224 Feet of Fencing

On a recent podcast this question was asked of me: What would I suggest to a would-be farmer as a first project? I replied that a good fence, specifically a perimeter fence, would be an ideal first step. Because in the building of a fence much is accomplished, learned, and discovered.

The replaced fence on the left. The sheep are still on the winter paddock.

While it may be somewhat unfashionable—in these days when global elites forswear borders, loyalties, and cultural identities, and even West Point decides that asking cadets to take an oath to duty, honor, and country is potentially divisive and downright antiquated—to discuss and celebrate boundaries, truly, good fencing does make for good neighbors.

One December day back in 1999 we set a corner post three feet in the ground adjacent to our barn. From that original post would evolve the fencing system that spans our entire acreage. That very first line stretched 224 feet westward toward the road, bisecting the upper portion of what would become our lower pastures. From that post and the resulting western terminal post, other lines emerged, merged, and enclosed the boundaries of our irregularly shaped farm. All of that initial fencing took a few years to complete, and factoring in improvements and repairs it is a task that has continued to occupy our attentions each year since.

On that first line we used Red Brand field fence, a thirty-two-inch-tall roll of galvanized wire held together by interwoven four-by-four squares, then topped it with three strands of barbed wire for good measure. While the height was less than adequate, the fence has, even while sagging in places with age, held to its original mission of keeping cattle and sheep in their intended pastures—though, it should be noted, on occasion an errant bull, ram, or even ewe has leapt over for love to showcase the limits on man’s will over nature. (As one farmer cleverly put it, “Where there’s a willy there’s a way.”)

That early fence held, more or less, until last Sunday. That’s when a large yearling ewe who in a bid for greener grass got her head stuck in a stretched-out square. Upon finding herself in such a predicament, she followed the instinct of every prey animal and panicked. Predators though we are, we followed suit. In the ensuing farce—as we hollered at each other, at the ewe, at the gods—we managed in spite of her antics and our collective panic to cut away some of the fencing and release her back into the flock. We closed the gap with stockman’s wire much like a fisherman mends nets. It was only then that we noticed the bottom of the fence. It had with the passing of the years become buried and rusted in the ground and was now broken beyond fixing by the ewe’s efforts to free herself. In other words, it was time to replace this oldest stretch of wire.

Forgive what may sound like an immodest boast, but after twenty-five years of near-constant work, our toolkit of basic competencies is more than adequate for many if not all challenges. Ripping out and replacing fence is old hat. Over the next couple of days, we both, together and individually, working in spare moments during our farm day, removed fence staples and clips and separated the old wire from the fence line. On Tuesday evening while Cindy prepared dinner, I pulled the last of the fence free from the ground.

The following day, a Wednesday, with the help of the Kid (the current one is home-schooled and has a flexible schedule), we rolled up the old wire, unfurled a thirty-nine-inch-tall field fence, stretched it tight with a ratcheted come-along, and attached it to the T-posts and wooden posts (including the two we set twenty-five years ago).

Total time from removal of the old wire and installation of the new wire to cleanup was only four or five hours. Working together gave us a chance to reflect on when we had put in the original fence and other stories centered around the many projects we have tackled. The manual competencies we have gained from working with our hands brings a satisfaction to our lives, a tangible “we did this.” When I get the questions from wannabe farmers, it is these moments I struggle to convey, because the answer is personal. It gets to the character of a man’s internal life and identity, and only that individual can look into himself and answer the question: will the prospect of sweat and physical work bring contentment, even joy, or will it be viewed as menial drudgery best “farmed” out to others?

For both Cindy and myself, it is in the moment of completion that we know ourselves; that we know what we can accomplish with hands to a task, that by embracing our limits and boundaries we are given a sense of who we are. That is the something, that is the everything. That is our analog to the message that place does not matter.

