Trauma Farm (36 page)

in the afternoon, depressed, lost in my life,

losing money on a farm, thinking about the large

destruction my race has engraved into the earth,

when the flock of mallards whistled through
the rock maples.

I was alone, except for the animals, the sheep
and the horse,

the audience of winter crows dotted like black
crescent moons

on the green pastures that were wearing me down.

The mallards hit the secret ice like a circus pouring

onto a stage, skulls driving into the earthen bank,

tangles of feathers, collisions, and sliding webbed feet,

a duck braking with its beak, leaving a white crease

like the track of a lost arrow leading to the shore as

fifteen mallards attempted to regather the honour
of a flock.

Even the crows rushed to the shoreline

to witness the relics of this indignity

while the last ducks waddled gracelessly

off the ice like miniature Charlie Chaplins.

And for a slender moment in the furrow of time,

on a farm in nowhere, everyone stopped to rejoice
and wonder,

horse and sheep and mallards and man and crows.

Yes, the ecology retains its own madness,
attended or unattended by us—

this strange planet overflowing with

odd carcasses skating on hidden ice.

Because so many of us live apart from nature today, it’s easy to lose our place in the cosmic lunacy of existence. Funniest-video shows on television are a riot, but they don’t carry the same otherworldliness as watching a mink cavalierly skip down the road while being stalked by a white peacock. Nor does a photocopier machine that won’t quit zooming or a video that dies in the closing scene of a dramatic film have the same immediacy as an animal nativity. Sure, we encounter daily drama and tragedy in ghettoes and work accidents, but while I’ve had my share of riotous times on the streets of our cities, I didn’t begin to understand absurdity in its fullness until arriving at the farm.

I always thought the world was strange. Maybe that’s why I can smile at the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s flippant remark “It never got weird enough for me.” But it’s gotten pretty close for Sharon and me—such as the time we decided to drain and excavate the biggest pond, enlarging and deepening it. With the increasing droughts of the recent decade the pond had begun to fall dangerously low by the end of summer. The loss of irrigation water in late August is no fun on a farm. Before the excavator dipped into the bottom muck remaining after I’d pumped out the last of the water, I grew suspicious. “I think there’s fish in that mud,” I told the operator. “Empty your bucket on the ridge between the ponds, so if there’s fish, we can scoop them into the lower pond.”

He hooked the bucket into the mud, and when he opened it above the green field a multitude of golden flashes poured forth in a muddy blob of slithering leaping, twitching goldfish up to a foot long and six inches deep. The dogs went crazy, snapping up the smaller fish, tossing them into the air, and swallowing the fish whole, while Sharon and I yelled them back and madly scooped fish into the lower pond. Even the quiet, dignified excavator operator was soon on his knees in the mud, scooping up fish (at $120 an hour, I might add) and heaving them into the pond.

I decided there could be money in these fish, and I didn’t want to choke the lower pond with too many, so when the excavator dumped the next load we scooped them into water-filled garbage cans, hundreds of fish to a can. Goldfish can gulp air and, even though confined, could survive while we finished the pond work. Only a half-dozen perished, but I was still desperate to get them out of their overcrowded containers and either back into the pond or sold. Naturally, we discovered there was no market for pond fish in the fall months, and I ended up returning them to the redug pond once it began quickly refilling. They’re still out there, feeding the herons and the ospreys, and me occasionally, if I decide to scare a guest by serving up a giant deep-fried goldfish with a sweet-and-sour sauce.

THE MOST ABSURD MOMENTS
come suddenly. Mike and I had been slaughtering pigs all morning, and we were covered with gore. We finally got the carcasses into the cooler. While we were working we’d made a deal on five laying hens I wanted to take home. We were walking down the roadway between the barn and his utility shed when I slipped on a big clump of goose shit. My slide was stopped by a rock. I glanced at my foot. It was twisted weirdly— pointing left while my legs were straight ahead. We both looked at it.

“Oh man,” I said. “I twisted my ankle on that goose shit.”

“Just like that?” Mike asked, befuddled by how quickly it had happened. I hadn’t even fallen. I lifted my leg. The foot was practically hanging.

“This is not good,” I said. “But I’ve never broken a bone in my life except when I shot off my finger twenty-five years ago.” Since I wasn’t worried about it, I just grabbed the foot and straightened it out. The thing clicked into place. The pain was tolerable, but I have a high pain threshold. “I better collect my chickens and get out of here.”

Mike was confused. “You sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. I must have ripped a muscle. Catch those chickens. I’m not leaving without them.”

We got the five chickens crated and in my truck, but the leg was starting to throb. “It’s hurting. I have to leave before the shock wears off.” The truck had a heavy-duty manual transmission and clutch, and every gear change was excruciating. I managed to drive home, the last half-mile in first gear. At the inner gate I pulled up and stepped down from the truck. A lightning bolt of pain shot up my leg and hit my head. I almost fainted. I was on the ground. The shock had worn off. I wanted to vomit.

