Category: New Brunswick

Travel Enriches Life

Maine Lobsters from a 2012 Trip to Canada

I have been accused of being born with wanderlust in my soul. I suspect it is true. The urge to travel was nurtured by mother was traveler in her own right. At the age of twenty-six she went to the World’s Fair in New York City, managed a boat trip up the Hudson, a visit to Niagra Fall, and took the train to Chicago and dropped down to Kansas for a visit. She might have had someone with her on the New York part of the trip but I am pretty sure that she was alone on the Kansas leg of her journey. She was a single mother, but she would throw me into the old 1953 Ford, hand me a map, and say let’s go to the beach. Often the back seat had two or three of her neices that were ten years older than me. When she was in her late sixties, she managed a solo air trip from North Carolina to Nova Scotia by way of the ever complex Boston airport. She was never afraid to travel and once she call too old to make long drives herself, she always found a driver. I like to think she taught be how travel and enjoy it with not a lot of money
There are people who never want to leave home. I am not one of those people. Part of me wants to see what is around the next curve or over the top of the next hill. Not only do I want to see it, I want to experience it. I still remember seeing the Montana mountains towering above the plains on my first cross-country trip when I was seventeen and traveled with a nineteen year-old friend in 1966. Seeing mountains so different from those near me made me want to see more serious mountains. We briefly slid into Canada into on that first trip. In 1969, I got another opportunity when a college roommate and I drove to Alaska. We went right up the spine of the Rockies.
While some take pleasure in knowing a community intimately, I find my pleasure of living in a community is greatly enhanced by having seen and even lived in other communities. Living in a wide variety of places makes you appreciate where you live. For the most part, the communities that I have figured out have been warm welcoming places where you feel like making a home and improving your surroundings.
One rule has been my companion, always try to leave a place better than you found it. The first house I bought for six thousand dollars was pink and something of a wreck when I first found it and convinced my college roommates to help remodel it. Though it was not finished when I left three years, it had been stripped to walls, insulated and rewired. It got copper pipes, a new roof, new pine paneling, a new chimney and fireplace, a new bathroom and water supply. We also created a great organic garden and put new roofs on the barn and brought the hayfield back to life. The house looked a lot different when we left.
St. Croix Cove along the Bay of Fundy was not the right place for cattle so we found an old farm in New Brunswick. We didn’t do much to the New Brunswick farm house other than paint it and add a chimney but we built two huge barns, renewed some pasture, and turned another abandoned farm into great hay fields. We farmed until twenty-two percent interest rates pushed me into a job in the city.
By then responsibility for a family had put my wanderlust in the backseat so we went where the job took me and that was Halifax, Nova Scotia. Halifax was a wonderful place to figure out. We would still be living there but we learned most children had to go to Toronto, Alberta, or British Columbia for jobs. We fled back to the states and eventually ended up on the top of mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. We were there when we took our children on their three week journey around the country. I hoped that travel might get in their blood, but perhaps home was too comfortable a place. Though they have traveled, it has never been just for the thrill of it like I have done most of my life.
When I was still living in Nova Scotia and not yet married, I ventured off to Newfoundland and dreamed of homesteading there. My new wife put an end to that but she was okay with farming in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick where we built our cattle operation. She was also okay with leaving all the friends we made during our twenty years in Roanoke for an extended adventure on the North Carolina coast which she grew to love.
We went to the coast wanting to be out on the water. At the age of fifty-seven, I began the journey of becoming a capable boater in the challenging waters of the White Oak River, Bogue Sound, and the Atlantic Ocean. I logged over 500 hours at the helm of my skiff until someone convinced me that seventy years was too old to be boating out in the Atlantic by yourself. Figuring out the coast and how to prepare a house and boat for a hurricane was a lot more complicated than I imagined, but we did it. We stayed through Category 3 Irene and in sixteen years there only evacuated for Florence. While living at the coast, we made a trip back to our Canadian stomping grounds in 2012. On that trip in Bangor, Maine, was where I found those beautiful lobsters.
You can have wanderlust but still want to enjoy and thrive where you are. We added to and improved every house where we lived. We made the places ours . Even after leaving the farm, isome places we were able to have extensive gardens. Our gardens were amazing around our coastal home and here in the Piedmont.
Perhaps the most unique change we made to a place was the small house that we built on the upper back porch of our coastal home. we created an amazing home but there too many steps for our aging knees. In 2021, we looked foreward to a move from the coast to the piedmont. Because we were old there was some exhaustion mixed with excitement, but we have enjoyed getting to learn our new area. I still miss the marsh and all the creatures there, but I have lots of pictures. The trips now are much shorter now but my mind wanders freely.

