Tag Archives: Kayaking with lambs

Threads

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A ham just removed from the salt.

When two or more of my fingers poke through the ends of a glove, or the cloth or leather has torn or frayed so that even duct tape no longer makes it serviceable, the glove is retired, nailed to the joist at the entrance to the barn breezeway in the shade of a large maple.

I recently nailed up another glove, to join its well-used relatives in the ranks. As I climbed the ladder, a cluster of long threads floating in the air brushed across my cheek. Only at eye level with the joist was it apparent where the threads had come from. The nail from which formerly had hung a glove now held only a remnant of fabric. I gazed down the line of gloves and spotted two nails that were missing theirs.

For years birds have put the cloth to good use, unravelling it bit by bit to build their nests. We have seen nests in both trees and bushes, held together by colored canvas threads (and sometimes, unfortunately, bits of plastic string from weed-eaters and synthetic feed bags), but it was only on this day, up on the ladder, that I realized how far the expectant parents’ patient recycling efforts extend.

My discovery was one more small insight into our natural world, an act of resilience and adaptation that I applaud. Yet it is also just one example of my endless and ultimately futile fight to hold back the forces of nature that would reclaim the progress I’ve made in harnessing this land to suit my own purposes: a recognition that the infrastructure—the result of years of sweat labor—is so frail and fragile when measured against the forces of time and nature and all of her creatures seemingly marching in legions against this farm; that the loss of whimsies like my glove museum are minor when compared to sagging fence posts or depredations in the gardens. This endless course of work is all done merely to maintain my place on the treadmill, and when I am gone, unless someone shares my vision, the fruits of my labor will also disappear one thread at a time.

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Reading this weekend: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way (L. Mytting). The Farmer’s Wife, My Life in Days (H. Rebanks).

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A personal favor to my readers: My book, Kayaking with Lambs, is set to be released next weekend. If you have ordered it (and thank you if you have) please take the time after reading to leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. For all books—but more than ever for books from small presses like Front Porch Republic—a comment from the reader means the world to any effort by the author to bring the book to a wider audience. Thanks!

Keeping Her Place

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Each ewe marked with a blue crayon streak down her back holds a membership among the select. One day last week we moved the marked group of seven ewes into a separate pen before turning the rest of the flock out onto the summer grass. Later that afternoon we took the chosen seven to a graded sheep auction in Athens, Tennessee. At auction, they might be sold to another sheep farmer or someone looking to start their own flock. Then again, they might be bought as part of a larger lot and head to a processor. You never know who will be buying on any given day.

Ginger

Ewes are culled for practical reasons. Some are at the end of their productive life, others have given birth to lambs that grew out unsatisfactorily, and some have proven to be unthrifty or especially susceptible to parasites. Every ewe culled has been known to us and valued, and the vast majority have been born on this land.

Farming livestock involves a daily exertion of power over life and death. A flock of chickens only needs so many roosters, with the excess going into the pot. The cock that rules the roost remains for a couple of years, at which time he makes way for a younger, more virile replacement and becomes the flavoring for a savory gumbo. A sow that doesn’t produce satisfactorily becomes whole hog sausage. Her weanlings grow and grow and are then loaded in a trailer and sent to the butcher. Extra bull calves are banded and fattened as steers—again, whatever the livestock, one male only is needed for breeding.

Our Red Wattle sow, named Ginger for her coloring, had been chosen for culling. Her date with Morgan’s Meat Processing was booked and noted on the calendar. I bought Ginger in remote Hancock County, a rural county nestled right against the Kentucky border, at a homestead set back in a deep no-light “holler” in the spring of last year. She is a very personable, very docile sow, a lovely specimen of her heritage breed.

Ginger had her first litter in January—a disappointing four piglets, of which only two survived. We would have been content with six but prefer 8-12. We decided to give her another chance and breed her once again to a Berkshire boar. When the farrowing date at the first of August passed with no piglets, it was with real sadness that we scheduled her slaughter. That she would make that final trip with her two market-weight offspring was of no comfort.

