Years on the Farm – Page 2 – Our technological infirmity

The Trails of Our Lives

By the time I found the first trail that really meant something to my life, I had graduated from college and was living in an old farm house on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. Behind the house was a large field which sloped upwards to a spruce forest. At the top of the field there was a trail that wound through the woods. As much as I loved the rocky shore that was part of the property, the trail at the head of the field seemed to be more personal.

My two Labrador Retrievers, Tok and Fundy, often accompanied me on my hikes. There was nothing spectacular about much of the trail but it finally opened into a clearing that actually was on my neighbor Joe’s property. The view from the clearing was spectacular. I was living in the Village of St. Croix Cove and you could see the actual St. Croix Cove. I loved the view so much that I eventually traded some land for it.

There were times that I thought that Nova Scotia was the greenest place that I had ever seen. We sometimes were able to find baskets of chanterelle mushrooms just off the trail. No mushrooms since then have ever tasted like those.

With the trail being inNova Scotia, it sometimes took on a winter look and often stayed that way for a month or two. While it was hard to walk up the hill, getting up to the trail on cross country skis was even more challenging.

With each move, we managed to find new trails, some of them memorable.

I eventually got some snow shoes but the snow and and my schedule never managed to really coordinate before we moved off to New Brunswick which was the land of real snow as opposed to rain, snow, rain, and more snow like Nova Scotia.

Still the Nova Scotia trail was beautiful when it did snow. It was a little challenge skiing through the trees without getting covered with snow but that was just part of the charm. That and freezing your tail off were just part of cross country skiing in Nova Scotia in its normal thirty mile per hour breeze.

When we finally moved to New Brunswick, it snowed a lot and we eventually got a tractor-mounted snow blower which coincidentally allowed me to groom a very nice cross country ski trail. Obviously, my wife breaking trail on snowshoes like she did the first winter was not a sustainable solution especially once we had three children.

That first winter on snowshoes helped me to find my next favorite trail which was about a mile and a half and took me to a ridge at the back of our home farm. At the top of the ridge you seemed to surrounded by endless woods. It felt like true wilderness.

The next ten years were spent farming and there was scant time for pleasure hiking. Every trip to the top of the ridge was precious. I did spend lots of time leading cows through the woods from summer to fall pasture and making the long walk to the barn during calving season.

If we fast forward about twenty years, we have moved from New Brunswick to Halifax and back to the states, first finding some temporary roots in Columbia, Maryland. While Columbia, a planned community, was full of trails, none of them were wild enough for me. Barely two years after getting to Maryland, we moved south to Virginia and found a wonderful place on the side of the foothills of Twelve O’Clock Knob Mountain. Up on the mountain behind our home there was nothing for miles. It was a good place for the next trail that provided a respite from the pressures of civilization.

In the early nineties while still living on the mountain, we went to look at a Labrador puppy. It was no surprise that we came home with Chester. Chester, a wonderful pal, like all Labradors grew quickly and needed lots of exercise.

One winter Chester and I were doing our normal two to three mile hike around our subdivision and we saw an old woods road. We walked up it and managed to find our way home through the woods. It was not too long afterwards that I ran into the owner and got his permission to work on the trail.

It was a beginning of a decade of walking that trail, but it took a lot of work to make the trail usable during the summer. The old logging road had filled up with poison ivy. It took me months of work and spraying to kill the poison ivy so Chester and I could enjoy the trail together. Then we often spent Saturdays doing trail maintenance. Chester sleeping in a shady spot while I worked.

The trail rose high above all the houses and looked down on the city of Roanoke. Once on the trail, you felt like civilization was far away. Eventually I discovered an old homestead and the grave of a confederate soldier. It was easy to imagine living on the ridge and trying to scratch out a life from the small fields on the mountainside. A couple of times I made it to parts of the mountain where I found an old road that was knee deep in pine needles. It appeared the road had been unused for decades. At the very top of the ridge even the type trees started to change from hardwoods to firs. It was not unusual to hike the trail in the morning and the evening. We all loved it. We kept a kiddie pool so Chester could cool off after his hikes. Only when Chester began to get old did the trail fall into disuse.

It was always Chester’s Trail to us even as we moved from Roanoke in 2006 two years after he passed away. It was perhaps time to go because the old road that I cleared had been graded and paved. Someone from the valley had bought the land along the ridge and was building a home near the old homestead.

