Because You Have To

Looking back at some of my journal entries from 1999, when we spent our first full summer at the farm, I realize just how idyllic I thought this agrarian experience was going to be. It was our own version of Little House in the Big Woods, filled with wild flowers and gentle breezes. There would be chickens to feed and eggs to collect, yummy breakfasts and evenings with a fire in the wood stove.

I hadn’t banked on spring thaw chicken coop cleanings that take three full days to complete; potato harvests in the dripping rain, drenched with mud trying to beat the oncoming freeze; butchering turkeys in a snowstorm where everyone wants to have their hands inside the bird because outside it’s so cold you can’t feel your fingers; or midnight tomato planting by headlamp and truck headlights in order to keep the plants from dying.

I hadn’t banked on these types of events because I had yet to learn what it meant to be in a situation where there was no other option than to knuckle down and “get ‘er done.” There was no team waiting in the wings to take it over or come to the rescue, no putting it off to a more convenient time, no contingency plan. In farming, often you’re it in these situations, and “I don’t feel like it” is not an option.

The pigs are out, it’s pitch dark with no moon, the fence is covered in sod…

Frost is coming and the garden needs covering and the delicate crops need picking and it’s cold and dewy and you’re all wet…

There’s over 200 round bales sitting in the hay fields. Your equipment is too small to move it, so you hire some help. They can only come one day that week—it’s drizzly rain with a wind all day. It’s been raining all week, actually, and the ground is a muddy mess. But you go out there anyway, pulling the truck out of the mud time and time again, slipping and sliding. You’re running a skid steer moving bales until you can’t unclench your hands and your knees are locked from the damp cold. You don’t even stop for lunch—a sandwich is brought to you in order to keep you going until darkness falls…

It’s lambing season and no-one has had any sleep in four weeks, the bottle lambs need feeding every couple of hours, and you have to trudge out yet again because one of the ewes looks like she’s going into labor…

It’s 90 degrees out with no wind and a brilliant sun. The hay is cut and raked and dry and has to get baled because a storm is coming. You’re soaked in sweat that won’t evaporate, covered in hay chaff, and your vision is blurring, but there’s 1500 square bales to make and stack and get in the barn before rainfall…

What do you do in these situations? Call it’s quits? Bring in the second shift (hahahaha)? No, you just do it—because you have to. Animal lives are at risk or a crop you’ve tended all season. If you give up, consequences are huge, usually including death of something you care deeply about. So, ultimately, there is no choice. You put yourself on the line for the sake of the farm.

Last night, I was puttering around doing the chores when Kara poked her head into the coop. “Em, Laura, do you know that you have a turkey on the roof?”

I step outside and look up and, sure enough, here’s this lumpy red head peering down from the top of the chicken coop. Kara runs to do another chore, and I grab a stick, trying to chase the wayward teenaged feathered one down. She’s not interested in that program and runs off further along the roof where I can’t reach her.

I remember helping to build this chicken coop in 2001, being on that shed-style roof before it was shingled. Trying to stand on a slant high off the ground was unnerving even back then, with nothing to catch your fall but a fence and another poultry yard below.

I go and grab the ladder I keep in the chicken coop for hanging heat lamps or changing light bulbs, feed it through the many doors in the coop out to the yard, and set it up at the lowest part of the roof. There’s no light on this side of the coop, and the ground is rather uneven. Carefully, I climb up to the top, eyeing the turkey and waving my stick. She sidles further away on the roof, where I can’t reach her.

To the turkey, she thinks that the roof makes a nice perch for the night. She’s not thinking about the owls that could spot her creamy-white body without a problem and scoop her up for a dinner. She doesn’t ponder the deadly nature of racoons or fishers. She thinks this is a nice spot and wishes I would leave her alone.

But I’m thinking about those predators, so I can’t leave her there to be bait. I hatched this girl from an egg in my own house, nursed her through the chick stage, spent countless hours hauling water and feed and cleaning the coop. And now, with one foolish act, she could throw all that care and effort to the wind. I must find a way to get her off the roof and back into the coop for the night—because I have to.

The roofline comes to just above my waist. I grab the edge of the shingles in my right hand, reaching out as far as I can across more shingles with my left and chest. I get my left foot up and onto the edge of the roof, which is a bit awkward in tall rubber chore boots. Then with a heave, I pull myself up onto the roof.

Part-way up, my coat catches, and I have to pull even harder to get up. At this point I’m committed—either I get up on that roof or I’m falling to the ground because the chances of my foot finding the ladder again are pretty darn slim. The back strap muscles on my left side spasm, seizing up. Yikes! Whose idea was this anyway. I lay there on the roof, madly rubbing my back while that silly turkey waits 10 feet off, staring at me quizzically. She probably thinks I’m the most awkward looking creature on earth.

Kara returns from locking in the rams. She rushes over and grabs a shovel, poking it up like a shark fin along the bottom edge of the roof. “Oh no you don’t!” she warns the turkey, who was contemplating jumping off into the wrong pen and getting mixed up with the breeder flock of turkeys. She knows we’re on her now and paces anxiously, just out of reach.

I’m scooting around on my butt on this roof, which is lichen encrusted and slippery. The turkey trots along like it’s no problem. Surely I must be crazy. What on earth am I going to do if I start to slip? What possessed me to get into turkeys?

Finally, we convince the naughty one to jump down into the correct pen, and Kara makes her way through all the doors in the turkey coop to hold the ladder steady for my descent. My back is still in searing pain as I inch towards the edge. I hate getting down onto a ladder, especially when there’s this much gap between where I am currently and the first step—you know, the one that says “not a step” in big red letters.

I roll over onto my belly and dangle my right leg down. Kara grabs my ankle, aiming it towards the ladder, but I still can’t feel the step. “Two more inches,” she calls out.

“Two more inches! I don’t have two more inches!” Leaning out even more further, feeling like I’m folding myself in half and surely will fall, I finally feel the step. A few hairy moments later, I’m back on the ground. Before the night chores are done, that turkey has one of her wing feathers clipped, to avoid a repeat performance of the roof climbing exercise.

Crazy? Yes! There’s a reason farming is the most hazardous occupation. But sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do—because you have to. See you down on the farm sometime.