On a small farm we have some latitude for keeping animals. Because ours is a modest economic model of a peculiarly non-industrial bent, choices are often made as much for personal reasons as for financial. Still, keeping a two-time loser on the payroll truly doesn’t make sense. We are not that kind of place, neither a petting zoo nor an animal rescue. Ours is a working, producing farm, and here everything is expected to earn its keep.

Yet … last week we were at our friends’ farm picking up three weanling piglets to grow out for ourselves and customers. They were from the same litter that we had helped castrate just a couple of weeks earlier, and we were buying them now because Ginger’s failure to farrow had left us with a gap in our pork production schedule (not to mention that a 500-pound non-producing hog eats the same massive amount of feed that a 500-pound producing hog requires).

While it is still not certain if the failure to farrow was the fault of our sow, when our friend mentioned while loading the barrows that she would be happy to help us artificially inseminate Ginger, I did an uncharacteristic clutch at the offer. I wanted Ginger to work out, did not want to take her to market, at least before she had lived out her productive life.

For those who don’t farm, my attitude towards culling may strike you as callous and unfeeling. Practical decisions often do. Which is why so many tough decisions in life are “farmed out” to others. But, not here on our farm, while livestock is in our care, we treat them well; we give them plenty of room, feed, and attention. Yet there is an end, as indeed there is for each of us.

However, when I fed Ginger last evening—watching her tuck into her trough, then galumph around the pasture—I felt at peace with this very uneconomic decision to give her another chance and allow her to keep her place.

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My book, Kayaking with Lambs, is now available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble (as well as Front Porch Republic Books).

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Reading this past week: both Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi (M. Twain) and select essays from The Burden of Southern History (C.V. Woodward).

It’s a Book!

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Dear Reader,

It is finally a book…kind of. I received my “presentation” copies this past week. And Kayaking with Lambs is now available for pre-order from the publisher. The title officially comes out on October 1. I have been advised that it takes anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks to populate in the various distribution networks (Amazon, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, etc.). But please feel free to pre-order a copy or five by following the link at Front Porch Republic.

A small publishing imprint, like FPR, is limited on the marketing that they can do. So, when you do get your copy, and read it, please take the time to rate and review it on Amazon, Goodreads, etc. etc. It helps.

I do so appreciate your encouragement over the years at this little blog. And I plan to resume normal posting next week. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go get my baler ready to bale hay.

Cheers,

Brian

PS Here is some advance praise for Kayaking. 

This is a beautifully sensual account of the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and emotions entailed in daily life on a Tennessee farm, very lovingly rendered with gratitude for being in a place worth caring about.

—James Howard Kunstler, author of the World Made By Hand novels.

I’ve long been an admirer of Brian Miller’s writing, and I hope this delightful book will find him many new readers. With perfect authorial control, it combines lyricism, self-deprecating humor, a grounding in place, political wisdom that’s all the more powerful for its understatement, and deep practical knowledge from a life on the land. A book to be read and enjoyed, but also—more unusually—to be acted upon.

 —Chris Smaje, author of Saying No to a Farm-Free Future

What a beautiful and inspiring book!  Brian Miller has given us a wonderful meditation on the glories and difficulties of life on his well-ordered East Tennessee farm.  Chronicled according to the liturgy of the hours, Miller reminds us of the importance of learning “to walk and not run though the seasons.” It is rich in both literary allusion and sober practical advice.  Kayaking with Lambs is a celebration of the archaic arts, the joy of duty, and the rich rewards of the habit of attention.

_ Scott H. Moore, author of How to Burn a Goat: farming with the philosophers

From the taste of a fat blackberry on a warm afternoon to ‘the sound of the moon rising’ to the sweet smell of lamb poop, Brian Miller conveys the small joys, alongside the modern perplexities, of shepherding a small farm. His attention to the cycles of life, of the seasons, and of each day transforms his ‘farm notes’ into a form of poetry.  –

Allan Carlson, author of The New Agrarian Mind

Good books about farm life and rural community are rare to say the least. Great books are rarer still. In Kayaking with Lambs, Brian Miller has accomplished the latter. Arranged as daily mediations, Miller takes readers on a delightful journey of his working farm, baring his heart and soul in the process. Along the way, we meet a menagerie of farm animals, as well as his best and sometimes not-so-good neighbors. A fantastic read.

Donald E. Davis, author of Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians.

