From the Top (14 page)

16: Inches required to measure the length of the crease put in the quarter panel by the railroad tie fence post down by the barnyard, which apparently isn't going anywhere.

3: Total number of times I had to go ask my wife to put all her stuff on again and come help pull me out.

1: Total number of times right at the end there where I got the plow truck stuck after she had suggested I just park it and wait for daylight.

0: Exact number of times I asked her for help that time and
instead just put the truck in neutral and yanked it out with the tractor all by myself.

1: Number of knots jerked into the brand new tow rope during that last little adventure.

7:52 p.m.: Exact time I just gave up and went in to watch the Packers game.

The Eskimos have a word for snow like this. It is not printable.

Back home on the farm I've been dealing with that one chicken. You know, that one chicken, the one that's never where she's supposed to be.

We free-range our chickens in the early spring, but once asparagus and gardening season kick in we switch over to a portable chicken fence. Nothing is more disheartening than spending the newborn morning nestling tender seedlings into the welcoming earth only to wander out over a reflective afternoon lemonade to find the whole works scratched into oblivion by a gang of marauding cluckers. When we first started raising chickens, many people happily told me the birds would keep pests out of the garden. What they didn't tell me is they would also strip the rutabagas, strafe the string beans, claw up the garlic, and peck the eyes out of the potatoes. To be fair, they do take a break now and then to poop on the deck. I'll tell you how to keep pests out of the garden: LOCK UP THE CHICKENS.

So now we have a fairly workable deal combining a coop on wheels and the aforementioned portable fence. I let the birds out on fresh ground in the morning, they get to peck and scratch and hunt bugs just the way they're designed, and we get to keep our kale. Meanwhile, I go up to work in my little office over the garage. But this year a pattern has emerged. By 10 a.m. or so I spy a barred rock hen come easing out around from behind the granary, free-range as you please.

The first time I figured it was a fluke. I caught her and put
her back in. I made that sound easy, but it wasn't. Before it was over both the chicken and I were out of breath and making angry squawking noises. Sometimes farmers need track shoes. I went back to work. And an hour later there she was again. I checked the entire fence perimeter for holes or gaps. Nothing. Plus, those other forty-nine chickens—including identical breeds with identical wingspans and theoretically identical brainpans—were staying put.

It's been a week now, and I still haven't figured it out. That chicken and I have gone sixteen rounds. She's lost some feathers and I've lost some patience. The thing that really drives me nuts is that I can't actually catch her in the act. She's either in or she's out. Because of where we're grazing them, the coop isn't visible from where I'm working, and naturally if I hang around spying on her, she stays put. I have entertained the idea of rigging a webcam so I can monitor her remotely, but we have real bad internet, plus these are the moments when you realize you're starting to go a little Captain Ahab over the whole deal.

I have come to the conclusion that what we've got here is a shape-shifting chicken. Yesterday, right on schedule, she tippy-toed out from behind the granary and slipped down between the spruce trees to peck around in the brush below the pole barn. I've seen a fox down there lately, so that chicken may be about to solve this problem herself. Passing through a fox is pretty much the ultimate shape-shift.

In the meantime, I bolt from the desk now and then to see if I can catch her in transit, but she's always either in or out. So far she hasn't attacked the garden. Perhaps that's a team sport, and she doesn't want to proceed without the other chickens. And therein lies the final indignity: every time I stand there all befuddle-faced, studying the fence, trying to work out how that dang Houdini-bird does it, there are forty-nine sets of beady eyes staring right back at me, and every single one of them knows the answer. You know what makes an evil sound? Forty-nine snickering chickens.

During the musical portion of this show, a group of singer-songwriters sat on the stage going around the circle playing songs, some of which dated back to the days of the troubadors.

I was walking from my writing room over the garage toward the house the other day when I noticed I've begun wearing a path in the grass between the two buildings.

That shallow little rut makes me happy. I don't know how long we'll live on this farm, but it's good to know I've been here long enough to scuff some paths into the dirt.

