Trauma Farm (32 page)
I LIVE TO WORK
and work to live. The blessing of a small farm is that it’s not a job—like food or poetry, it’s a calling. It’s a thousand jobs, most of them intermingled, often culminating in the afternoon when, like the average farmer, you find yourself trying to complete everything simultaneously. Work inherited our suspicions only when it became a commodity. True, in any endeavour there’s inevitable drudgery. Hand weeding five thousand bulbs of garlic can translate into drudgery fast, yet I’ve learned to love the multitude of tasks on a small farm, though Sharon will testify she’s seen her share of incidents where I’ve gone hysterical while repeating a mindless job for the thousandth time.
On the farm everything is continuous, and few tasks are completed. Construction projects like barns and sheds are never-ending. Training to be a potter years ago is how I learned that a pot never finishes firing. Even porcelain glazes—and window glass, a glaze in another form—continue changing after leaving the kiln. Over the centuries the glass in the windows of Europe’s ancient cathedrals has flowed down, displaying visible changes in thickness and colour. The miracle of ancient potters is that they used traditional knowledge to create for the future. The famed Chinese “crab claw” crackle glazes would barely begin to crackle during the lifetime of the potter. They were designed to achieve their finest form long after the potter was in his grave and had passed his secrets on to his apprentice. A well-maintained small farm has that kind of continuity, passing its traditional knowledge from generation to generation.
Whenever we take on a new farm helper, I remind myself it is the duty of the young to be thoughtless. I know this because in my younger years I stomped off my share of job sites in frenzies that, in retrospect, were undeserved, and I’ve also lazily inflicted too much bad craftsmanship on a number of employers. Since then our hired hands have exacted revenge on me for my own years of idiocy. Hired help definitely ain’t what it used to be, though I’m betting farmers have been saying that since Babylon. Here, in the lotus land of the Gulf Islands, we get them all—the boys with bones through their noses and women with so much face metal they tinkle. Because of a lack of affordable housing there’s a constant labour shortage on the islands, and farmers like me go begging for labourers in unlikely places, snatching whatever wandering but work-willing hippie goes by—a hiring practice that can lead to encounters with fabulously interesting people, along with the occasional scary or ludicrous consequence.
Butterfly, a Maori-painted spokesperson for the new “Freedom Camp” in Fulford Harbour, announced to our local paper that she and her fellow squatters were protesting an ugly subdivision many miles up-island and would only abandon the public beach they’d squatted if greedy islanders would donate a mere thousand acres of land so they could live in harmony with nature. One of this sharp-witted gang of ecologists had discovered a loophole in the law that allowed them to camp below the legal high-tide line, which is higher than the physical tide line—in a comfortably dry squatters’ lawful limbo where they set up their tarps, tents, and driftwood structures, polluting the fragile eel-grass ecosystem of our bay. These are the kind of eco-urbanites who ruin the hard work of real ecologists.
Naturally, farming being what it is, I had to swallow my pride and offer work to the Freedom Campers, one at a time. Usually, they didn’t show up before noon, and often they didn’t show at all. Sometimes we wished they hadn’t. Except for one stalwart flat-nosed, nipple-pierced fellow— who turned out to be remarkably nice, hard-working, and intelligent—the Freedom Campers were notably averse to work, and the camp soon turned into an awful mess, which they abandoned as winter came on.
Then we found a neighbour who was reliable and helpful, a real sweetheart who, when Sharon instructed him to weed the garlic, did just that, snapping off several thousand garlic tops. Fortunately, he was such an inept weeder that the garlic survived, though dwarfed and unsaleable for the year. He was a smart, likeable fellow with a university degree and, apart from this spectacular accident, became a fine worker. Acceptance is an important part of farming. Another helper lasted an hour mowing the lawn before he announced it was too hot to work. That night he carved a bloody cross in his forehead and took to ripping up the saplings on the farm where he was staying. Fortunately, they got him medical attention before he hurt himself further.