No Regrets-Years On The Land

Headed Home On The Road That Took Me To The Cattle

After I graduated from Harvard, I spent over a decade on the land. First, I was part of the early back to the land movement and then later as a cattleman with two hundred head of cattle before we sold them all in fall of 1982 after enduring 20% interest rates. It was a hard life with little room for error and no vacations but the rewards and lessons far outweighed the challenges.
My training other than my Boy Scout years involved wandering the woods shooting the odd squirrel as a teenager, fishing whenever I got a chance, lots of camping during college, and a summer traveling to Alaska in my Dodge Powerwagon. Studying colonial history during my college years had little value when I headed off the Nova Scotia and the old farmhouse on 140 acres overlooking the Bay of Fundy that I bought with my mother’s help.
Rebuilding the old two-hundred year old farm house was really where the training started. I grew up without a dad so I had no one to teach me many of the skills that I needed in 1971. It is surprising how much I could pick up from the free Sears Roebuck manuals on electrical wiring and plumbing. Carpentery I learned from friends who spent some time in Nova Scotia with me that first six months. Gardening and farming I learned from Roedale Press, Malabar Farm, Living the Good Life, Firefox, and the Whole Earth Catalog.
I learned how to do a Thanksgiving dinner when a handful of Harvard/Radcliffe graduates came to see the place that had captured my soul. It was the first turkey any of us had ever cooked but we managed even the careful negotiations on how much celery went in the stuffing. I had grown up knowing the basics of cooking since my single mother often worked late and if I wanted to eat, some knowledge of getting food on the table was essential.
Gardening while guided by the books but was heavily infludenced by having actual hands in the dirt. I was lucky the first old farm had some giant piles of ancient well-rotted chicken manure. The combination of great compost and Nova Scotia’s foggy shore was so good for growing broccoli, we often picked it in five gallon buckets. The cattle started with a few head on the Nova Scotia place, but I quickly figured out the Nova Scotia shore was a lousy place to raise cattle.
In the summer of 1973, I married a wonderful Southern lady who had grown up in the same area as me. Her mother was a part of the same growing, canning, and cooking environment that my mother had lived. By the fall of 1974, we had found our farm in the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. There there was plenty of advice on how to farm. I incorporated some of those ideas with my own plans. By 1975 we were wintering our Angus herd in the woods and putting up our hay in round bales. My only help was the previous owner of the farm. He had farmed with horses and eventually a small tractor to help with the loose hay he put up annually. Even in his sixties he took to the world of big tractors like a duck to water. He also helped me build a couple of big barns, one 128 ft by 41 ft and the other 69 ft by 64 ft.
By the time the barns were done, we were putting up 200 to 300 tons of hay per year. I could build anything from kitchen cabinets with my radial arm saw to barns with a chain saw. I could use a welder and an acetelyene torch. I had survived working in over 100F temperatures to to feeding cattle in minus 40F a mile back from our farmhouse. In the dozen or so years we lived on the farm, I amassed enough stories to fill a lifetime. The experiences carried me through a coporate career and have defined my life.
My wife and I still have special friends from those years on the farm. Our lives were fundamentally different from those living off the grid today but many of the lessons we learned are the same being learned in Alaska. We heated with wood, supplied our house with running spring water, grew much of our own food including having a milk cow and chickens. The freezer was always full of beef and there was never a shortage of potatoes in the cellar or vegetables we had canned. We lived in a close-knit community where the men dug everyone’s graves and when the funeral was over, they went out and put their overalls on and gathered their shovels to fill the grave.
We battled as much as 23 feet of snow in one year. It was wild enough that we had no fences in the back of our farms. In the early years snowshoeing on six feet of snow was common. I know what it means to grow animals which you end up eating. My wife’s first lesson in local food was walking into our Nova Scotia kitchen early one morning and seeing a freshly dressed lamb that I had hung from the top of a door frame so I could cut it up. We sometimes ate salmon that the local tribles sold door to door. There were even a few meals of wild native brook trout. In the spring we gathered fiddlehead greens from the marshes. Before our cattle herd got so large we could often pick chantrelle mushroom from the edge of the forest. They were a staple when we lived in Nova Scotia.
The challenges that we faced on the edge of civilization made us stronger people. Living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Columbia, Maryland, Roanoke, Virginia, and Cape Carteret, North Carolina ground any rough edges off of us and helped us give our three children, all born on the farm, a good start in life. Even at 77 years old, I still garden and I love the feel of rich dirt in my hands.
I have no regrets about the years that I spent living on the land.

