Monthly Archives: July 2017

These are the Days of the Evil Uncle

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We are currently hosting my fifteen-year-old nephew on the farm for two weeks. I’ve been devoting all my spare hours to developing fiendish new ways to torture this city-born boy. But, it has proved more difficult than this Evil Uncle imagined. I have put him on the fencing rack for seven straight hours, forced him to work in the greenhouse all morning, restring hundreds of feet of electric fence for hogs….and, he was still smiling.

But, on Tuesday I have a plan to finally break his spirit. We will be putting up over three-hundred square bales in the barn. That should do the trick.

In the meantime, breakfast. For, even the condemned deserve a final meal, or, two.

On Becoming an Evolutionary Cul-de-sac

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I was 16 when I put brand new brakes on my car. It took most of an afternoon, and it was a task that finally completed gave me a real sense of accomplishment. True, I had a couple of small parts left over. But I was young and I operated under the assumption that the auto parts store had given me either spares or parts that didn’t go with my model.

Once finished, I climbed in the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and took off down the road. Wow! It was a smooth ride and I felt great. That is, until I came up fast to my first stop sign and applied the brakes. Odd feeling, pushing down on the brake pedal at 50 miles an hour and encountering no resistance. It’s a memory I can still summon readily to this day. Fortunate for me, the auto engineers had built in a backup breaking mechanism called the emergency brake, a handy invention that I deduced might be best to deploy … quickly.

I give you this preamble as evidence that even though a person comes from solid civil engineering stock, basic mechanical skill is not an inherited gene. We all have the friend, often on speed dial, who is great at teasing out the workings of ‘most any thingamajig. But my solutions to mechanical failures are victories hard won. The puzzles that five-year-olds routinely solve on Facebook in a cute two minutes elude me — sometimes for hours, and sometimes for many years.

The Neanderthals who lurk in my ancestry were a smartish but conservative group of bipeds. They developed a reliable tool kit over the millennia to make their lives run smoother. But then they apparently had a community meeting and said, Enough is enough, and they settled in for the next 100,000 years and made no new improvements. I kind of admire that about them; perhaps we could learn a thing or two from that approach to technology.

But then there is my H. sapiens DNA. It allows me, eventually, to not only see a solution but also want to implement it. Yesterday, for instance, we were unloading feed barrels. Cindy backed up the tractor and boom pole to the bed of the truck. Dangling from the boom pole was a nifty contraption called a barrel lifter. This simple invention is the best $40 we ever spent. It has two metal “hands” at the end of a chain that grab the edge of the barrel. Once the boom pole is raised, the barrel lifter and barrel in tow swing up and out of the truck bed. No muscling required.

The first barrel was a breeze. The second barrel presented a slight problem. It didn’t completely clear the bed of the truck. Taking on my finest Thinker pose, I struggled for a solution. After some minutes, the little gray cells began to sing: It’s the weight, I deduced triumphantly! Each 300-pound feed barrel removed took more weight off the truck suspension, thereby raising the bed of the truck a couple of inches and causing each subsequent barrel to drag along the tailgate when hoisted. But voilà! A few adjustments to the tractor’s three-point hitch, which in turn shortened the top link’s angle after each barrel, gave the boom pole a higher lift. Problem solved.

This Eureka moment may not mean much to you engineering types. But small successes like this one are huge to my sapiens self. Victories for H. sapiens, yet disappointments to my inner Neanderthal, who, wrinkling his jutting brow, mutters, What’s next? Will he be wanting to invent block and tackle?

Perhaps. But I must leave that astonishing accomplishment for later. I’ve just had a brain flash that there just might be a better way to knap flint! Stay tuned.

Giving the Finger to Modernity

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I practice at being out of step with modernity.

The mercury is already pushing the mid-80s by afternoon, and clouds are beginning to build in the west. I sit in my car in a Pennsylvania parking lot next to a mattress store, watching. Across a field, a boy is perched on the bench seat of a hay wagon, holding the reins to a team of Belgians. Farther back stands an older boy. He is reaching down and catching square bales as they are tossed up to him from other boys on the ground. He already has stacked a layer three-high on the 16-foot wagon. The driver, maybe 8 to 10 years old, twitches the reins and moves the load forward every few minutes before again coming to a stop. Up ahead, the father is driving a second team that pulls a gasoline-powered baler, spitting bales onto the ground at regular intervals as it tracks the windrows of hay.

The scene I observe is a Hieronymus Bosch painting with a twist: In the background of the tableau, the family of man and boys gathers forage for the winter. At the forefront, a stoplight blinks commands on a four-lane highway, the center of a tortured world of strip mall architecture, where the obese and the tattooed pour onto the roads and the pavement groans under bumper-to-bumper traffic. A boy, the same age as the ones working the field, sits in a car, screen-staring his young years away. A man in the front passenger seat stares ahead, oblivious to any other way of living. A Chick-fil-A and an Olive Garden shoehorn the paved landscape and the fields of the family at work.