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Reading this week: I knocked out the first three of the Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries (L. Block) in as many days. It has been close to thirty years since I read this series with some pleasure. The intervening years have done nothing to dim my appreciation. Think of a funny wisecracking version of Sam Spade, except as a Raffles-like burglar by night and rare book dealer by day, and you will get the flavor of Bernie. I’ve also started The Pursuit of Happiness, how classical writers on virtue inspired the lives of the founders and defined America (J. Rosen). I’m only two chapters in to the work but already am mentally placing this volume in my best-of-2024 list.

A Tale of Two Ewes

Two stories, each with a death but one ending in hope.

Both accounts concern our role as caretakers in the nurturing of life and the inevitable taking of it that is ever-present on a farm. The stories are twinned together in this work, born in the blood and hope of birth before one day vanishing into decay and dust. There is no hiding from the harsh light of reality any more than we can avoid the reaper. For the farmer, no bureaucrat, politician, or soldier is on hand to shield him from weakness, standing ready to do his dirty work. No amount of ritual washing of hands while passing off decisions to a mob will absolve the choices made in his name. It is in the final accounting of what happens between those two events that matters for all living things. When, on some occasions, the “green fire” fades from an animal’s eyes, the farmer will have been on hand and watched it fade, perhaps having even been the agent of execution. Yet having been a good husband and shepherd to his charges, he will find his sad peace in it. And on better days (hopefully more often than not), through his care and nursing the light will flare back into eyes that had dimmed. Then faith and promise are renewed.

 

Killing a Ewe

No words. We both look at each other and nod agreement. I walk back to the house in the rain. This inescapable part of farming life seems never to occur on sunny days. Sad duties always require sad days for their completion.

Upstairs, next to the bed, leaning against the wall in a corner is a single-shot 16 gauge kept on hand for just these days. I pick it up and also grab a couple of shells of buckshot from a box. If an old shotgun sticks around long enough it eventually will accumulate an untold history of the most wretched uses. Killing a ewe is certainly among the most cheerless occupations for this instrument—and for the one who pulls the trigger.

I slog through the cold rain and muck back to the barn and the warm, steaming, false comfort inside. Cindy has shooed the rest of the flock out into the outer corral. Given that privacy I approach the pen where the ewe, who has lost both lambs and has prolapsed twice, stands in pain and already dying. I raise the gun, and she obligingly nuzzles the end of the barrel. I say goodbye out loud as I fire one blast, and she mercifully falls dead.

I eject the smoking shell and place the gun on a feed barrel. We each grab a leg and pull the dead ewe from the pen and down the alley of the working chute, a smear of blood marking the path on the gravel. We load the still-warm carcass into the waiting tractor bucket. We return to the barn and pick up two healthy just-born lambs, then coax their mother into a lambing pen where we can keep an eye on all three. The late afternoon becomes evening. We finish our late-day rounds of feeding and watering the sheep, hogs, cattle, chickens, and even the greens in the hoop house before I find the time to dispose of the dead ewe.

Throughout the night and into the predawn we will take turns checking on the flock of pregnant ewes and nursing ewes and their lambs.

 

Saving a Ewe

“Breech,” Cindy said.

One of our favorite ewes, Bunny (you can always know a favorite if she has been named) is in labor. She had shown signs of lambing earlier in the day, but it wasn’t until evening that the contractions began. After another hour of watchful waiting without any lambs born, Cindy makes an internal examination and discovers a large lamb in the birth canal. It is breeched, butt-end first and back legs folded under the lamb’s body. Further complicating the delivery, a second lamb is crammed head-first alongside the first—like double plugs in a drain. It’s clear that nothing will pass through without intervention.

Bunny is a seven-year-old ewe with a slightly swayed back from many multi-lamb pregnancies and a Holstein udder that swings close to the ground. She still has good teeth, though, so she can still graze, and she delivers healthy lambs, mostly twins and occasionally triplets, year after year and mothers them expertly. She clearly has grit, but it is also obvious that she is now in serious distress.

Fortunately for both of us, even after twenty-four years of raising sheep, cattle, and hogs, our experiences with difficult births remain minimal. Most of our ewes have been able to lamb easily, a trait we have selected for in our breeding program. The downside of this good providence is that our skills in dealing with a breech or other malpresentation remains rusty from lack of practice. At risk of losing both mother and lambs, we agree: it’s time to call in the vet.