Everyone Needs A Wild Spot

Snowy Woods Road, Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

The years in Cambridge drove my need to escape to wild places, I explained.
Goose, “I was born into the wild so getting close to it makes my fur feel alive.”
Me, “Does your fur feel alive when you go out on the screened porch?”
Goose, “The outdoor air smells different. Sometimes I can smell other animals like foxes. The wildest thing I have ever smelled is that long-haired cat that sneaks around the house. That puffs up my tail.”
Me, “I have always had to travel a little to my wild places but the reward has always been far greater than the effort.”
Goose, “Going to a place where you can focus all your senses on what is around you is very rewarding. If you close your eyes, you can imagine the place you are visiting in a different light. The screened porch in the morning is not a screen porch at all. It is a hill overlooking a grass-filled meadow filled with little creatures and the occasional larger creature that causes my fur to stand on end.”
Me, “Does you mind let you wander the meadow?”
Goose, “Even better, my mind absorbs the meadow environment so when I nap, I am actually out in the meadow hunting in my dreams.”
Me, “That’s very human-like. The older I get the more my dreams try to pull together pieces of places that I have been. I often find myself in a problem-solving situation that I never quite have enough time to finish.”
Goose, “We all try to solve problems in our dreams. I am always trying to open a can of pop-top cat food. My dreams have never figured out how my two paws can do that.”
Me, “You are very talented with paws, I have seen you take your paw and wrap it around a knob on a cabinet door and pull it open.”
Goose, “Yes, my paws are big enough to do that, It is easier if one of my sisters is there to use their paw to hold the door open while I change positions.”
Me, “I haven’t been to my special place in the park here in a while. It is a bench among the tall oaks with a tiny brook nearby. I am hoping that as warm weather returns, I will get back there. I know that I need it.”
Goose, “Hopefully you still have some of those wild places stored away in your mind.”
Me, “Yes, I have written about my special wild placesmany times. Those posts and the pictures attached to them are a great help.”
Goose, “We all need to pull ourselves out of our daily live to get some perspective.”
Me, “I agree. Once I did it so successfully that in my dreams I was flying fifty feet above my life. I still remember how vivid those images were. I could see things I never imagined. This was in the eighties, well before drones. It was very different that any experience in my real life.”
Goose, “Our brains work in mysterious ways. Mine is telling me that I need a nap.”
Me, “Yeah, I think you are overdue.”

A Life of Icy Roads

An icy road in the woods, five days after our second storm of the year.

