Trauma Farm (35 page)
THERE WAS A CEDAR
blocking the tractor’s route to the lower fence and the road, and I regretted having to slay it. This is all part of the circle. In order to pick up your firewood you need to make a road, and to make the road you have to fell a tree. It’s an endless circle, the worm eating its tail. Construction and reconstruction. This tree had lived at least a century longer than me, but it had to go. There was no route around. It was almost five feet in diameter. Regretfully, I made my back cut. When I started my finishing cut, the trunk settled curiously on my saw. I hammered in a couple of wedges. They didn’t make any difference. I trudged up to the house and roused the boys, who were busy lunching on a crown roast, a big jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. I’ve long given up questioning what a hard-working young man will eat, and I didn’t even grimace at the sandwich of beef slabs and peanut butter Jason was wolfing down.
I needed help. I’d met a strange tree.
For the young, challenges are what the world is about. Along with Roben we had four of them staying with us that summer: Paul, Jason, Seb, and Joaquin. They trooped down behind me to the tree, where I shot an arrow with a string attached through the branches near the crown of the cedar, and we drew up a thick hemp rope and cinched it tight. Four of them stood in line at the end, ready to yard on the rope when I gave the word. Meanwhile, I’d directed Seb to the road beyond the fence, where he could warn any neighbours if anything went wrong and the tree fell backwards while they were driving by. I sledgehammered more wedges into this fat cedar. It settled further, now leaning towards the road, threatening to crush my big new saw. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’ve felled a number of trees in my life, and I’ve never seen one behave like this.
A turkey vulture glided across the pasture. Everyone watched in awe as this normally shy traveller of the thermals backflapped and landed gently on the crown of the tree I was cutting.
A vulture?
On my tree?
There was an unearthly cracking groan, and the vulture lifted into the sky as the tree reeled backwards. Seb was so enthralled by this piece of theatre that he forgot to check for traffic. My neighbours were driving up the hill as the cedar hit the road with a crash, taking out the phone and power lines of every house beyond our farm, only narrowly missing their car. The boys stood in the grass, mouths agape, the useless hemp rope yanked out of their hands, the vulture circling above us. “That was a show,” I noted angrily, retrieving my chainsaw, miraculously untouched by the mishap.
“Wow,” they kept repeating in their best stoner voices, impressed, as I thumped up the hills to call the power and phone companies to inform them I’d cut everyone off the grid. Worse, the tree had taken out the lines
after
they divided to go to our house and up the hill, so we still had phone and power. It was two days before my neighbours finally got their telephones back. bc Hydro, the power company, was quicker. When the Hydro crew pulled up we’d already bucked the tree and removed the pieces and cleared the road. I’d discovered the source of the disaster (aside from the fortune-telling vulture). Decades ago the cedar had been struck by lightning, topping it. A lateral branch then became the new leader, shooting ten feet away from the original trunk, on the side facing the road. The tree later regrew so bushy that it looked normal from the ground. The tree was also rotting from the mishap and was ultimately doomed, and there was no way I could have known it was off-centre, but that didn’t make me feel much better.
The Hydro crew were annoyed, even though I’d saved the twisted crown to prove nature’s duplicity. I took some serious abuse and financial threats but Hydro never billed me for the damage I caused. I had to stand on the road in front of my smirking gang of helpers and abjectly accept the lecture I deserved. I was told later that it’s the custom to allow every islander one tree across the lines, at least if it’s an authentic accident. I’ve used up my tree.
I
’M USUALLY IN
my study by dawn and outside in the afternoon, doing my chores, because I can’t take the heat emanating from the attached greenhouse. The parrot loves the heat and his perch, especially because it commands a view of the road. If he sees cars approaching he starts shouting, “It’s party time!” Tuco has been living with me too long. Twenty-four years now. Today I’ve returned, suddenly haunted by work, and slipped upstairs before dinner.
He was bored and I was wearing the letters off my keyboard, already sweating in the heat pouring in from the greenhouse, when I heard a buzzing while I answered a few overdue emails. I glanced up as the wasp zigzagged through the open greenhouse into the study, making an impressive dash past a snapping Tuco, although Tuco is so fast he can bite you twice before you realize you’ve been bitten the first time.
I watched these manoeuvres with a dumb curiosity, until the wasp made a sharp turn and dived into my open shirt, stinging me above the heart, before stinging its way down my belly as I leaped to my feet, cursing, ripping my shirt open, slapping at my chest and belly until it tumbled out and flew past the bird, now so impressed that he only glared balefully at it. The wasp exited the bright greenhouse while the stings reddened my chest and my heart started pounding.
“Where did that come from?” I whined to Tuco, numbed and throbbing.
It came from the world. The way it always does: like the day I was working on the coop while Sharon mucked about with her burn pile of blackberries, old prunings, paper feed bags, and broken-up lumber far beyond recycling. I use my wood thirty different ways until I finally give up and accept its ashes for the garden. She had an epic pile smouldering, but the fire wouldn’t take, which was surprising, because Sharon is a closet pyromaniac.
