Somewhere on the long bypass around Kansas City, the pair of Red Devon bull calves had had enough. They had loaded easily enough that morning. The seller had met me in the parking lot of the Great Mall of the Great Plains in Olathe. I had driven 11 hours to get the calves, and now, only an hour into the drive home, they were trying to climb out the back of the small horse trailer. An opening intended only to allow a horse to gaze out from its trailer stall was incentive and opportunity to these two boys. I stopped on the eastern side of KC, found a farm supply store, and bought a panel of hog fencing. With the help of loaner bolt cutters, I trimmed the panel to fit the opening and put an end to the escape escapades.

If you farm or have a homestead, you have your own catalog of livestock-transporting stories to share. Because if you have an urge to acquire stock, or an urgent need to move them, you will use whatever conveyance is most readily at hand, whether trailer, truck, car, wheelbarrow, or lead and halter. To haul animals is to give full scope for the unpredictable to happen with predictable regularity. Like in the case of my friend who was hauling a load of hogs to slaughter when his truck broke down …

On I-40.

At rush hour.

In downtown Nashville.

Man, did I laugh long and hard as he told his story. I knew firsthand that if your trailer is going to develop a terminal malfunction, it is not going to happen in your driveway. Rush hour in a large city on one of the busiest interstates in the country, under a tight deadline — yep, that sounds most likely.

At the outbreak of Covid, the hog industry was faced with processors closing and the consequent backlog and ultimate collapse of the complex chain of farrowing and finishing pigs destined for the supermarket and the non-existent restaurant trade. Small farms like ours were the beneficiaries of panicking meat customers and panicking mass meat producers. One man in our area packed his large cattle trailer with weaned piglets he bought in Kentucky from one of the giant farrowing operations. He drove around the Southeast, stopping at strategic places to sell to small farms and homesteaders. He sold hundreds of weanlings a week before the industrial machine began to sort out the bottleneck.

Cindy bought four piglets for our farm and four more for friends and neighbors. She hauled them in her hatchback, between the rear seat and the back door. Good idea — no need to hook up the trailer for eight 20-pound weanlings. Except … 10 minutes into the 20-minute drive home, those piglets, which apparently had been holding their sphincters tight since Kentucky, decided to let loose. Over the next month, every time we decided to head off the farm, Cindy would open her mouth to ask the question and I would hasten an answer before it was voiced: “Let’s take my truck.” Because pig shit lingers. Boy, does it linger.

I’ve hauled geese back from North Carolina in a rental car. I’ve hauled them from Ohio in the passenger seat of my truck. Cindy has hauled goats, newly purchased rams, and injured ewes (not mentioning pigs again) in her assorted hatchbacks over the years. We have each driven to the post office a dozen times to collect ducklings, goslings, and chicks.

All of this was on my mind Friday morning when the phone rang. Our postmistress was on the line. “Your geese are here,” she said. I jumped in my truck and drove the 15 miles to our rural PO in Philadelphia. At the counter, the sounds of baby poultry from multiple boxes made conversation and thinking difficult. This time of year it is air travel (fittingly) that seems to be the preferred method for transporting birds. By shouting, I communicated what was needed, picked up the box of our goslings, which had shipped from New Mexico the day before, placed them on the passenger seat, and drove back to the farm, this time without incident.

…………………………………………………………….

Reading this weekend: In Praise of Good Bookstores (J. Deutsch). This is a philosophical defense of the ancient economic structures of an uneconomic cultural cornerstone, the bookstore. It rewards with careful reading … mostly.

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