A surprisingly useful helper received instructions from his television set, which made Sharon nervous. He worked like a tornado but soon decided he knew what to do best and when to do it. If you gave him the gas Weed Eater, a tool that thrills all the boys, he’d do the whole farm and the public roads if you didn’t catch him in time and take it away. And there’s nothing like soothing old bones, naked in the hot tub at dawn on a peaceful farm, alone in the woods, and suddenly hearing your lawn mower start up around the corner of the house. But he was a good-hearted fellow and gradually drifted off-island, following his voices . . . .
For several months a slender young woman, sun-browned and as hard and skinny as an arbutus branch, became an excellent helper. A farm has many duties that tend to drive away female workers, but she had the strength and the fortitude to toss the hay bales, shovel manure, and wield a mean pickaxe, although her first day at work was surprising. Sharon explained the garden tasks that needed doing, and the young woman, surveying the jobs ahead of her, said, “Well, I better get to work, then.” She promptly whipped off her top and started weeding.
“Uh, we have guests coming shortly,” said Sharon, somewhat taken aback.
“That’s all right,” the bare-breasted woman replied. “I don’t mind.” I didn’t either, though it was distracting. Sharon thought it was all rather amusing in the end.
Our all-time favourite helper was a willowy, big-bearded fellow who belonged to a society that advocated “marijuana milk.” The members of this group thrive on the seeds of (legal) hemp, sprouted and blended into a drink which, apparently, like many other rare plants advocated by enthusiasts, is “the most nutritious food in the world.” He looked so frail you feared he would blow away, and he moved so slowly it gave me a nervous breakdown just watching him. Yet this mellow, sluggish helper accomplished an astonishing amount of work and never lost his cool. He usually finished more than what we asked him to do by the end of the day. A perfect combination of natural laziness and high intelligence, he moved more slowly than honey across a piece of toast, and no gesture was wasted. It was like a miracle every day, watching the jobs efficiently eliminated one by one. We practically wept when he and his family were driven off the island because they couldn’t find housing. We still hope to get him back.
Following his departure, our first interview was with a labourer who, upon arrival, announced he charged more to do construction work, couldn’t do heavy lifting (including wheelbarrowing) because of a bad back, couldn’t distinguish weeds from vegetables, wouldn’t use motorized lawn mowers or tillers because they were detrimental to the environment (even though he arrived in a big pickup truck), and refused to help with the sheep or the chicken coops because he was a vegetarian and livestock were a blight on the planet. Then he was annoyed that I couldn’t provide him any farm work.
I still have a fondness for our clutch of nineteen-year-olds who spent the first years with us—that hard-partying, sometimes feckless gang of anarchists who taught me a lot, though there were days I couldn’t get them out of bed after a particularly enthusiastic night of partying. Once I grew so pissed I walked into their room and started up the chainsaw. The combination of sour gas fumes and noise soon had them jumping that morning.
They also caused their share of damage.
My belt sander wore out, and I bought a fancy, expensive replacement because we had a lot of work ahead, since we’d ripped off the roof of our large log house and were erecting a new, intricate, gabled roof. We admired the sander at lunch, after which Joaquin carried it out to the barn, placed it atop the two-by-twelve he was sanding for a windowsill, and plugged it in. Naturally, the trigger had been accidentally locked on during lunch. The belt sander took off at high speed down the board, launched into the air like a ski jumper, and crashed into pieces on the floor. This was so gruesomely hilarious that I threatened to have a T-shirt made up proclaiming Joaquin the world champion “belt-sander racer” as I returned to the store to replace it.
There were several legendary lunches like that—such as when Jason, a big and strong worker who’d returned from off-island, was delegated to dig the last of the drainage trenches in heavy clay we’d been pickaxing out all week. Once he was through we could finally lay drain rock and Big ‘O’ pipe to drain the soggy lawn. When his morning’s work was done, Jason came in to lunch, collapsed in a chair at the table, covered in mud and dirt, exhausted and proud of himself, and declared, “Well, I got it done. Filled in every trench!” The entire crew looked up from their soup, horrified.
