Born to be a hired hand

What I'm about to lay out here is not true. Well, certain points are true, but to say that my parents' intent was exactly how I'm going to explain it is not. They truly love and cherish their three strapping sons and in no way saw us as beasts of burden created simply to work the land. For now though that's how I'm gonna make it seem.

My birth was designed by QuickBooks. Okay, it wasn't around yet, but if mom would have had it back then I'm sure she'd ciphered out growth and profits and at what point they would have needed to have an extra hand around to fetch the old man the water jug, then advance to feeding hogs and get promoted to running the chisel plow. What I'm aiming at here is that from the time my older brother was about 13 till my little brother hit say 21, 22 my parents always had a dependable hired hand (Dad might balk at the idea of dependable, so for his sake I'll say readily available). Basically a good 17 or 18 year span where they've got from one to three of us available to do their bidding.

We were trained in the ways of the hired hand from a young age. Sure it all seemed innocent. When you're seven and mom says 'Dad's outside working on the tractor, go see if he needs any help' you go running with a smile on your face. That's how it starts, first you're handing the old man a little ol' wrench and asking curious little kid questions about how the tractor's PTO works. Next thing you know you been in the same field all day, the lights fading and you've still got dozen more bales worth of hay to roll up before you can head home. The young mind absorbs everything like a sponge, and they know this. You go with dad and watch him grind feed when you're five, its fun. He gives you the little spade shovel and you playfully toss corn into the grinder when your nine, its fun. Then you're 15 and the old man ain't nowhere in sight, and you're heaving a ton of corn with the massive scoop shovel into the gnashing, loud as hell gears of the grinder. No one taught you how this insanely dangerous machine works, but you've seen the old man do it enough and whether you were paying attention or not you damn well ought to be able to get the job done.

Now I say the old man ain't nowhere in sight. That's not because he's kicking back having a cold one, rather he's out expanding the whole operation. And expand we did. I'm not going to, but I could probably go back into Ma's aforementioned QuickBooks and chart out the growth of the family business and find a peak at some point when I was between the ages of 18 to 22. At that time I was at the prime working age and yet to move on to my own job or move out of the house. My older brother was still available if we were truly in need. And my little brother was at the age that driving a tractor and other such things he was easily capable of doing unattended.

Ma and Pa had themselves three genetically controlled farm hands. Who were capable of performing tasks nearly exactly as the boss wanted them done, as they had seen the boss do those tasks over and over again for a decade and change. Country Osmosis is the technical term I literally just made up for it. Now each of these three quasi-clones have their own strengths and weaknesses. One is as big as a bear, but about as personable. Another will always get the job done, but he ain't in a hurry to do it. And the third is the smartest of the bunch, but a little too headstrong most of the time. So while it was pretty easy to create their work force, just by hitting the sheets, our parents also have to take responsibility for creating their employees' shortfalls. Something a normal HR department can shy away from.

I loved working on the farm. Sure it was hard work a lot of the time, but it was infinitely better than working at the GAP, or Olive Garden or where ever the hell else high schoolers work. And I was born into it. Shit, if you listen to what I said above I was bred specifically for it. I've since left the farm, but my little brother is still with it. Reckon he'll try and make a go of the farmer's life for as long as he can. And like our dad who was brought up the same way we were he can say he was born to be a farmer. And sure other folks can say the same about their chosen line of work, but it's the rare discipline in which you're literally training on the job when you're five years old. And that's what I mean when I say we were bred to be farm hands.

Elbow Deep

The last one was about piglets, so we'll stick with babies. Probably won't try to keep linking each one of these to the next, but for the moment.

Pulling calves is a troublesome thing. I only ever actually had to get my hands dirty with it a few times. A couple were DOA, but a couple made it. I remember the first one rather well.

The old man had recently gotten back into raising cattle. He had for a while long before I was born, but had stopped, then about the time I was 12 or so he bought a bunch of cows and a big ass Charolais bull. We had some issues with calves from that bull, if I remember correctly. A number of the cows, especially the heifers (if you don't know a heifer is a cow who has yet to have a baby. After that they're just a cow.) had difficult births. So by the time the instance I'm talking about here happened I had watched dad pull a few calves.