An hour and half later, at 9:30 p.m., we are on the ground in the barn with our large-animal vet. (Having pulled him from his daughter’s first birthday celebration, we find that the eventual bill reflects the inconvenience.) By this time, the second lamb has somehow receded from the vaginal opening and the breeched lamb has been partially expelled by painful exertions. The vet pulls out the now-dead lamb. Its back end is cold; the front end is still warm in the birth canal. He lays it on the hay floor. Taking the very large, well-formed lamb in hand, I carry it from the barn with a plan to dispose of it in the morning.

The birth canal now clear, the vet pulls two live lambs from Bunny in quick succession. Each is exhausted and the third lamb, the smallest, is barely moving after the long-delayed entry into this world. The usual practice with delayed or difficult lambing is to rub the lamb vigorously, stick a straw in its nose to stimulate breathing, and, if needed, grab it by the legs and swing it gently to clear the airways of mucous—all of which we do.

After another few minutes both lambs are breathing and already struggling to get on their feet and nurse. The smaller third-born, a ewe lamb (the other is a large ram lamb), is unable to stand. Her back legs are splayed out and almost appear to be disjointed. Triplets are packed in the womb tight, and this one must have had her legs back for much of her time in the birth canal. We work throughout the night, taking turns during barn visits, to massage the legs until, at last, the little lamb can stand on her own. (Bunny also experienced temporary paralysis in her back end from the difficult labor and was unable initially to stand. The vet and I each grabbed a side and held her up for a few minutes. She stood, wobbly, but remained on her feet and got to the immediate job of cleaning the newborns. The vet gave her both a steroid injection for the pain and a preemptive antibacterial shot in case there were tears in the uterus from the delivery.) The farm vet—an hour after arriving, makes a quick exit, shouting over his shoulder, “I’ll send you the bill in the morning.”

Neither lamb is yet nursing; neither is standing well on its own. We prepare a substitute colostrum (the high-nutrient first milk) replacer, insert a tube down the throat and into the stomach of each lamb, and feed them. Cindy repeats this procedure twice between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. I arise at 4:30 and find a note on the coffee pot alerting me that the ram lamb is now nursing on his own. I tube-feed the smaller, wobbly ewe lamb in those early hours and again around 7.

By the time we get back out to do our morning chores, both lambs are up and walking around and both are nursing on their own. Later in the day, as well as the next, we continue to give poor Bunny a steroid shot to ease her pain. A couple of days more and she is fully recovered, albeit with some continued bleeding from the traumatic delivery. Her lambs are also fully recovered: they come to their mother when called and nurse frequently and vigorously like healthy lambs do.

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Reading this weekend: Down and Out in Paris and London (G. Orwell); A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Notes from a Secret Journal (E. Abbey); and Great American Fishing Stories (ed. L. Underwood).

 

Porch Sittin’

“Front or back?” “Front.”

I hold open the door to let her through, and she takes the rocking chair in the sun on this still-cool afternoon. This passes as a modest modern chivalric gesture on my part as I sit in the other still in the shade. Afternoon coffee ritual. She drinks from her autumn-themed Polish pottery cup; the one with bright cheerful flowers is reserved for the morning. I drink from a small white cup first used by a Flatwoods, West Virginia, hotel. (My sunrise coffee is sipped from a hefty cream-colored Lea’s Pies mug from Lecompte, Louisiana.) These details to our rituals are important, always.

Spring is coming (from another spring).

We laugh long and hard, tears streaming, over something neither of us recalls even thirty minutes later. A bluebird sits on the front gate, a mockingbird and a sparrow on the southern, side gate. The sun is now low enough to warm my chair. I tilt my cap down to keep the winter’s light out of my eyes.