After moving from the mountains, we spent almost sixteen years at the beach. I found a favorite trail on the beach to the end of the Point at Emerald Isle. It was a wonderful hike and once again it was easy to feel like civilization had slipped away. Still it was not the same since I had to share it with lots of others in the summer and people could even get to the end of the trail by boat. I did fall in love with the salt marshes where you could lose the pretense of civilization a lot easier than on the beaches.

Now we are back in the hardwood hills not far where I grew up playing in the deep woods. I think that I might have found another trail that looks like it will be a big part of my life. It runs through what can only be called a cathedral of leaves. The beauty of their colors have left me speechless at times. I am happy to have found it early enough in life to still be able to enjoy walking it.

Not Enough Wilderness To Save Us

Sunset on White Oak River Near Swansboro, NC

Towns are magnets and they suck people from the countryside, especially the young and talented. We noticed this happening when we returned to New Brunswick in 2012.We farmed there in the seventies and early eighties. Since our trip, what remained of the three churches in our old town disappeared. The community store closed. Yet the provincial capital, Fredericton, is thriving as the small towns wither. It is a story repeated time and again in Canada and the United States.

I still worry that some of those wild places like the North Carolina coast will become too populated. I sometimes think that what we call the Northern Outer Banks from Corolla to Cape Hatteras will sink into the seas just from the weight of all those beach castles. I offer up my profound thanks for those who created the National Seashores. Beyond nourishing our souls places like coastal Carteret County and hilly Davie County where we now live grow a lot of food that North Carolina cities need.

(Read More)

Empty Promises

No Paper in the Driveway and An Empty Newspaper Box

I don’t want to be the old guy complaining about other people trying to earn a living. I would like to provide some constructive criticism that might make all of our lives easier.

I spent nearly twenty years at Apple and anyone who knows me will quickly tell you that I am no Steve Jobs fan. I saw him do things that were nothing but mean and contributed nothing to the great products that came out of the company.

However, the one thing that I learned of value from time within the Steve Job’s orbit is that the hardest thing is to say no to things that you might like to do but aren’t in your sweet spot. I would add that if you cannot do something with passion and precision, find something else to do.

Obviously sometimes you really need money and I understand those pressures because I have had my back to the wall with a payment or bill due. I have been lucky that I have always found ways, one time I sold our bulldozer, to keep going until better times. Those better times have always taken me to opportunities where I was proud to work and more importantly eager to do my best.

So here is the problem today. People take jobs and commit to doing the work, then they don’t do the job. Some never master what it takes to do the job. Some pretend to do the job. Others do not even bother to show up. We have been amazed when trying to hire students to do data entry as part time jobs. It is not hard work, yet continually people commit to working x-number of hours but only work half that. Then there are those who promise but never show.

The problem is widespread. (Read More)

The Shade Trees Are Still There, We Aren’t

I remember well the Sunday afternoons under the shade trees enjoying watermelon or homemade peach ice cream. As children, we played like there was no tomorrow. It was a simpler time when people could actually talk politics without getting angry. There was nothing like an old fashioned chicken stew to bring families together in North Carolina’s rolling hills.

There were no chicken stews that I got to attend during my college years. Those were the especially turbulent late sixties and early seventies and I was far away from North Carolina in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As I finished my degree in the summer of 1971, I needed to get away from those strange-hued city-night skies where it was impossible to see the stars.

Just as people used to gather under shade trees in North Carolina, friends used to just drop by on Sunday afternoons at our farm for visit. It was a great excuse to stop working and spend some time catching up on the neighborhood news. It was the way people built relationships, established trust and found common ground. I cannot ever remember discussing politics.

Beyond the impromptu visits, there were community picnics, shared meals, church services (even burials) and work done for the good of the community. All these things made for richer shared lives. When we were on the farm, I never doubted that the community and friends helped us be successful. The support of their communities was essential to success of farming when we had our farm.

That was back in the seventies. The fifty years since then have not been kind to under the shade tree gatherings or any of the other ways that we connected and established relationships.

(Read More)

Partners in Cooking and Life

When I was chasing cows around our farm in Canada, I would have laughed if someone told me that I would replace my wife as the bread baker. I still remember the days that she would bake four or five loaves of oatmeal bread and the kitchen smelled heavenly every time I entered during the day.

I know that cooking together with my wife has become a great joy. We have found a few regional recipes to carry with us as we have wandered from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Virginia, the North Carolina coast and back to the rolling hills of the Piedmont.

The meals that we have cooked are almost always based on simple ingredients. We are blessed to have grown up in families that were close to the land. Fresh vegetables and food direct from the farm or sea often have delighted us and made our meals special.