The first time that I can remember facing an icy road, it was probaby 1961. I was a twelve-year old passenger in car headed back from Camp Raven Knob, a Boy Scout camp west of Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Adults had come to rescue us from another frozen, icy night in the three-sided Adirondack lean-tos. I wasn’t particularly worried about the icy roads because I wasn’t driving.
Seven years later I am home for the holidays from college and my mother is hosting a Christmas party in Mt. Airy, NC, for her extended family which are mostly from the next country over. Mount Airy is in the transition area between the hill country and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Weather forecasting in the sixties was a little more rudimentary and a snowstorm hit early in the afternoon. Snowstorms are not every day occurences in the North Carolina foothills. Our relatives were becoming worried about getting home. I was going to school in Massachusetts so my old Bronco had snow tires on all four wheels. I offered to escort a convoy through the worst hills. It might have been the first time I had driven in North Carolina snow which isn’t anything like northern snow. It is rare when NC snow isn’t slush or packed ice. That first trip was in slush which is no problem with snow tires. Everyone drove in my tracks and I took them half way home to the point there was hardly any snow on the road. I was young and probably didn’t worry about it very much.
There were many opportunities to drive on snowy roads during college. Four of us even took a trip to Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island in November our junior year. Cape Breton welcomed us with snow, sleet and freezing rain. We faced some very cold camping and tough driving in the old Bronco.
After graduating college, I moved to eastern Canada. Over the course of the next seventeen years I owned a variety of snow worthy vehicles from Land Rovers to Land Cruisers and 4WD trucks. We even had 4WD drive tractors on our 400 acres farmland.
My wife was in her orange rear wheel drive Volvo wagon on a very snowy day coming back from the doctor with our first child who had swallowed a bunch of Flintsone vitamins. The syrup of ipecac hadn’t worked at the doctor’s office. I had just found out when I came in from barn chores and rushed to the doctor’s office in my trusty 4WD Chevy pickup. I crested a hill as I was speeding to the clinic and there was my wife’s car stopped in the middle of the road. She had stopped because our daughter had started throwing up and she was afraid she would choke in her car seat. I didn’t have time to think, I avoided hitting my wife and daughter by putting the truck into a snow filled ditch. With the big snowbanks, I ended up safe, and I rode home with my wife, grabbed a tractor and a neighbor and we retrieved the truck without any problems.
Snowbanks along the rural roads were a great safety feature. You could slide into a snowbank without worrying about damaging your car. After we quit farming, I became a sales manager for the first Apple microcomputer dealer in the area. I had to travel to three locations in New Brunswick, one in PEI and another in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At first I did it in my old front wheel drive Subaru. One time I came home from a trip and was barely able to get the Subaru far enough in the driveway so I could get our tractor and snow blower around it.
Soon after that I switched to a rear wheel drive Volvo sedan. I put snow tires on all four wheels and fifty pounds of sand over each rear wheel in the trunk. I went everywhere in it. After I joined Apple, I once drove my sales manager from Toronto from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Charlottetown, PEI in a blizzard. He was amazed what the Volvo would go through and even more surprised at the ice encrusted ferry that we took to the island.
Four years later we are living on a mountainside overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. We bought an AWD Nissan our first winter there. We had a variety of AWD vehicles there from Subarus and Grand Cherokees to my wife’s AWD Volvo wagon and my AWD Acura MDX. The little Nissan Axcess was a favorite because I could put chains on all four wheels. There were storms when Little Limo as she was fondly known was the only safe way up and down our mountain. I ferried many people with groceries up and down the mountain to their parked cars at the foot of the hill over our seventeen years there. The Acura with its locking AWD mode was the second best vehicle on the mountain. It is still with us and now 21 years old.
We lived on the NC coast for sixteen years and only had ice a few times. With no hills it is not much of challenge. Here in the Piedmont where we now live there are certainly enough hills to make things interesting but snow and ice is a rarity. Still in the last two weeks we have had two storms, one four inches of sleet and the other a foot of fluffy snow. We had no need to go out but I did go to our butcher shop located on the ice road pictured at the took. The Acura MDX never hesitated even a couple of really icy hills. It brought back some memories, even a snowy one to Newfoundland pictured below.