I know all about the negative connotations of the rut—metaphorical and otherwise—but in a world where the perfectly tended lawn seems to represent the pinnacle of civility, I prefer a well-worn path here and there. Back when I was a kid haying on the Jerry Coubal farm, I used to love walking the dirt path that ran from Jerry's farmhouse to his barn. It cut a good three inches into the sod and ran arrow-straight. Jerry's people were Eastern European immigrants who came here with nothing. By the time I was old enough to help hoist his hay bales, Jerry had one of the finest farms in the county. I figure one of the reasons for that was because of that straight path. When Jerry left the house for the barn he quite literally went straight to work.

We had paths on our farm too. My favorites were the ones worn by the cows and sheep across the pastures. Perhaps these paths didn't reflect best grazing practices, but they did reflect a
natural rhythm in which the animals came and went with the sun, and the way the paths forked and forked again and eventually faded into the grass was the same as the veining of green leaves, an organic pattern reassuring to the eye.

Not all paths are worn in the dirt. Back in the day my neighbor Tom used to run a matched pair of oxen. His best pair were named Chester and Lester. They pulled in more than twenty-five parades, Tom says. He started making yokes for Chester and Lester when they were calves. He says he learned how to do it by reading Foxfire books. By the time Chester and Lester were full grown they went about twenty-four-hundred pounds apiece; the yoke alone was six feet wide and weighed nearly sixty pounds. Tom hand-carved the beam and made the bows from red elm he cut from the river bottoms. He'd steam them over a hog kettle of boiling water and bend them using a homemade jig. Things didn't always work perfectly.

Over in the corner of Tom's workshop there is a spade with a handle shaped like an upside-down “U.” If you jab the spade blade into the dirt, the handle rises up, then curves around and drops so that the butt of the handle is pointing straight back down at the earth. One of Tom's favorite things is to take a newcomer through his workshop, and just before the newcomer is ready to leave, Tom will grab that shovel and hold it up. “Whaddaya think this is?” he'll ask. And after the guest hazards a guess or two, Tom's eyes will twinkle, he'll grin, and he'll say, “I picked this shovel up from the ditch after the boys on the country road crew got done leanin' on it!” And then he'll cackle like it's the freshest joke he's heard in a year.

Tom performed the shovel joke for me for the first time right around the time we moved to the farm. I bet I've seen him do it for other unsuspecting newbies fifteen times since. And I know full well that the U-shaped shovel handle is actually one of Tom's failed oxbows. But I never get tired of watching him set the whole joke up and then deliver it with that sly twinkle he gets. That story is a well-worn path, and it's a good one.

Perhaps the most precious gift of a well-worn path is how it reminds us we have been blessed with a stretch of no disruption. Some measure of peaceful continuity. That is why it is good to hear these singers this evening. The songs they're sharing in the tent tonight are not being sung for the first time. In some cases they've been sung multitudes of times over tens of thousands of miles and decades or even centuries. But every time they emanate from the stage it is like the first time. There are some things—good saddle leather, a shovel handle, a soothing chorus, those old footpaths—that don't get worn out, they get worn in.

Friends and neighbors. It's good when they're both.

I was talking with my neighbor Tom the other day. I admit I was bragging a little, telling him about my new scythe. I think you pronounce the
th,
but I'm not sure. For years I went around pronouncing it “sigh,” hoping that was somehow more high-tone, but Tom says scythe with a full-blown
th
so lately I've been going with that.

Tom is eighty-two years old now. Lives in the same house he was born in. Just never came up with any real good reason to leave, I guess. He's got a nice little farm there down by the crick. Well, it used to be down by the crick, but then one day in 1967 Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate came plowing through about a hay bale toss from the barn and now there's a three-mile detour between the porch and the crick, but that's a story for another book.

I met Tom while I was dating my ultimate girlfriend. I call her the ultimate girlfriend because she was, but also because ultimately I married her. Or she married me. (I should check the paperwork.)

