Trauma Farm (33 page)

Once, a citified friend was cooking on our wood stove, and her stir-fry began turning into a stew. She gasped, panicking. “How do I turn this thing up!” There were no knobs, of course. My father used to say: “If you want a fire, you have to burn wood.” And there’s nothing like a bin of cedar kindling to set the stovetop glowing orange. Chinese stir-fry and coffee are natural allies of a wood stove. My favourite sound on a cold morning is the clanking of a kitchen stove being cleaned and fired up.

Those who live with wood spend hours, days, perhaps years in front of the chopping block. The art of the axe must be learned through long practice. Chopping wood only looks easy. In the old days, children learned to cut kindling and, if they kept all their fingers and toes, graduated to the axe. Mike, as a tyke, had to stand in a zinc washtub to protect his toes. Some woodchoppers prefer a single-bitted axe, others the classic double-bitted blade—a tool of beauty, but like household knives, it’s impossible to keep sharp if helpful friends get hold of it. As much as I love a good axe, I shifted to mauls long ago because enthusiastic guests kept ruining my axe blades. Also, I have to take down our giant big-leaf maples when they go punky. Splitting a knotty, four-foot round with a double-bitted axe is no fun. Besides, you can reverse the maul and use it as a sledgehammer on your steel wedges.

Wedging is another art. For a start, like the axe or maul, the wedge requires finding the key spot at the rim of the round. Amateurs will whomp an axe into the centre of a wet green round and then spend an eternity wriggling it out. Learning the art of “seeing” the split point in a round is a lifelong quest. As with a karate punch or chop you aim for the bottom, not the top, of your round. The blow is achieved by seeing your way through to the other side.

It’s been remarked of the lumberjack: “He makes all his love in the forest and chops all his wood in the whorehouse.” The woodcutter walks in and out of history and mythology, whether it’s
Gilgamesh,
humanity’s first recorded work of literature, which takes its impetus from logging a sacred forest, or Paul Bunyan, or the heroes of fairy tales like “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Japanese have long known the special quality of woodcutting, and it is a mighty woodcutter in
The Seven Samurai
who’s one of the first to come to the aid of the stricken townspeople.

Finding yourself outside on a cool autumn day, shimmering with sweat in a red plaid shirt—the dogs lying behind you, the peafowl dancing suicidally in and out of the flying chunks of wood as they race for black ants and the fat, glistening bodies of termites—is as satisfying as pausing on the way into the house and admiring a full woodshed. Cutting wood means losing yourself—the way you do in meditation. That’s why electric or gas-powered wood splitters are an abomination. “It is with their muscles that humans most easily obtain knowledge of the divine,” according to Aldous Huxley. The Woodchopper is a famous yogic posture, a continuous-motion exercise, used to release tension and “to energize and stimulate the whole body.”

Zen monks long ago learned the meaning behind woodcutting. “I pump water, I cut wood. How wonderful!” Their texts are full of such quotes: “When chopping wood, chop wood. When breathing, breathe.” My favourite is attributed to a particularly venerated sage: “Before enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, I chop wood and carry water.”

Perhaps we woodcutters are all students of the Catholic monk Saint Benedict of Nursia, who said, “To work is to pray.” Cutting firewood, moving fluidly yet living inside the cave of the body, is a kinesthetic meditation. Every log holds the possibility of enlightenment—the moment the blade drives through, following the grain, splitting its linear universe. It’s the poetry of the everyday, the kind those monks preach; the ability to find the extraordinary in ordinary life—like a wolf on the hunt, at perfect attention to the world.

17
FENCE BUILDERS
AND TOOL USERS

I
F I DON’T WALK
our fences in the morning I walk them in the afternoon. A good farmer knows fences are a blessing and a curse, and demand regular scrutiny.

There was a careful man who raised emus and built his fence to the specifications of a government bulletin, complete with a strand of barbed wire on the top to discourage dogs from leaping over and attacking the emus. The fence seemed sturdy and sensible until the man realized the emus were entranced by cars and would race alongside the road, often with their heads over the fence as they tried to keep pace. It took only one mistake for an emu to slit its own throat and die, flopping beside the fence.

Animals have impressive techniques for killing themselves with fences, or wrecking them, mostly because fences are designed for our pleasure and not theirs. Our horse, LaBarisha, is a master at tangling herself in page wire or snake fences that she’s knocked down trying to get at the neighbour’s pasture. She’s such a pro that she recognizes immediately when she is in trouble and will patiently stand there until we discover she’s missing, search her out, and unsnarl whatever mess she’s gotten herself into. This afternoon in our eighteen-year-long day is no different. Extricating a horse from a pile of crossed rails can be disheartening, yet she’s so trusting she will allow me to lift her hind leg and back her foot up five inches, following it with the next leg. She taught me that snake fences look picturesque but they’re near-worthless with large livestock.