Farther down the road, back in the stream of modernity, I pass three different buggies of Amish women, all driving teams, their children aboard, moving down the highway at five to eight miles an hour. If the journey is indeed more important than the destination, then these women and their children have learned the lesson well. They are chatting and laughing, as their fellow travelers, mere feet away, are entombed and unsmiling.

Do they ever glance at the cars and wonder, May Swenson-like: “Those soft shapes, 
shadowy inside the hard bodies — are they their guts or their brains?”

I pull into my hotel parking lot, retrieve my luggage, check in, and go up to my room. I open the curtains to glimpse the last of the day. Across another parking lot, across a road, lies another field. In the dying evening light, another man and a team of Percherons pull a manure spreader across the pastures back to the barn. On the seat, on either side of him, are his two sons, sharing an unheard conversation.

Standing at the window of the third floor, in isolation and sadness and cowardice, I think, we chase our lives across the decades seeking a sense of purpose. Yet our gaze is averted from the possibilities and the wisdom gained from living slowly, at five to eight miles an hour.

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Reading this weekend: The Ends of the World: volcanic apocalypses, lethal oceans, and our quest to understand earth’s past mass extinctions, by Peter Brannen. An interesting read about all the ways life has been wiped out in the past on this planet. And, it gives you a nice perch from which to contemplate the same.

Sweat and Domestic Politics

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The tall grass stings my legs like dozens of small, angry, invisible bees. I am reclaiming a 200-yard stretch of two-line electric fence that temporarily subdivides our eight-acre bottom field into two-acre parcels. Overhead, the large transmission lines that cut across our farm release enough ambient electricity to create a mild, stinging current between the grass and my bare legs.

Each week our sheep graze the new grass of one of the smaller parcels before we rotate them to the next. Each previous parcel lies in distinct states of regrowth, like snapshots between haircuts taken over a period of time. On this hot, humid afternoon, the sheep have retired to the barn panting as I, their obliging servant, walk the line with a large reel, cranking the handle slowly as I rewind the braided wire.

This job is necessary but tedious. I turn the crank and turn the crank and turn the crank and then, stooping, unhook the wire from each of the 50 plastic posts aligned across the pasture. The first strand collected, I turn back and begin reeling in the second strand, eventually returning to the starting point. Where, the task completed, so is my day. Lathered in sweat, I trudge back up the hill to the barn and put the wire away.

Earlier in the day had found me spending a couple of hours in the hoop-house. Swigging water from a large jug every 15 minutes, the greenhouse temperature at 100-plus degrees, I prepared three new beds for the next rotation of vegetables.

We use a micro-irrigation system to water the hoop-house gardens. The drip lines are connected to a four-cistern setup that harvests rainwater from our hay-barn roof. A one-hour pumping into the vegetables depletes the water in the cisterns by a third. We water every five days, giving us a 15-day supply of water. That gives us pretty decent odds that a good rain will replenish the coffers. But, in the event of a drought, we also have an underground line fed by our well from which we can water the livestock and the plants.

Returning to the house after reeling in the wire, I settle in on the front porch with a well-deserved end-of-the-day beer to watch the late evening moving in. Out in the bee yard, Cindy has been adding a super to one of the hives. As I watch her walk back up the drive, her face red and her bee suit drenched, I imagine that in this heat, working in the bee yard is much like working in the hot hoop-house.

I sit in my Adirondack chair, beer in hand, and I eye her warily as she approaches. She lingers with purpose at the top of the steps, clearly preparing to alter the course of my idyll. Because, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a cold beer must be in want of a task.

Sure enough, on queue, she channels her inner Jane Austen and says, “if you have a minute…”

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Reading this weekend: The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees, by Robert Penn

Happy Fourth of July

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Each year on July 4th, we visit a small cemetery located over the next ridge. Here is the annual holiday post from the archives.

On October 7th, 1780, the American militia, led by 1100 Overmountain Men from what is today Tennessee, cornered the British at King’s Mountain, South Carolina. In the decisive battle that followed these men changed the course of the Southern campaign for American Independence. The Battle of King’s Mountain was led and fought by backwoodsmen, including the father of Davy Crockett and many of the earliest names in Tennessee history.

Sixty or so years later in a narrow valley, in 1840 and 1843, not far from where our farm is located, down a small gravel road, two of those heroes of the American Revolution were buried in a small church cemetery. The church is long gone. Only a hundred or so graves are found in this out of the way spot. This year, as we have done for a dozen years, Cindy and I place flowers on the graves of Big Jim Campbell and William Moore to honor their memory.