We talk of the upcoming early evening projects, the before-dinner work that roots us to this farm. Modest in scope, each: reattaching a barn gutter for me and a stall gate the sheep managed to detach for her. After that, chores, supper (her night to fix dinner), and cleanup in the kitchen before retiring. We will both read. Nan Shepherd keeps her company past 11, while Vincent Starrett has me slumbering by 9:30.

But that is later. Now we just sit. The birds do the same. A pause in the day for all of us, until the sheep begin to bawl and the cows gather at the fence to stare us down. It’s feeding time. “I still have one more sip,” she says when I start to rise. It’s a daily ruse of sorts to keep me on the porch. She makes an elaborate gesture of savoring what is not there. Rituals satisfied, we stand in unison and move toward the porch steps. The sun also lingers on the horizon before heading to bed for the night.

From the Curmudgeon’s Desk

The talkative teenager

The Kid mistakes my compliment on his work spreading hay around the barn as an affirmation of my interest in chatting and consequently an invitation for him to talk … a lot. Never, ever, I remind myself, underestimate the loquacity of a teenage boy. He stops working while relating another story, so I finally cut him off in mid-flow: “If you must talk, then you must work at the same time.” He complies. And that slows him down. But just a bit.

Sweet Gum in the snow

 

The one-handed boy

Always with just the right hand, the Kid reaches out to do a task, leaving his left hand waving around on its own, independent course. “Help me hook up the bush hog.” He stoops, reaches with his right and tries to shift a tractor link. I suggest using both hands, and for a moment he embraces the two-fisted approach. Within a minute, though, he’s back to the one-handed action. I’m flummoxed. Is he practicing for the eventuality of a late-in-life stroke? A career at the Las Vegas slots? Has he made a Lentian resolution to put himself in the shoes of the one-armed man?

The next day he’s once again forking soiled barn bedding into a wheelbarrow singlehanded. I try once more. “Kid, use both of your hands on that pitchfork. You’ll find it a heck of a lot easier.” He does and it is. Yet after only a few minutes he reverts to the right-only approach.

The cause and the impossible solution to this worker’s handicap finally dawns on me that afternoon as I watch the Kid collecting eggs. There are only so many eggs you can pick up while holding them all in the same hand, and I’m really curious how it will resolve. I watch from the doorway of the coop. He gets creative (he’s certainly not lacking in intelligence in solving the challenge, albeit in a roundabout fashion) and snags a nearby bucket, tucking the handle into the crook of his left arm. This allows the heretofore torpid left hand to semi-reengage with life as the right goes on collecting eggs.

That’s when the proverbial light bulb finally comes on and I point out the obvious: “Kid, if you would stop carrying your phone around day and night, you might just remember God gave you two hands.” He stares at me blankly for a moment. Then a comprehending smile spreads across his face. The man is making a joke, so he laughs.

 

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Reading this weekend: Born in a Bookshop (V. Starrett). This autobiography of the famous author and bibliophile has surprised me in all the best ways. While it is certainly an accounting of his reading and collecting in life, it is also the story of early 20th century journalism in Chicago. There are unexpected stories of his war reporting from Mexico, where he hangs out with Jack London and his wife, with whom he goes shopping while waiting on the fighting to happen (which it never does). He shares numerous accounts of breaking into gruesome murder scenes to take pictures. Starrett shares the recollection of fellow journalist Carl Sandburg’s routinely buying a mystery book, then tearing out the first thirty pages and tossing the rest, saying he only needed thirty pages to read while commuting home on the train). He recounts playing hooky in D.C. with a young FDR while they scouted rare books and drinking and writing stories with Ben Hecht (of “The Front Page” stage and movie fame) … and I’m only halfway through the book.

This Forgotten Valley

That in this blighted landscape there are still places of settled beauty is a comfort: a chance to glimpse what went before and could be again. Yet it is also sad—that the occasion of removing oneself from an anywhere to a somewhere should be so jolting as to be noticeable; that the simple absence of suburbs, strip malls, check-cashing joints, derelict commercial ventures, new fast-food emporia serving up empty calories for the lost, the bloated, and the lonely, before those buildings too slough off into the accumulating mire of abandoned infrastructure on the edges is somehow distinctive.

