Sharon put the dog out and started screaming. She saw what the cat had been sensing—it was a dead peahen, her bloody head resting on the doorsill. Lady Jane, sweet Lady Jane, had fought off a raccoon but her skull was fractured. She’d crawled from her destroyed nest in the bush to the greenhouse door before she expired. Her pathetic trust that we could save her made me want to scream at my world. While peafowl can fight off a raccoon, the hen is at a disadvantage on the ground, defending her nest, because she won’t abandon her eggs or young. When a raccoon stumbles upon a nesting hen, it probably feels about the same as a young mugger discovering a drunk in a business suit staggering down a dark alley.
The next year, when nesting season came I was determined to protect Lady Jane’s daughter, Lady. I had the good fortune to find her nest immediately—peahens remain still on their nests and are nearly invisible in the brush. I phoned around and discovered a farmer who had a broody hen resolutely attempting to hatch a porcelain egg, which he’d placed under her in case he needed an emergency hatchery.
Since I feared Lady would hate me forever, I decided to disguise myself. I found a pair of rubber gloves and some overalls. Sharon announced I’d look terrific in a feed bag, so she cut out eyeholes and slit the sides to fit it over my shoulders. Then she handed me a cute little basket with a bright red towel to wrap the warm eggs in. There I was, all two hundred pounds of me, with an empty hog-grower bag over my head, gloved and padded, clutching a tiny red basket, resembling either a deranged IRA gunman or a monstrous Red Riding Hood. In retrospect I now realize I was the victim of an elaborate practical joke by Sharon.
Restraining her laughter as much as she could, Sharon said, “I’ll start the truck.”
I nodded my feed bag and lunged into the woods, praying nobody would drop by for a visit. This would be the capper to my reputation on the island. I smashed my way through the brush, trying to be scary, which wasn’t hard. It’s tricky stumbling around dense shrubbery with a feed bag on your head and a delicate basket in hand. I practically fell on the nest. Lady regarded me with disdain as she backed away from the eggs, reminding me of my crabby grade-school teacher after a kid had vomited on her desk. Lady didn’t even fight while I gathered up the eggs and threw some spiky debris onto her rudimentary nest, hoping this would be enough to keep her out of the raccoon’s clutches. I’m convinced she knew exactly who I was but was so astonished by my performance she temporarily forgot about her nest. I fled through the bush, triumphantly holding the wrapped eggs in the basket, and leaped into the truck after tearing away my feed bag and other gear, feeling like a bank robber who’d just pulled off the big one. I said to Sharon, “Let’s
get out of here.” Those eggs had about thirty minutes before they’d lose viability.
As Sharon drove off, she turned to me and said, “If you’d told me ten years ago this was what farming was going to be like, I would have left you.”
And we both started to laugh . . . hopelessly . . . hysterically . . . .
By the time we returned—the eggs now under a slightly annoyed hen who would soon be hatching the strangest chicks—it was dusk. In a month we’d pick up those chicks and raise them. But tonight we walked down to the lower pond. The moon had risen behind the half-dead big maple reflecting on the sheet surface. Myriads of small bats skimmed the water, ghost-flying for insects, dipping once in a while to shiver the mirror of water.
Ajax gave his long nerve-tearing scream from the maple, and distantly, behind the house, high in the cedars, Lady replied, a little sadly I thought, but safe, at least for tonight.
NOT EVERY FARMER ENJOYS the absurd. You have to be a bit deranged to even consider taking up farming. As the old farmer said, farming is tough because it’s so close to the ground. Faced with dead birds, the progress traps of human culture, the vagaries of weather, intransigent government regulators, clueless customers, and insane income tax forms, farming cultivates a dry wit and patience, an almost Buddhist ability to accept the fortune of the natural world. What did the farmer say when he won the lottery? “I guess I’ll just keep on farming until it’s all gone.” He understood living in beauty.
One of our south island farmers leased a neighbour’s field and used the elegant heritage barn to store the hay after he mowed and baled it every year. Recently, the uninsured, empty barn burned to the ground.
