When the Horse Has Left the Barn

There are moments during winter (and this is promising to be a real old-fashioned one) when running a farm can seem at its best a poorly thought-out choice for a way of life. And at its worst? Well, there is the cold, mud, snow, windy cold, mud, ice, frigid cold, mud, more mud, and knee-deep mud, and the ongoing necessity to be out in it—breaking frozen-over drinking water in the troughs, prepping for the impending onset of lambing season, watering veggies in the hoop house by hand (done by filling buckets with icy water and lugging them some distance), trying to start chainsaws, and, always, the lovely promise of dealing with it all for more weeks upon miserable weeks. And to cap off the joy, there are the endless leg-breaking opportunities afforded by mud, be it sloppy or slushy or frozen.

It was on the tail end of one recent day of the above, just after I’d finally snuggled down under the covers in my boxers and T-shirt and was drifting off into a well-deserved seven to eight of the soundest, that my beloved nudged me awake and said, “Hear it? It’s raining really hard.” I responded with a helpful and most sincere, “Uh-huh.” Nudging me again, she said, “Should ‘we’ (meaning me, dear reader) go out and let the sheep into the barn?” Being the kind and compassionate husbandman of our stock that I am, I surfaced long enough to parrot the forecast in my best Phil Connors assurance: “The rain is not going to last. It is 33 degrees, but the temperature is going to rise all night to 50 degrees. They’ll be fine,” I said as I fell back into the deep sleep of the just.

Around 3 a.m. I awakened to the sound of rain beating on the tin roof above the bedroom … and to the stirrings of guilt. I thought about getting up, and for a good minute resisted. Then, resigning myself, I emerged from under the toasty covers and shuffled out of the bedroom, trying to avoid that one squeaky floor board, and went downstairs to dress. The temperature gauge in the house registered the outside temp at a balmy 34. WTF! I pulled on my barn jacket and scrunched a wool beanie on my head before stepping out onto the porch. Heading off into the unwelcoming night, I glanced at the rain gauge. It showed that two inches of rain had fallen in the past few hours. (Double WTF!)

In most weather we leave the cattle in the field, where they can shelter under the trees, and the hogs in a paddock with a stall; livestock of all sorts are pretty resilient and can shift for themselves in our moderate Tennessee climate. For safety’s sake, though, we bring the sheep into the corral each night and the chickens into their fenced run. The only real exception to leaving anyone outside is when it is very cold and raining. This particular night it was both.

I had spent the previous day “winterizing” the barnyard, including placing heaters in all the watering troughs for the cattle, sheep, and hogs, and even a heated pad under the chicken waterer. (A frozen fifty-gallon water trough creates a 425-pound block of ice, perfect for a large party but useless for thirsty livestock.) The prep work I’d done left a dangerous spaghetti string of long extension cords winding through the doorways and over the rafters of the barn and out into the now wet and muddy paddocks, each providing ample opportunity for man or beast to trip or get tangled. But everything was taken care of except bringing our pregnant ewes in from the drenching rain.

In the wee hours before dawn, with the rain, fat and just shy of snow, streaming from my wool cap, I squished and slid my way through the mud to the barn. As part of the winterizing process, I had spread gravel on all the paths most traveled by the cattle and sheep. A truck with twenty-one tons of No. 4 had been delivered earlier in the week. Using the bucket on the small Kubota, I had moved several tons already, filling in areas around gates and creating new pads for water and feed troughs, all so the sheep in particular wouldn’t have to stand in muck. Yet it is no surprise as I rounded the corner of the barn that I found the entire flock standing in the mud instead of on the gravel. All began to holler the moment they saw the flashlight’s beam.

I walked down the narrow work alley that is part of the covered chute system attached to the barn and opened the walk-through gate for the flock. They flooded (right word, that) around me into the dry overhang, each woolly beast as it passed using me as a human squeegee to remove a few gallons of water from its coat. I guess turnabout is fair play, for I was now as wet as they were. From the chute system, I swung open the barn door to let the sheep into the warmer interior … except that the cattle had beat me to the punch. They had taken advantage of an unlocked gate on the far side of the barn and now lay placidly chewing their cud and looking at me with their best “Whuht?” expression.

What was expected to be a simple visit to the barn to right a problem that could have been taken care of earlier in the night continued to go from bad to worse. Leaving the problem of sorting out the barn‘s living quarters for the daylight hours, I went back out into the pouring rain, only to find that the water troughs were already forming a crust of ice. Two breakers in the fuse box had tripped, indicating that apparently I was running too many heaters off the same circuits. It might have been cold, but at least my temper was warming up. I made a couple of adjustments (although it actually took me another day to find the right electrical load balance) and walked back out of the barn, where it was still pouring rain and still a miserable night, and slogged through the mud up to the house around 4:30. Thoughts of sleep long past, I started a pot of coffee—not that at that point I needed waking up.

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Reading: The new Hearth & Field print journal (H&F delivers a lovely read that is good company for a snowy evening) and The Code of the Woosters, plus Carry on, Jeeves (the latter two both by Wodehouse). Is there such a thing as too much P. G. Wodehouse? I’m apparently on a mission to find out. Also, I’ve returned to a reading of Tom Holland’s Dominion.

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Housekeeping: A reminder that the full archive of my posts (dating back to 2011) is available here and that my book can be purchased here.