My ultimate girlfriend used to bale hay for Tom. One day fairly early in the courtship Tom pulled me aside and told me she out-worked every boy he ever hired. He seemed to intend this less as a testament to her character than a challenge to my own.

Tom has seen it all from oxcarts up to the internet, which he just recently began to surf. I spend a little time with him now and then when I need something welded or turned on the metal
lathe, or if I'm just looking for advice on how to comport myself over the long term.

So we're walking through his machine shed recently and I see a scythe slung up in the rafters. I start rhapsodizing about my own scythe, which I admit I am inordinately proud of, in part because it was won at an auction by my buddy Mills. (The formative years of our friendship were based on shooting carp with bows and arrows, but lately we've bonded over an addiction for auctions.)

So I'd told Mills I needed a scythe, and one day when he was going to one auction and I was going to another I got a call from him.

“You still lookin' for a scythe?” “Thaaat's affirmative.” (Two decades, and we still like to pretend we're talking on our fire radios.)

“What'll y'go fer one? There's a beauty here, and they're starting the bidding!”

This was tough because pickers and rural theme restaurants have driven up the price. So I'm kinda mulling it over and Mills hollers in my ear. “I GOT IT!!!”

That was fast. Too fast. “Umm … whad'ya pay for it?”

“FIVE DOLLARS!” You should know that Mills regularly speaks in ALL CAPS.

“Five dollars? What kinda shape is it—”

“SHE'S A BEAUT!”

“Are you sur—”

“MINT!”

Part of the fun of this story is imagining the scene on the other end of the phone: Mills with his eyes the size of canning lids, surrounded by the auction crowd and hollering into his cellphone and dancing over a five-dollar scythe. It's like the redneck version of Sotheby's, when they have those unidentified bidders calling in from Monaco or Macau, or Chippewa County or whatever.

So I wind up with this scythe, and it is a beauty. I use it mostly for cutting wheat and oats, which I then harvest by hand and put
up in the granary for the chickens over winter. I've even learned how to sharpen it. I have three different whetstones, and I use them in sequence. The fine grit stone was quarried in Slovakia, and I think that's probably important. I like sharpening the blade while the sweat runs down my brow. Makes me feel hardy.

Now I'm in the machine shed with Tom, and I see his scythe up there in the rafters and I start rattling on about my scythe. I tell him how I sharpen it. I tell him how I use it to cut the oats and wheat to feed the chickens, and I describe my sharpening technique and ask him what he thinks of it. All this time he's just looking at me with a quiet smile, and I know what that quiet smile says: it says how pleased he is that some of us in the trailing generations are taking up the old ways, respecting them and nurturing them and carrying them forward. When he looks up in the rafters at that trusty old scythe of his and says, “Yep, sounds like you're doin' it about right,” my heart swells with pride.

Then he lowers his gaze back to meet mine, and he smiles, and he says, “Y'know what else works real good?”

I'm all ears, ready for the wisdom.

“Yah, one'a them gas-powered weed-whackers!”

Everything old is new again. Then we remember why it was we ditched the old things in the first place …

I took my two daughters on a hike the other day.

The highlight of the trip came when we sat down on a stump for snack time and spotted a big ol' bear track in the mud. You could see it all: the individual pads, the tippy-tip claw marks, and most entertaining of all, a greasy sideways smear leading up to it, so you know he lost his footing and slipped coming in. There was much giggling during my reenactment of what a big tough bear looks like when it slips in the mud, including how he ducks his head and looks around to see if anyone was watching.

During the hike we discovered that a big old willow tree at the end of the valley had blown down across the neighbor's fence and was blocking his gate. So the next day I called my buddy Mills and we cut it up. I called Mills because it's good to have help for a project like that, but also because my wife and daughters were gone that day, and we have a rule about never going out into the woods with a chainsaw unless someone is around to hear you if you need help. I made that rule because I come from a family of loggers and know what can go wrong—especially if you're more familiar with a keyboard than a chainsaw. Mills has that rule because the last time he ran his chainsaw without someone around he got pinched in a tree and had a long wait before taking an ambulance ride.