My favourite incident with this gang was a repeat performance. Once we had the gables framed for the roof, we left a beam hanging out as a handhold for returning because the roof had tricky angles and was dangerous. Unfortunately, the beam was also at perfect head-banging height when you climbed from the deck to the roof. Each day, after breakfast and lunch, every one of us would bonk our heads on that beam, curse our forgetfulness, and carry on. Crossing the tin roof inevitably made us forget the beam, which we needed to return. Within days all of us had bruised foreheads. To entertain lunch guests I would take them to the front lawn and say, “Watch this.” As the crew walked out onto the high roof after lunch, my guests and I would double over, choked with laughter as each of the gang would crack his head, curse himself, and carry on—like a row of sheep stepping into the same hole, one by one, over and over again.
ONE DAY I WAS
cleaning up the offcuts thrown onto the lawn from our framing when Seb charged down the first sheets of red tin laid on the roof and flew off the low eaves, right over the narrow front deck and onto the lawn, where he did a couple of rolls, rose to his feet, and calmly walked off. I was horrified. It was at least a twelve-foot leap. “don ’t jump off the roof!” I roared between gritted teeth.
“Who jumped? I fell,” Seb said casually as he crossed the lawn to the back deck to return to the roof. Danger lives with us everywhere.
I lost a finger to an accidental, self-inflicted shotgun blast in my twenties, and faced logs rolling off a hillside when I earned my living as a logger and saw enough to convert me into an environmentalist for life. In White Rock, shortly before we moved to the farm, I balanced my chainsaw overhead and sawed off a chunk of rotten deck until I hit a nail. The chainsaw kicked back, striking my face. I could feel the blood trickling down my cheek as I made the slow walk into the basement and its bathroom mirror, assuming I’d taken a chunk out of my face, afraid to touch it. In the mirror I saw only a tiny cut, bleeding profusely. The saw must have stalled on the kickback and struck my cheek during the brief moment when the chain stopped, because by the time it was back at arm’s length it was fully revving again. How’s that for luck? I still bear the tiny, near-invisible scar as a symbol of foolishness and survival. The hazards of the working life walk alongside the laughter, and only the wakeful among us survive, and sometimes not even them. The grace of work is beautiful, joyful, and dangerous.
Ever since we moved to the farm on that winter day and discovered the one lonely piece of punky alder in the woodshed, I’ve been obsessed with accumulating firewood and kindling. Luckily, within days we’d found a woodcutter with a load of firewood that was—unbelievably—dry. Unscrupulous woodcutters claim they have cured, dry wood, whether they do or don’t. Once you’ve worked with firewood for a few years it’s easy to tell from the grain, the checks, the weight, and the bark not only the type of wood (balsam fir, for instance, is useless compared with Douglas fir) but its dryness and age. Since the house is enormous, it consumed twelve cords a year for the first years until I developed alternative heat and reinsulated and sealed up the holes. I practically became a high priest of fire.
Woodcutting is a great unsung calling—these days a religion known only to rural communities. Loggers used to be mythic heroes in a dangerous profession, but because of the greed of the multinationals, their honest, dangerous labour has been tainted by the environmental degradation caused by bad logging practice. Also, surprisingly, burning well-cured wood in today’s high-tech stoves is not environmentally dangerous, unless you live in a populated valley prone to air inversions, where some regulation might be necessary.
My favourite wood is arbutus—called ironwood by the locals, with good reason—but big-leaf maple and Douglas fir are fine, and alder is usable. How many people can recognize the difference between a standing fir and hemlock? Fewer can recognize these trees by their wood. How many chop their own wood today? Like farming, chopping wood is becoming a lost art. Will our grandchildren be living off algae and synthesized proteins, dwelling in homes heated by solar arrays or distant power-creation mega-projects? Will a thermostat be all they know about that human essential—warmth?