Toyota Land Cruiser on a snowy road to nowhere in Newfoundland, March 1973

Doing it the hard way

In the sixties or early seventies, the back to land movement was well known. The 1968 Whole Earth Catalog was the instruction manual dedicated to it. Helen and Scott Nearing were its inspirational grandparents. Many in my generation’s back to the land movement were vegetarians like the Nearings. Some were vegetarian by choice and others because of necessity. Because of my proclivity to cattle and farming, I studied Louis Bromfield’s book, Malabar Farm. Today there there is a new generation of people going back to the land.
In this century they are known by the label “off grid.” Few of those folks are openly vegetarians. This new generation proudly hunts and fishes for protein to supplement what they grow. Though their animals are more likely goats than cows, there are some with cows and even horses.
Many of today’s off grid folks are often in places deliberately difficult to reach. Most back to the landers in the seventies went where they could find cheap land whether it was alongside a road like my house and barn or back in the boonies where my friends in the dome lived.
During the seventies, the rural Annapolis Valley where we shopped did not have supermarkets. It had small grocery stores and cooperatives where you could get your food, your baler twine, and some beef fattener for your steer all in one shopping trip. Beaver Fruit Cooperative got most of our business. I also did some bulk orders with the folks in the dome. We had a local hardware and a Sears catalogue store which is where we ordered our appliances.
There were times in the early seventies when I thought about getting farther from the roads that connected us to the rest of the world. Reality always intruded. I thought about homesteading in Newfoundland, but my wife took one look and said I would be homesteading alone. I even found a great spot high on a hill on my land in Nova Scotia.
It is pictured at the top of the post. It was over a mile off the road which does not sound very far until you factor in the heavy clay soil and the astronomical expense of building a mile-long gravel road where gravel is in short supply. Then there would be the likely impossible task of getting power to the homestead. In those days there were no solar panels and battery systems to give you electricity off grid. Drilling water wells on our North Mountain was also problematic.
By the time we moved to New Brunswick we were well on the track for serious farming. We still gardened on a large scale, had chickens, and a milk cow. We did move to having someone butcher our annual steer for us instead of doing it ourselves. In creating our farm, we built well over a mile and a half of roads with New Brunswick’s ready supply of gravel over our rocky soils. I also convinced New Brunswick power to bring power a quarter of a mile back to the new barns that we built. We drilled a well back by the barns. It provided so much water that it was hard to measure.
So by 1976, all the elements were in place for us to move farther from the village of Tay Creek near our new barns but with no close neighbors. It wasn’t in the cards. While we had not had a great experience with the people of St. Croix Cove, the people of Tay Creek had been so welcoming that neither my wife or I would consider having the village become less accessible. It was also a great convenience to be by the road where the school bus picked up our children. It turned out we liked being part of our small farming village. We valued the connections of people dropping by to chat. I did not even mind cleaning the driveways of some residents who became close friends. When we needed them, our farming neighbors were there to help as much as they could.
In the end it seems the biggest difference between the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies and today’s off grid homesteader is that the homesteader of today is often working to isolate themselves from others. In the sixties and seventies back to landers were still interested in community. I loved the small country stores, but today’s off grid folks are much more likely to seek out the anonymity of COSTCO. The money that some make from YouTube makes it even easier to not have ties with nearby communities. We were part of communities because we needed connections and income. Even today you will find exceptions and some off grid folks are much more community oriented than others. However, when I hear the term off grid what comes to mind are people living in places that are only accessible by four wheel drive, snow mobile or ice road for at least part of the year.

Barely Clinging To The Grid

Our formerly pink house after a year of intense work

The dearth of good programming this holiday season has sent me to YouTube where I have enjoyed watching this generation’s homesteaders who would have been part of my generation’s back to the land movement in the late sixties and early seventies.
I was on the fringes of that movement back in 1971 when I bought an old farm including 140 acres, a two-hundred-fifty year old farmhouse (pictured above after a year’s hard work), with a barn and out buildings. I had just graduated from Harvard but had chosen Nova Scotia over law school. Four, also disillusioned, college friends went with me to Canada, but I was the only one to make the commitment to become a landed immigrant. My Dodge Powerwagon and Landrover came with me to Nova Scotia. They carried all that I owned including a TV and lots of spare kitchen utensils from my mother in Mt. Airy, North Carolina.
The pink house in the middle of a sheep pasture was in rough shape when I took possession. We set about tearing it down to the hand hewn beams, insulating it and attempting to bring some modern conveniences to the house. That was probably what set me apart from most in the back to land movement who leaned towards off grid domes, hauling their water, and hand tools for gardening and no modern conveniences,
Maybe it was a childhood in rural North Carolina which was still close to the land filled with small farms that made me different. My mother had been born on a millpond in 1910. I had listened to plenty of her stories of ice being stored in saw-dust insulated holes in the ground and cooking over a wood stove. When I was growing up in the fifties some of relatives still had outhouses on their farms. I also probably had camped in the woods more than most. For whatever reason, I was fine with the conveniences that electricity brought including hot water and a dishwasher. I was also happy to use a diesel tractor on our farm.
I became the electrician and plumber for the modernization of the old house. By Thanksgiving of 1971 we were ready to host some college friends who were sure that we were crazy. It was the first Thanksgiving on our own for all of us. It was pretty rough with everyone sleeping on the floor, a blanket for a bathroom door, chicken crates for kitchen cabiinets, and mayonaise jars for glasses. Still we had an electric stove and a dishwasher. Still it was a great celebration of our independence.
The next year the house was more livable but we poured our energies into gardening and farming. My dad gave me $11,000 to buy a tractor, three furrow plow, disk harrows, front end loader, manure spreader and a bush hog. I took $1,500 and bought our first herd of six or seven cows. We also started refurbishing the old baler that had come with the farm. We converted it to a PTO driven model instead of one powered by a mounted gasoline engine.
We had unlimited compost from chicken manure that had rotted for years behind some old chicken houses. I had little experience gardening besides helping my mother grow tomato plants in North Carolina. What I did have was inspiration from Helen and Scott Nearing and Malabar Farm. Gardening in Nova Scotia on the foggy North Mountain by the Bay of Fundy required a lot more expertise than in North Carolina. Still the abundance from the garden was overwhelming until my mother and her sister, both experienced canners, showed up to help us through that first harvest. We filled the freezer and the cupboards. That winter we butchered a steer we had fattened from our herd. We hung it age in our cellar before carving it up. The next summer we raised pigs, one for us and three more for neighbors. We butchered them with the help of neighbors in the fall, topped up the freezer and made crocks of salt pork. It was an amazing amount of work that made me appreciate all the fresh pork in the fall that our relatives had always given my mother and me.