 

 

Kayaking With Lambs

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This is not what I expected when first I took up farming. Even today it is hard to conjure the farmer I envisioned two decades ago. No doubt he was tweed-clad, leaning on a walking stick as he surveyed a vast fat and sassy flock of sheep. And, in truth, I have been that man, played that role, an East Tennessee member of the minor gentry. But, more often than not I have played the fool in service to the foolish. And so it was to be on this day I describe.

Lambing season brings a level of noise that is hard to convey and even harder to endure. A bucket gets rattled 50 yards away, and a mob of ewes begins bawling in hopes that the farmer has gotten the feeding time wrong. The lambs pick up the chorus. And when the lambs begin bawling, the ewes turn their attention from the din of the feed bucket and begin calling their babies, all at once, who all respond, all at once. The only sane way to handle the chaos, which restarts every half-hour, is to try desperately to shut it out.

All of which is to point out that it was hardly my fault that I ignored a bleating lamb for more than four hours. I was working in my study that morning, tuning out the periodic bleat-in-unison and along with it the small, plaintive call of a lamb. Using the skills of not listening I’ve honed over 35 years of domestic bliss, I focused instead on the tasks at hand, all the while meaning at some point to check on the annoying background noise. At lunchtime I ran some errands before returning home and taking a short nap. The bleat still continued, I noted, and filed my good intentions away to the back of my brain.

The back of the brain is an interesting place. It is where we store hard-to-retrieve items like “Don’t forget to pick up some toilet paper in town” and “Wash that grease off your hands before using the yellow towels.” And “I should probably be a good farmer and check on my livestock before doing anything else.” But, as they say, the road to hell leads to the back of the brain, or something like that.

So another half-hour went by, and I awoke refreshed and lay listening to the endless rain (six inches in 24 hours, to be precise) falling on the tin roof for a few minutes more, when, finally, I recalled the lamb’s incessant bawl. Heading downstairs, I pulled on my rain slicker, my battered fedora, and my wellingtons and sloshed out to the barnyard. The flock peered out from the hay barn, where having knocked over the carefully erected fence panels, they were busily making a mess of my neatly stacked hay bales.

Over the ever-present din I could hear one tiny voice coming from somewhere else. Sure enough, looking for yet another way to die, wedged halfway across the dam of the pond and standing in water up to its belly, was a lamb. Apparently, it had taken a wrong turn in the hill pasture and gotten separated from the flock. Doing what all good little lambs do, it had panicked, tried to take a shortcut to the barn, and gotten trapped between a thorny wild rose in front and briars behind, the steep wall of the dam above and the three-foot-deep water below. A woven wire fence across the dam prevented the simple solution of my reaching down and pulling it to safety. My attempt to wade into the pond ended when the water level reached the top of my wellingtons mere feet from shore.

Slosh, slosh, slosh back to the hay barn I went, ignoring the greedy sheep who were ignoring their distressed comrade while stuffing their faces on ill-gotten hay. I took down one of the kayaks from where they hung barnside. I grabbed the smallest because it was lighter and easier to haul back to the pond. Only when I had squeezed my 6-foot-2 frame into the six-foot craft did I wish I’d chosen the larger.

Kayaks are nifty vessels. They are light, maneuverable, and oh, so prone to tipping their contents into cold water. I kicked off from the bank and sat perched atop the boat, the overladen barge ready to offload its cargo at any second. A few strokes of the paddle brought me across the pond to within two arms’ lengths of the lamb — who about that time decided to move farther under the protection of the wild rose bush.

Finally, though, I managed amid plenty of scraping and scratching and more than a few unrepeatable oaths to get close enough to grab the damn sodden beastie and swing it into the boat. The lamb bucking and twisting, myself clinging to it with one hand and paddling with the other, the kayak lurching this way and that — it was only with much mutual surprise that we successfully crossed the pond and drifted onto the far bank.

Exiting the kayak, we both, man and lamb, stood and shook ourselves for a moment. Then the wayward babe ran to its mom, unscathed from the ordeal, and the two rejoined the general mayhem in the barn. I left them to it, as another carefully stacked round bale was being demolished, and once in the house, went directly to the freezer and took out four lamb chops to thaw.