I occasionally went out to check the cows with dad, who did it every morning. One of the younger cows was about due and dad had seen her off by herself down in the bottom (read 'bottom' as small valley for those who might not know country terms for terrain. Maybe I'll do a post on the various ways to describe land.) the night before. We walked down to see if she had the baby and she was basically where he had seen her, in the corner of this little pasture off to the side of a big field. I remember walking up on her as she lay on the ground. Most times a cow will make a little nest or hole in some tall grass and give birth sorta secluded like. When we walked up to the cow there was big area, maybe like a twenty foot wide circle, where she had smashed down the grass. She had been moving around for a few hours probably, wallering in one spot and then pacing and laying down again as she struggled to have the baby. And by the morning she was about spent.

She didn't try and run or anything when we walked up to her, she was just plopped over on her side. Dad walked around to her backside and checked what was the trouble. Sometimes the calf is turned around backwards, and that's a bitch. This calf was the right way round, but instead of coming feet first one of his legs was folded back along his side, which makes his shoulders wide. There was one foot and a little bit of his snout sticking out. Dad reached in to see if he could feel what was wrong. He could and he tried to sort it out, but he couldn't get the other leg to right itself. That's when he turned to me.

I had little spindly arms, which might allow me to make the necessary adjustment, where the old man couldn't. Again I had seen him do this a few times and it usually consisted of just reaching in and tugging out the calf. So he grabbed the tail and held it out of the way, and I got down on my knees and slipped my hand alongside the calf's head inside the vagina. I was about up to my elbow when I felt the shoulder and was able to get a grip on the calf's leg. There wasn't much in the way of room to maneuver the leg in there, and after a minute of trying dad told me to stop. 'Can you get a grip on it?' was the next question, I could. He had brought some heavy twine with us and made a loop in one end and told me to slide it as far up the good leg as possible. I got it up above the elbow and cinched it tight.

Now the task was just to pull it out and hope that we didn't break both its front legs in the process. They have an apparatus that's made for pulling calves, I even think we had one, but not right then. With the cow tired and not exactly lucid on her side there, I reached way back up in there and grabbed the crimped leg as tight as I could with one hand and grabbed the protruding little hoof with the other. Dad hunched over the top of me with the twine in one hand, the other ready to guide the calf's head out. Then we just pulled on the sum'bitch. I remember having to sorta press the folded up leg tight against the little guys body as we inched him out. Once the head was out, and dad got a proper grip on the straight leg, the rest of the job wasn't too bad. When his second elbow came out we got the other leg facing forward and the little guy slipped right on out.

You ever see in nature shows about lions and wildebeest and shit, when the wildebeest or gazelles have a calf the little fella jumps right up and starts walking. Cows are usually about the same, but after the long ordeal that calf was about gone. Dad cleaned out his nose and mouth of all the nastiness that goes with birth, rubbed his chest and got his lungs going. And after about another ten minutes had the little thing stirring, but not quite on his feet. Dad prodded the young cow to get up and ushered her over to the baby. Instinct tends to overrule anything else and despite her being dead tired and sore as shit, I assume, she started licking him and cleaning him up herself. We hung around watching them for a bit longer until he finally got up on his wobbly legs and started to nurse. After that the young cow just eyeballed us until we headed back for the house.

That time was a positive outcome; doesn't always go that way. Stillborn births happen for various reasons. Or you help pull a calf and the momma won't nurse or take to the calf, in which case you raise the calf yourself. Having a bottle fed calf on occasion is fun, I mean they're cute and playful and it's something different for a couple months. But hopefully you get the babe out alive and the old cow does what she's supposed to do.

Now I want to say I got back to the house and jumped in the shower, but most likely we just rinsed off at the well, changed shirts and went about the rest of the day.

Line 'O the day - April 26, 2007

Last night I dreamt that I came up with a cure for epilepsy in cats. Do you think I can make a profit on that?

