Unstuck
Most of my chickens were killed last night. I let my guard down, forgot to lock their coop, and this morning they were gone without a trace save for two feathers. It’s as if they were never here, never arrived, never galloped across the lawn and chased moths, never battled over grass blades. Chickens have a way of injecting life directly into the heart of almost any situation. With their loud colors and loud voices and overall histrionics, a sleepy place blinks open when they’re around. This morning, the front yard is silent. I don’t get attached to my chickens anymore the way I would a dog or goat or other furry beast. The feathered stock are approached with a utilitarian philosophy, probably because they’re the easiest to lose. If I attached more emotion to their value beyond being simply egg layers, I’d walk around with a constant throb of heartache. So a part of chicken-keeping makes me hardened in a way that is unanticipated and uncharacteristic. But there it is.
I blame their loss on predation and myself. Last night was the end of a dramatic day, professionally. For reasons outside the scope of this little blog it appears my job may be coming to a premature finale. I anticipated 9 more months, a short term stability that suddenly feels like a life-line cut. In my bewildered stupor last night, I simply forgot to lock the coop as I went along my normal route from the house to the buck pen where I tuck the boys in each night, locked (hopefully) safely away from prey. When big changes happen like a job ending, or a relationship breaking, or a promise forgotten, it gives me sea legs on solid ground, so I stumble around until the world rights itself. Who knows what I was mumbling to myself last night as I walked right past the coop, the moment forgotten where I would normally slam it shut. It’s a tragic reminder of the domino effects of emotion; that unrelated work events yesterday caused a stupor, caused me to forget a chore, caused so much death.
The good news, the great news, is that it’s rained most of this week. We topped nearly six inches at the property and the grass has already greened up; there’s even some new shoots in a pasture that’s been barren for months. The downside of rain is simply the minimal havoc it inevitably creates. Our clay soil expands and contracts like a heaving chest, so any amount of moisture changes the gate structure. Our newly installed gate locks no longer work. They’re stuck firmly in place and the only way to enter or exit the pasture is by climbing over them – until the ground inhales again in the dry heat. This means I scaled the fence the last two nights in the murky dark at 11pm wearing scum-covered wellie’s and shorts, the feeble light from my headlamp barely illuminating the metal bars on the gate itself. I’ve lost my footing twice already, sliding down, my shorts catching and tearing on stray wire. Same thing the next mornings. But at least the boys have been locked safely each night and let out to graze all day again in the morning – that’s worth torn shorts and bruised knees.
Rain also causes general unrest with the goats; fickle creatures that have particular opinions about almost everything. They huddle together and complain loudly about the rain drops, the humid air, the damp hay, the squishy muck about their feet. I imagine they’d prefer to come inside and sip martinis around the bar in my kitchen, their legs crossed daintily, flipping their ears back with a cloven hoof the way women toss hair over their shoulders. Forcing them to stand out in the weather is beyond them and shows a baffling level of disrespect. Goats have a way of retaliating when they’re pissed off that demonstrates the depths of their clever little minds. After a particularly torrential downpour on Wednesday, merely two hours after the extent of my deteriorating job situation was first revealed, I went outside to milk the girls. The barn area looked molded and saggy at its edges, flies buzzed emphatically above the sludge creeks that hollowed the earth and carved paths in the bedding. It was studded with goat droppings and exuded the distinct funk of rotten agriculture. It wasn’t until Jolene spewed forth a shattering scream that I realized she was stuck, her head having slid into perhaps the only bar of our hay feeder that is just 0.5 mm TOO narrow to fit a goat head. Although she managed to work her head in, it sure as hell wasn’t coming out. Her udder was engorged with milk. And both guardian puppies licked her sides playfully as she kicked and stomped at them. In between screams she shifted her position and calmly turned her head to peer at me as if saying, “SEE. If you’d let me inside for drinks, this NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.” Thanks Jolene. Noted.
Despite my best efforts of pulling her backwards, turning her head this way and that, there was no freeing her. Willy even joined the effort when he grabbed onto my shorts while I pulled at Jolene, tugging them backwards until he managed to pull them straight off my bottom. I finally grabbed a pail and milked her right inside the barn, her head stuck into the hay feeder firmly enough to make a nice milk stand of sorts. Unfortunately Dolly, who still receives a bottle, attempted repeatedly to catch sprays of milk in her mouth, sticking her head between the pail and the teat with her mouth open. After pushing her away she finally lost her mind and used my back as a springboard in frustration, while Pearl leaned against me, chewing gently on my hair, unwilling to leave her sister’s side. Such is the temperament of goats, Nubians particularly, who provide a bottomless pit of entertainment or annoyance, depending on the weather. It wasn’t until Jer returned home one hour later that Jolene was successfully unstuck from the feeder. He ingeniously placed a car jack between the bars, pumping it open gently so the metal was never cut, just bent slightly.
A farm is a simple backdrop against which I’m casting all these complicated work problems, lately. I’ve walked around the situation for days now, the problems are the same I’ve puzzled over for months really, so tangled together it’s unclear how to unravel things, and even if I could, I believe there’s no original strand to link back to. There’s no longer an origin, the end of a string that started the bundle, no opportunity to start over. I think about it as I wash water buckets, then as I empty rain-filled troughs, when I wipe the mud off my hands onto my shorts, then finally when I climb over a gate stuck in its latch, and when I watch Jer free a stuck goat. Like the farm, are these issues as easily surmountable as climbing over, prying open, wiping off? For all the perceived movement going on over here, I’m actually stuck hard, but slowly taking cues from the basic problems we have to solve every day battling animals and weather. Can it be that simple? Here, if something’s broken, we fix it. If something’s stuck, we unstick it. Now I see how that is no different from any other aspect of my life. I’ve been wearing this job like a hand-me-down jacket so it tightens at the shoulders over time. Like I’d climb a stuck fence or free a trapped animal, I’d shed clothing that no longer fits. And written like that, I see there’s no choice, it’s just what is done.