We were blessed to have grown much of our own food for over a decade. We have never lost those skills or the appreciation of truly fresh food grown in soil that has had enriched with compost that we have made.

For much of our life, we were too busy to do much more than get food on table. That has changed. (Read More)

A Cathedral of Leaves

Trees at Rich Park in Mocksville, North Carolina

Apparently none of the storybook scary tales of danger in the forest ever stuck with me. In rural North Carolina in the fifties, no one worried about evil happening in the forests that surrounded us. We did not understand it at the time, but the cathedral of leaves where we played immensely enriched our lives. As a fifties explorer of the local woods, I could not make the connection because I had yet to experience any of the great cathedrals of the world. Now it seems pretty obvious.

In the summertime, we got up in the morning and headed to the coolness of the deep woods. The towering trees and the brooks that ran through them were our playgrounds. We built dams, seined for minnows, made forts, and played elaborate games in the woods. Sometimes we hardly bothered to leave the woods for meals. We barely escaped the trees as dark descended on the forest.

(Read more) This is post number nine in a series of twenty-two designed to get my blog to 1700 posts before Thanksgiving 2021.

We Were Barn Builders Once

The first barn we built on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick, Canada

We moved to our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick in the fall of 1975. We bought a few cows and they were housed in the old style barn that came with the farm. That spring I went to Manitoba and Saskatchewan and bought a trailer truck load of cows. I had no intention of wintering that many cows in an old style barn. We got a couple of estimates to build a barn. We decided to build a couple of barns ourselves.
While I had learned a lot about working with my hands since I graduated from college, building a barn was not one of those skills. Living on a farm teaches you quickly do what needs to be done even if means learning how to do something new. I ordered all the materials that we needed from Ontario. They were shipped by rail to New Brunswick and then delivered by truck to our farm. The trusses for the barns were 36 ft. long and the others for the other barn were 36 ft. Even getting those trusses unloaded was not easy but it is amazing what you can do with a couple of farm tractors with front-end loaders.
It was harder getting a crew together but a couple of older neighbors agreed to help the two alternative life-style individuals that I hired. They had both come to Canada to get away from American life. I did not care about anything other than they were smart and hard workers. I started by digging a trench four-feet deep as straight as possible for 128 feet. We followed recommendations and made concrete pads to go under each of the four by six pressure treated poles. It was the last time we put pads under poles.
It turned out the instructions we were following were written for building barns in rock-free Ontario soils. New Brunswick soils were mostly rock. There was little danger of them sinking. After the first trench, I decided that we would dig holes with large hydraulic-powered auger mounted on a front-end loader. The advantage of having it on a front-end loader is that I could put down pressure on the auger with the loader so that it would dig more efficiently in the rocky soil. Once the poles were set, we used a tractor-mounted concrete mixer to pour concrete around the poles.
Once the posts were in the ground, it was just a lot of chain saw carpentry cutting the posts off to the same heights. Then we put plates on either sides of the poles. Then the trusses were put in place one at a time. The first truss was the hardest since there wasn’t a lot to brace it with when it was first lifted up. By the time I built the second barn, I had figured out how to improve the construction so that the first truss really was no longer a problem. If you look closely at this picture of the construction of our second barn you can see we put longer posts at the end of the building.
Beyond all the strapping that goes on a pole barn, the hardest thing is putting on the big sheets of galvanized roofing. Often you are way in the air and the only thing keeping you from slipping is the head of a nail. The second barn also got extensions on both sides. We ran out of pressure treated wood so we used cedar posts that came from trees cut off the farm.
The first barn was finished by Thanksgiving (American) 1975. I put the last steel on the barn door before I had any turkey. There a lot of other things that went into making the barns functional like getting electricity to them and of course water. We had to drill a well. I used the backhoe to build a small underground building around the well so I could keep it going in the brutal New Brunswick winters. I dug trenches to put frost free hydrants at both barns.
The finished barns had dimensions of 128 ft. by 36 ft. for the first barn and 69 ft. by 64 ft. for the second one. When I visited the farm back in 2012, both barns were still in good shape in spite of no real maintenance since 1984 when we moved from the farm. They were the only barns that I ever built.
It took at least of couple of years to get the interiors of the barns done so that they met the needs of our growing cattle herd. It was a lot of work but the new barns, a round baler and big farm tractors allowed me to run a cattle operation with 65 or so calving females before we decided to change careers. At our peak before our dispersal in 1982, we had 200 head of Angus, both red and black. The open style barns gave us a very healthy herd of cattle. In the nearly ten years we farmed, we never had a vet visit the farm. We probably had well over three hundred calves in that time.