Robert Frost’s neighbour in “Mending Wall” said, “Good fences make good neighbours.” I don’t fully believe this. Fences are traps for stealing your time and crushing your fingers and have caused their share of feuds. In many early tribal cultures it was an insult to your community to fence a field. When we fenced our lower field across from where the new neighbours were building their house, we didn’t realize they’d sited their house to enjoy the view of our “wild meadow” instead of the generally more preferred water view of the strait. Our sheep soon created a bucolic, grassy pasture, grazing down the invasive weeds, and our neighbours were hugely disappointed because it was no longer a knee-high flowering meadow.

AFTER MIGRATORY SOCIETIES SHIFTED
beyond hunting and foraging but before they succumbed to property ownership, they gated not their world but only garden crops likely to be damaged by either wild beasts or wandering livestock. The livestock—fowl, pigs, goats, cattle—lived alongside, tethered or free, depending on the local conditions.

As villages and their livestock populations expanded, the surrounding area was usually treated as a commons for all. Once the grazing around villages grew deficient as populations swelled, the animals would be herded even farther away and brought to their corrals nightly for feed or defence, breeding or birthing—if at all. Since the fields were open, to fence a house garden was regarded as merely self-defence. With further growth, good grazing could be found only so far away that families began to “own” certain areas, and eventually they moved out to work and live near their livestock. Thus began the rural life we know today. Around the world, these various stages of farming still exist, though they’re diminishing rapidly.

Grazing is an evolutionary characteristic inherited to protect herbivores from parasites and predictable actions that will attract predators. The grazing instinct also discourages overgrazing (as long as too many herbivores aren’t confined in one area) because it makes the animal constantly seek new pasture. Actually, grazing is not restricted to herbivores. Everyone, at some point, wants to graze beyond their fences, whether it’s for money or sex. With livestock, at least, grazing creates a balanced and healthy diet, especially if pasture land is not all in grass. That’s why cross-fencing and rotational grazing work better than feedlots.

Fencing ranches and farms became a legendary subject of dispute in North America, horrifying the free-roaming Native tribes. Sitting Bull noted about the colonialist farmers: “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own, and fence their neighbours away.” The fencing conflicts with the Native cultures culminated during the invasion of the American West by settlers and farmers; and then, shortly after, small herder-farmers also found themselves battling the big cattle ranches when they began fencing their land.

Barbed wire, “the devil’s rope,” is a monstrous creation. We picked up a couple of rolls of barbed wire in our early years, mostly to wrap around the base of the cages (animals go under, through, and over fences) built to protect our fruit trees from deer and livestock. My history with barbed wire consists of five years of putting it up and ten painful years of untangling it and taking it to the recycling yard— and I have the scars to prove it. Barbed wire will grow right into the ground, wrap around anything moving (including sheep or me or the horse), generally endangering lives, temperament, and skin. It can spring the fencing nails out of a rotten cedar post and attack you from thirty feet away. The dogs love watching me wrestle a length of old wire into a roll. Dogs are secret sadists, and they will leap barking around me as the wire slowly eats me alive.

UPON OUR ARRIVAL
, Trauma Farm was an abandoned goat ranch with only one distant neighbour. As in the early days of settlement around the world, the goats freely roamed the fields cleared by the original owners. There were corrals for milking and separating the billy goats, and a deer fence around the garden and the house, but that was knocked down. Without goats the meadows were waist-high in places. I wandered through the grounds and discovered many exotic introductions:
Magnolia stellata
trees chewed to the ground, rare pines and roses, a few fruit trees. It doesn’t take more than a couple of years in this climate for a garden to return to the forest. Sharon was thrilled (that changed later as the workload increased) because this was her opportunity to garden on a large scale.

I set our nineteen-year-olds to the firewood and fencing immediately. I’m still grateful for their energy and what they taught me about being young again, despite the near-constant head-banging rap music at full volume on the ghetto blaster, which Sharon once threatened to throw into the pond during a particularly misogynistic song. It’s said rail splitting made Abraham Lincoln into the man he was. I believe that. It’s hard work and an art. Those lads made more than 2,300 cedar rails for the snake fencing that we erected to cross-fence the acreage. Joaquin, wide and muscled, was a great rail splitter, but our boy Roben, smaller and wiry, had both the eye and the strength and could split thirteen-foot-long rails so fast it would make Lincoln spin in his grave. Roben often made as many seventy-five cedar rails in a day. I got chainsaw elbow from bucking up all the deadfalls and sick cedars I felled for fencing.

FENCING IS NECESSARY, BUT
gates are the pathways through the world of the farm. Livestock soon learn to wait by the gate at dinnertime. I watch them amble up the field in the afternoon, moseying along, grazing as if the dinner bucket were the furthest thing from their mind, but they know where it all comes from, and they look upon the house as a temple and me as a capricious god who mysteriously appears with the grain they covet. This does not stop them from attempting to help themselves. Our first horse, Stonewall Jackson, was a master gate cracker with those rubbery lips like fingers. He’d draw back the bar on a gate before you could turn around and yell, and then he’d rip a bag of feed out of the pickup in the driveway. I finally had to put spring-loaded latches on the gates—as well as the pull bars.