On this morning I am in my truck driving on a remote road in another state on my way to pick up ewe lambs earmarked to become next year’s breeding ewes. The valley, not the vertical, winding, densely wooded path I expected, is everything one would not imagine so close to the heart of empire. Now, I’m not going to name this forgotten valley, because it deserves privacy. Of course it is not inconceivable that some AI algorithm or, more likely, a real estate developer is already mining the coordinates to bring this place into the commercial fold of modern capital, thus ruining it forever.

This forgotten valley is a working valley. It is not the preserve of the newly arrived affluent in gated enclaves, who provide gainful employment to the natives by allowing them to scrub their toilets and polish their antiques. Nope, this is the genuine somewhere, a rare gem just a few inches on the map from D.C., that expanding Borg cluster of the soulless, the clueless, the grifters, and the grafters. So just in case this valley remains off their maps, let us keep it hidden, mum’s the word, ok?

This valley consists of open, gently rolling hills. Up to five miles across, it is protected by steep forested ridges on either side. Every few miles I pass through a compact hamlet, and for the last hour and a half to my destination I do not spot a single fast-food restaurant or—and this is more tragically impressive—a dollar store. There are plenty of family diners, small-time tractor dealers, and a scattering of feedstores. Although primarily a valley of crops and livestock, there are also active signs of small quarrying. I see none of the usual small prefabricated factories that so often dot a rural landscape.

The housing stock is mostly modest older ranchers and the classic T-shaped farmhouse so prevalent in the East, a few mobile homes, but to my relief, no McMansions.  A handful of pre-Civil War homes of stone, set back in groves of oaks, signals an agrarian prosperity both past and present. There are even a few water mills that, although no longer in service, are nicely kept up, perhaps awaiting the day in a future low-tech world when reuse makes sense. This is not an empty valley—homes, both clustered and isolated, are to be seen for the full length of my drive—but no strip mall architecture assaults me as I approach and leave each community. While a few farms advertise places to stay, and many promote eggs, produce, and hay for sale, nothing signals the desperation of the developer to sell both virtue and heritage.

At my destination, a slightly stooped nonagenarian in overalls greets me in a pickup by his mailbox. His son is busy in a field spreading manure with a tractor; his grandson is in Pennsylvania dropping off lambs. I trail the old man in my truck as we bump along to where his son is working. Once the son is collected, I follow behind, down a good mile of a family road with half a dozen homes belonging to the three generations who work the 500-acre farm, before arriving at a barn next to a formerly fine brick two-story, now unoccupied and crumbling. The son tells me it is the family home, built in 1833 after the clan had settled in this valley.

A few more minutes of introduction, and we turn our attention to the ewe lambs for sale. I select four chunky four-month-olds to bring home. We load the lambs, exchange cash, and say our goodbyes. I turn to retrace the hour-and-a-half drive through this lovely, remote somewhere valley and then embark on another five hours of interstate, cheek by jowl with too many others driving to anywhere. Finally, a little after seven in the evening, stiff of neck following a total of twelve hours on the road, I pull onto the gravel driveway of our farm. Cindy is waiting for me in the dark by the mailbox.

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For those of you who listen to podcasts, I have been interviewed on a couple over the past few months (promoting my book). The experience of being asked questions and having to respond on the spot is certainly an interesting and new one for me. It has taught me that I’m better at coming up with an answer after a few days of mulling it over. Alas, that is not the format on offer.

A one-and-a-half-hour interaction with two hosts (Josh and Jason) of the Doomer Optimism podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=MIhsXKq0ZzY

A thirty-minute Q&A with John Murdock of the Brass Spittoon podcast: frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/brian-miller-on-kayaking-with-lambs/ (Link is near the bottom.)

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Reading this weekend: Death Comes for the Archbishop (W. Cather), a slow, evenly paced novel in which nothing much happens but a man’s life. And—I’m just guessing here, having the last third yet to finish—it might just end with his death.