Slow progress

Robb and I spent the better part of our energy Saturday at Ashland Farm. Neither of us is really known for responsible behavior in cow pastures. But on Saturday we held it together. No cows were accidentally released; no bulls were provoked; no one fell down and landed in any piles; no one attempted to tackle any livestock; no one's side view mirrors or steering wheel was slimed by a hungry calf; no one was cross-dressing or wearing any sort of costume; no one's boyfriend or girlfriend was cheated on; no sleeping bags were shared; and certainly no stomachs needed to be pumped. All in all, we were very mature.

What we were doing at Ashland was sawing up and hauling away a dead walnut tree that had fallen in the pasture. Lucky for us the temperature stayed around eighty and the clouds never burned off because the humidity hovered at 100%. The air wept. We were wringing wet before we even began working on the tree. Unlucky for us the old walnut had fallen at the bottom of a steep hill, and the ground was far too damp in the morning to drive down to it. So while Robb ran the chainsaw I pushed the tree, log by log, in a zigzag pattern up the hillside. On the first trip up I overloaded the wheelbarrow. I realized it immediately, but my pride would not let me dump any logs halfway up the hill. I struggled and strained the load up to the top and chucked it into the back of Mom's truck.

It was on that first trip with the wheelbarrow I realized precisely what brand of misery we had volunteered ourselves for. At least my end of the project was miserable. Robb could saw away like a happy little beaver, while I did battle with gravity. Over and over. Hades designed a specific hell for this order of punishment, and it's where he entombed the soul of Sisyphus. Struggle, struggle, struggle, almost succeed, realize it's only a drop in the bucket, repeat forever. It did not take long for me to lose count of the trips I was making up the hill. I alternated between a bucket full of skinny logs and a bucket with only two huge ones, every other trip. Just remembering it now makes my abs strain and my ankles ache. But the mind numbing quality of the endeavor allowed me to meditate on other things. Thankfully, by the time we were ready to load the truck a second time the grass had dried enough to drive into the field.

I deliberately did not take my camera along that day and was grateful for my forethought as the day progressed. The temptation to abandon the wheelbarrow to go tripping over the hill to spy on the sheep would have been too strong. The pasture was something out of an Irish storybook, too green to be real with picturesque outbuildings and frolicking calves. I might ask the Conners if I can come back to Ashland to paint sometime, once all the backbreaking labor is done. (Which reminds me that I still need to photograph my paintings from Nags Head and share them...)

Unless you are the title character in some fatalistic novel--think Tess of the D'Urbervilles--a farmyard is not necessarily a reeking sea of equal parts mud and dung. The pasture was lush and firm and striped with the well worn trails of the cows. These animals like routine. And we were clearly interrupting theirs. As the girls made their daily way from the breakfast in the back pasture to a late morning chew in the front, they had to navigate past Robb and his terrible chainsaw noises and me and my incessant plodding. They eyed us both with caution and curiosity. Eventually each cow worked up the courage to skirt past us and up to the front field. We were only ever hesitant when a beast with ferocious horns came our direction, but once I saw her udder I relaxed. Robb discreetly put the fallen tree between himself and the horned cow until she passed us by.

The sheep were a different story altogether. They are a fretful bunch, huddled together, easily startled. No wonder their groups are called flocks as they moved across the hill like a cloud of birds. A sudden noise from us caused the sheep to turn on their hooves and scamper away en masse. When we got back from the gas station they poured suddenly out of the shed and from under the chicken coop, away from the noisy people they were hoping would not return. Eventually they came to roost at the top of the next hill under a tree where they could keep several dozen skittish eyes on our progress. I wonder if the farmer still notices the strangely human quality to their bleating or if he has heard it for so many years he no longer hears it. Several times I turned toward the sheep as though listening to someone who began speaking to me. So much more than a "bah." A guttural, very throaty cry just shy of actual speech.

Consider for a moment the many hours pouring over my family history this summer. Most of the people before me were engaged in agriculture. My mother grew up on a dairy farm. My father's family kept chickens, ducks, and an oversized garden. One of my great grandfathers was a sharecropper, another was an executive in the Agriculture Department. A great great grandfather was a professor of agriculture who spent six years teaching in Japan, one year teaching in Germany, and authored Progressive Poultry Culture (published in 1907--a copy of which I just received from an antique book dealer in WV). How different our life is from theirs. How far away from them we've gotten in such a short span of years. What would they recognize in our daily routines?

We are foreign creatures but not entirely. They would certainly recognize ants preparing for a long winter: the collecting and chopping of wood to heat our home. And they would recognize the lean times that force us to conserve our energies and monies and remind us that we do not live in a world of infinite resources. They would recognize the value of sweat equity and helping a older neighbor clear away a fallen tree. They would find familiar our daily efforts to spin straw into gold, to stay afloat in rough waters, to care for our families. They might wonder, as we sometimes do, if speedy progress is a blessing or not.