That winter of 1972 was something of a lonely one. One member of the college crew married the local school teacher and moved into another old house across the dirt road. The last one of my college friends left for a warmer climate. That left me wintering on the Bay of Fundy with our two Labs, Tok and Fundy, and a handful of cats. I made friends with some back to the land folks who lived far in the woods in a dome. I ordered some supplies with them including a giant tub of honey that was still with me when we moved. Mostly what we didn’t grow came from Beaver Fruit Cooperative in Lawrencetown down in the Annapolis Valley or from itenerant peddlers who sold salt fish and winter vegetables. I say we because that was my last winter alone.
I got married in the summer of 1973 and brought my new North Carolina bride home that September just in time for an early season snow storm that took the power out for a week. We stayed warm with the fireplace and cooked over the same. It was not unusual for the powe to go out on our dirt shore road but a week long outage was rare. That next summer my wife and I continued to garden, work on the house, and farm a little. Farming was a little because I had sold the cattle and part of my land to disolve an uneasy partnership with the friend who had married the village school teacher. Well before garden season my wife and I had made the decision to move to a better farming area with more and friendlier people.
We found the perfect place for us in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. We moved there in the fall of 1974 and started the process of building a real farm with the help of some great neighbors. We built our first barn in 1975 and converted to round bales in the summer of 1975.

Annually, we put up 200 large round bales for our herd which eventually grew to 200 head of purehred Angus.

We were actually even closer to the land than we were in Nova Scotia. On our New Brunswick farm we had spring-fed water for our house. We continued to garden, added chickens, and a milk cow. However, we found a local butcher to do our annual steer. We were still on the edge of the grid. Our first winter we got twenty-three feet of snow. We saw weather as cold as minus forty with sixty mile per hour winds. We went back to mostly heating with wood, burning three to four cords per year in our much newer home which was only one hundred years old. It was cold enough that we unplugged our freezers in the shed which was attached to house so you could get wood without going outside. The first winter there I fed hay that had been put up with horses. One thing we did not do is fight snow with tiny all terrain vehicles. A couple of miles of road to keep clear required real snow removal equipment.

Our 85 HP International 786 tractor with 8 ft wide blower, Tok and me with lots of layers

When I look back on it all, I am amazed that we did it without someone getting really injured. There was no Internet or YouTube for advice. Advice either came from a book or your neighbors. I learned to be pretty self-sufficient often repairing broken equipment with my torch and welder. I added chain saw carpentry to my resume as we built the barns. We ran our cattle in the woods in the winter and managed to get through our farming years without ever having a vet come out for a sick animal. We might still be farming if interest rates hadn’t surged to 20% and drove me to working in the city with computers and eventually to a career of nearly twenty years at Apple Computer.

We were never off grid but if your farm doesn’t have any cattle fences in the back because there is no place for the cattle to go, you can justifiably say you were barely clinging to the grid.