She found me and said, “Why don’t you heap it up with the tractor?” Give a man a tractor and a fire and you’ve instantly created a dangerous combination. Soon I was using the bucket to fluff up the pile and make it burn better. The smouldering mess caught and began to flame. Then the tractor died in the pile. There was an exquisite moment of quiet terror as the motor coughed out, counterpointed by the crackles of the growing fire under my bucket. “Oh shit,” I gulped, after checking the fuel gauge. The tractor is so old and trustworthy and so seldom used that I couldn’t recall when I’d filled it up. For a moment, I couldn’t even remember where the gas tank was. The last time I’d lifted the hood I’d discovered a mouse nest on the filter. I had no diesel fuel anyway. The fire crackled louder, and a whoosh of flame erupted under the bucket.
“What’s the matter?” Sharon shouted.
“I ran out of gas. We have to push it out of the fire.” I set everything in neutral and climbed off.
Sharon looked at me with that kind of resigned contempt you never want to see on the face of your wife. “Push it out of the fire? It’s too big!”
“Come on, it’s almost downhill,” I said, leaning into the big back tire. The thing wiggled slightly, which inspired her enough to lean against the other tire. I had the bucket lightly resting on the fire pile, and the hydraulics were holding. If the bucket was down we’d have been finished. I rammed my shoulder into the tire and shouted, “Heave! Fast!” The fire was growing larger by the second. There’s nothing like desperation to triple your strength. The adrenalin was throbbing in my blood vessels, and the tractor inched backwards. “Heave!” Six inches. “Heave!” A foot. “Heave!” Two feet. Heave!” Four feet. We were on a roll! “Heave!” My backside was getting hot, and the fire six feet high. “Heave!” The tractor was out. We sat down on a couple of firewood rounds, watching the beautiful licking flames soar into the air. “That was a thrill.” I beamed encouragingly at Sharon, while she looked at me with a bright-eyed, breathless astonishment.
“We actually pushed that big tractor out of a fire!” she said. Sometimes she gets a real thrill out of the hare-brained stunts I invent.
ABSURDITY HAS LIVED WITH
the planet since the first cell divided. The mutations that led to the platypus and the nuclear bomb are the ultimate theatre of the absurd. That’s why cultures need their tricksters as much as they need their heroes. Looking at the
American Heritage Dictionary
definition of
absurdism,
I discover its roots come from
ab
(away from) and
surdus
(silence). It’s the noise of the world. “Ridiculously incongruous or unreasonable.” And we all encounter it in our daily living.
Because I’ve been living in the impressively varied kingdom of Trauma Farm, I suspect I see more of the absurd than many people. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my life hauling hay in the rain. But human encounters with the strange and the nonlinear carry greater weight when lives depend on them, as any soldier or pistol-toting gang kid in the urban wastelands will tell you. Fighting with a computer for ten hours only to discover you failed to tick a software function doesn’t carry the same visceral impact as a tractor running out of fuel in a fire pile, or a bull falling into an abandoned well. This could account for the rising need for extreme adventure tourism among urbanites.
Whether you’re dealing with battlefields, computers, or tractors, the absurd is essential to life. What interests me is how we confront the absurd. When I consider honestly the two ends of the spectrum of modern farming, whether it’s the reductionist methodology of agribusiness or the traditional culture of the small farm, I can only recognize how absurd both are. Each style of farming resembles what Samuel Johnson called a man’s second marriage after a failed first one: “The triumph of hope over experience.”
Albert Camus tells us in
The Myth of Sisyphus:
“The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.” And he’s right if you consider cosmic irrelevance to be silence. The noisiness of life confronts death. The absurd is what brings us to the deep well of traditional knowledge behind the tricksters in so many aboriginal mythologies. How do we face our need for order and answers in a world whose order has no answers, only differing systems of survival?
In our human arrogance we don’t realize that animals have a lot to teach us about absurdity and desire. I see it every day as events unfold around the dogs and the sheep or in the uncanny manoeuvres of my parrot, contriving to figure out ways to surprise me. If you are a lazy thinker, and unobservant, you begin to believe that absurdity happens only to humans who drive tractors into fires. But if you contemplate the natural world you soon recognize stupid, blind fate and foolishness everywhere.
A couple of decades ago I was skiing a steep, snowy ridge when I saw something that brought me to a sudden stop. In a pine tree growing alongside the cliff, about five feet away, a handsome buck stared back at me with dead eyes, impaled on a branch fifty feet above the forest floor. He hadn’t been hanging there long. Did he panic at a noise and take a wrong leap? The natural world is full of false turns, which is why I’ve gradually learned not to become so angry about the stupidities of the human species. Absurdity is a constant, whether it’s two dogs bonking heads as they try to enter a gate from opposite directions or a gander attacking a horse. Guests at the farm often warn me with breathless voices that a lamb is limping. The truth is, the lambs are lways limping. These frisky little champions of idiocy have perfected every conceivable technique for falling into holes. Nor is foolishness restricted to domesticated animals—the poor dead buck was proof enough that blind fate thrives just as freely in the wild.
SMALL JOYS ON THE FARM
Winter came weird this year, as it always does—
cool and wet—rain after rain, the ponds flooding,
the sheep limping on rotten hooves.
Then the cold snapped its brittle fingers
and a sheet of ice shielded the ponds
for a week before the rain came again,
leaving a deceptive film of water on the slick surface.
I was sitting by the window drinking red wine