Pigs will eat ya

I hate pigs. They are slightly intelligent, but only to a degree that pisses you off. Say you have them in one pen and you want them to go into another pen, they realize this and refuse to cooperate. On occasion it is because they're scared or confused, more often it's just because they're screwing with you. All their little buddies ran into the other pen, it would be easy for them to follow suit. Yet they don't, just to spite you. All of that is somewhat irrelevant to the story I want to speak on, but its information worth having.

The countrified story for the moment is one of Abe's, my little brother, near death experiences. He's had a few, so have I, its just the way it goes on the farm. I'm gonna say I was 11, maybe 12, which'd make him 6 or 7 when this went down. So, the old man and us were working over the pigs, and by that I mean we were doctoring and castrating the little ones, not more than a few months old. You work it out so that all the sows have their piglets around the same time. Then they all grow up together and it's easier to work them and move them and sell them off in big batches (this is all obvious rudimentary stuff that everybody knows, right?).

How exactly did our little operation work, you ask. It goes like this, we have 4, 5, maybe 7 sows with little ones, and we get them all in the barn at once. Now there are three separate pens inside this barn (there were more, but we're only using three for this). So all of them are inside one pen, the 5 sows and 35 or 40 little ones. Now we cut the sows off into one pen and the little ones into the third and then leave the original pen empty. Important note here, the pen the sows are in is walled off and they can't see us or their babies. This kinda gets them worked up and pissed off.

Then we start to work on the little ones. This consists of me and my older brother running around grabbing the little pigs, dragging them over to dad, and holding them down as he checks them, gives vaccines and castrates the males. My little brother, being a little to small to manhandle the pigs, is shut off in the empty middle pen, just watching us through the fence. The whole deal makes for a dirty loud morning of work, which we would do every few months when a new batch of piglets was big enough. So what went wrong that particular morning?

Nothing really went wrong, but circumstances escalated, you might say. The little pigs don't like the chasing, and manhandling, or especially cutting out their balls. And they let you know it, squealing and crying and running around. Being unable to see the proceedings the momma pigs get pretty agitated, and that morning they got themselves worked up into a frenzy. When Abe screamed was when we saw what had happened. The sows had went crazy and busted open the door that separated them from the middle pen, which he was in. I mentioned hogs are vicious in my previous entry and that is no joke. A 300 pound sow could tear through a 7 year old boy in about half a second, and there were 3 bearing down on my little brother. Abe screamed when they busted through the door, and backed away into the corner of the pen. The scream turned them from the fence and their little ones to him.

That moment was one of those instances you see something happen incredibly fast, yet you don't realize how fast it is really happening. Dad jumped the fence, grabbed a 2x4 (from where I do not know), and commenced to beating back the pigs. He snatched up my little brother with his free hand and tossed him to safety into the pen we were in. Abe was wailing as he picked himself up off the ground, but beyond being sacred shitless he was ok. Our old man was just about as shaken up I figure, he was calm as he always was, but was pretty pale in the face as he climbed back over the fence and inspected his youngest. Again things happen so fast at times you don't think about them in the proper context until much later. Thinking back to that experience now, it was an insanely close call. One good bite and it would have been curtains for Abe, or hell they could of just got him down and trampled him.

Between Dad, my brothers and I there's probably a couple dozen or more stories that put us on death's doorstep (the old man's exploits fill out the heavier percentage, I'd say). And usually you shake it off and go right back to work, which is what we did that day. Abe almost got ate, but as soon as he was out of harms way we went back to chasing pigs and doctoring them up. Shit's got to get done.

Line 'O the day - March 30, 2007

What the hell is so difficult about the name Zeb, I never see anybody asking Tom, or Bob, or any other three letter name how to pronounce one syllable. “Hi my name is Tom.” “Wait, what was that? Tuumë?”


Present day note:
I reckon this was me just venting one night. Doesn't matter when, or who or the noise level in the room, I almost always have to say my name twice to everyone. Most folk always think Zed.

Though being named Zebulon is a first rate conversation starter. Thanks mom.