“Sharon?” I called like a child or a dying man wanting his mother. “Sharon?” I crawled through the gate because I couldn’t stand anymore. The fifty-foot deck leading to the kitchen was now a mile long. “Sharon,” I whispered. “Sharon, I think I’m in trouble.” I vomited over the side of the deck, into the flower garden, where it wouldn’t be seen, and crawled forward. By now my calls were only whispers. So much for my high pain threshold. “Sharon. I need help.”

I crawled to the kitchen door and pushed my way in. “Sharon? I’ve hurt myself.” Finally, she heard me and rushed into the kitchen. She got me into a chair, where I lolled about in excruciating pain. “I think I broke my leg. We have to go to the hospital.” She tried to touch the obviously damaged foot. But I wouldn’t let her.

“I’m disgusting. I can’t go in like this. Take my clothes off.” Since Sharon worked at the emergency ward, she immediately knew what I was thinking. Pride is one of the absurd wonders of human life. I hadn’t shaved lately and I was covered with pig’s blood and guts and feathers. I was a spectacular sight, and I knew it would embarrass her among the people she worked with. Somehow we got my clothes off, and Sharon brought a bowl of hot, soapy water. Together, we washed and shaved me, and then I tenderly dragged clean clothes onto my carcass. I put my arm on her shoulder, and we limped out to the car. I was drooling with pain by the time we reached emergency.

They put me on a stretcher and hauled me in and X-rayed me. It turned out I’d broken my fibula on that goose-shit slide. But miraculously, I’d put it back into place. The doctor was impressed. “I’ve never seen anyone set their own broken leg so beautifully.” Normally, with a break like that they’d have to carve me up and insert pins. However, the swelling had locked it into place. The doctor didn’t need to do anything. I’d done his job for him, though I probably caused myself more pain. “Don’t ever try that again, you lucky fellow.” They slapped a cast on and shot some Demerol into me, and in an hour I was good to go. By then I was woozy and cheeky enough to ask for a doggy bag of Demerol, but they weren’t amused. So I cheerfully waltzed out of the door with my new heavy-duty cast and my blood full of narcotics.

I was a lucky boy indeed. Farming accidents are not always so minor. On June 8, 1948, Cecil Harris was repairing his tractor when it fell on him. The old boy couldn’t haul himself out and he knew he was messed up internally. He managed to free his pocket knife and carved on the fender: “In case I die in this mess I leave all to the wife.” Then he signed it before he lost consciousness and eventually died. He had the presence of mind to recognize that without a will Canadian law would put the family assets into a temporary legal limbo, which would have hurt his beloved wife financially. The fender is now in the University of Saskatchewan College of Law library—as an example of a legal will, and a testament to forethought in the face of death and the absurdity of life. When I consider how weak and craven I had become after a mere broken leg, I’m ashamed of myself.

HOW DOES ONE LIVE
consciously? Only with praise, I think—by celebrating the landscape of life that we don’t understand and never will. What do you do when, as Camus discusses in
The Myth of Sisyphus,
you finally acknowledge your inevitable death, the death of all things? You can become a hedonist like Don Juan or a conqueror, seizing what you want before you die. You can hide behind organized religion and take instruction from preachers who insist there is a creator designing your life. You can accept defeat and commit suicide, perhaps the weakest of those choices. Or you can live with all your senses alert to the world. Live in beauty and then die an artist. That was the best answer Camus could devise, and it’s a good answer. In the end Camus argues for neither science nor God, and despite being tagged an existentialist, he is one of the most optimistic of philosophers. He argues for existence. That’s what he meant by existentialism.

For him the story of the Greek trickster Sisyphus provides a clear example of a man living life at his fullest, doomed by the gods to forever push a rock up a hill only to watch it roll back down, over and over again. For Camus, that’s the moment Sisyphus is most alive—watching that damned stone roll back down. That’s when he understands the comedy of the world, and so he turns and goes to fetch the rock, fully self-aware and conscious of the comedy inside his personal tragedy. You could call this the story of farming.

WE WERE WATCHING A
trashy Hollywood film on television. Suddenly, the cat went strange and began yowling. Tara, the black Labrador, was under the table sucking up the popcorn the parrot was throwing from the dish attached to his perch. They both stared at the cat. We tossed the annoying cat into the mud room.

After the film, Sharon put the dog out and started screaming. She saw what the cat had been sensing—it was a dead peahen, her bloody head resting on the doorsill. Lady Jane, sweet Lady Jane, had fought off a raccoon but her skull was fractured. She’d crawled from her destroyed nest in the bush to the greenhouse door before she expired. Her pathetic trust that we could save her made me want to scream at my world. While peafowl can fight off a raccoon, the hen is at a disadvantage on the ground, defending her nest, because she won’t abandon her eggs or young. When a raccoon stumbles upon a nesting hen, it probably feels about the same as a young mugger discovering a drunk in a business suit staggering down a dark alley.