Line 'O the day - March 11, 2007

The gaping maw is not a welcome sight, but having that realization while leaning too far over the edge might come a little late in the game.

Farm Life: Hog Lot

I want to say something about myself first. I have two degrees, I've studied film production for one and then separately I have a degree in Ethics. I can make movies and I can wax philosophical if you'd like. Also I've lived in New York City and currently live in a major metropolitan area. I just wanted to state that up front, and say that by most accounts I'm a fairly intelligent, forward thinking, modern fellow. Having said that, I used to sleep with pigs. Literally. Maybe I'm not the only one, if you read this and there's a commonality between us let me know.

So, my old man had a pig farm for the better part of my youth and we always kept a few old sows behind the house to toss kitchen scraps to (chicken bones, watermelon rind, hogs will eat anything). You would go out back and see the pigs basking in the sun, sprawled out snoozing away the day, and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. For as much as I hate pigs I will give it to them that they know how to relax.

We'll say I'm around seven years old and run it up till I'm about ten. On an odd summer afternoon you could find me lounging in the hog lot, straw as my bed and an old sow as my pillow. Like I said we fed them scraps, you could do it out of your hand, and you could pet some of them, others weren't too friendly. And when they were napping they'd be piled all over each other, one more little body wasn't that much of a concern. I'd be out cold taking a nap like any other 8 year old, only I was right in the middle of two or three coarse haired grunting hogs. All of which had a couple hundred pounds on me. Was it dangerous? To an extent I guess, but my parents were attentive and conscientious, and if they thought it was too dangerous they wouldn't have let me do it.

I stopped doing it at some point. I didn't exactly outgrow it or anything, but the hog operation got bigger and the lot became more crowded. Plus the old sows got sold off and the younger ones weren't as accommodating, in a manner of speaking (pigs can be vicious, if you didn't know).

Now then, that is but one of a great many instances that comprise my life growing up. I'm inclined to think it's not that unique, and there are others who've had a nearly identical experience. Anyway, I think for the next one of these I'll stick with hogs and the more vicious nature of the animals. Only the next story centers on my little brother.

This might work, could be horrible

So I think I may have come across an idea for the blog that I can do as a serial thing and keep it going for some time. Provided I keep with it. Basically this is something I can crank out in a half hour or so on an odd night, when I'm not otherwise busy.

The blog is called Learned Country Boy and so I figure I can easily create a series of posts about country life. And not necessarily quaint little stories of farm life that conjure up images of a piece of straw clamped between some redneck's teeth, or an old man and his hound dog gazing out at the cattle on the lower forty. Such instances can be recollected, but there are also things much harsher and much deeper than those, which I will attempt to call upon.

Farming in its simplest form is about life. Things are born or take root. They grow, with strength or weakness. And they die, sometimes earlier than they ought to, beaten down by the harshness of the elements. A farmer, rancher, whatever you want to call them is a custodian of life and death. They dictate life and death on a daily basis, measure profit by how long something lives. Corn gets planted, it grows tall and green, then it starts to falter and wither away. A farmer has to wait, watch the leaves of the plant turn brittle, time out how long he lets the corn die in the field before harvesting it. A calf is born, its mother cares for it for months, and then the rancher decides it's been long enough and separates cow from calf. Lets the calf grow more, feeds it well, treats illness if it arises. Then when its market time the calf is sold to be slaughtered. If the corn field gets flooded, or the calf gets sick and dies money is lost, and a family's, hell a community's livelihood could hang in the balance.  That being said, the bulk of these probably won't be in a very serious vein, but some will.

Hopefully some will be funny, provocative, or insightful, but they will be as honest as I can make them. And ideally interesting, otherwise whats the point. The first one will be about me, a bit self-deprecating look at a childhood activity (I can easily be made fun of for what I'm going to divulge).  Be up later today sometime.  Beyond my own rural exploits, I'll be stealing from a massive family history of life on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

Line 'O the day - March 6, 2007

Forestall your weary contemplation. For such thoughts only stall progress.

Line 'O the day - February 28, 2007

I’m a little under the weather; I’m just getting over a bad case of appendicitis.