So my options seemed pretty cut and dried. I could save money and wait until I was closer to retirement age and buy a small farm responsibly. Or I could just jump into it, become a student of Hard Knocks University, Agricultural Department. I chose the latter. It suited me to dive into the life I wanted. Also, something I read along the way really stuck with me. In Joel Salatin’s book You Can Farm, he encourages the hopeful farmer not to put off her dream until the circumstances are perfect. He says, quite bluntly, that if you can’t make a profit on your backyard or garage, well, what makes you think you’ll be successful when you finally do get hold of some land? His point was to just get started. Learning comes from mistakes, experience, and hard work. Ideally, I would have grown up as a third-generation farmer who already understood how to clean a roasting chicken and raise heirloom vegetables, but that wasn’t me. If I wanted this to happen, I had to start now. Perhaps then, when the land and life I dreamed of did come along, I would already know a few things, and getting started in the farming business would be more about growth and transition than about making the same mistakes with electric fences and gardens I would have made for years on rented land.
The reality of this gung-ho attitude isn’t as sexy as it sounds, of course. It was fraught with panic attacks and the feeling of treading water. What had me pounding with anxiety wasn’t being tight on cash; it was the fear that there would be no cash at all. When the economy came crashing down and people were being laid off at the office, I was a wreck. Losing my job was all it would take to end my homesteading education. Some nights I would lie on the futon in front of the fire, unable to sleep, because I knew how close I was to the edge. If I lost my job, the dogs and I would have to move to some apartment and try to get another job while I got back on my feet. The chickens would be sold. The sheep would be returned to their former farm, and rabbits and bees would end up as Craigslist castaways. This is a sobering thing to think about when you are planning gardens, breeding livestock, and building new animal housing. A signature on a pink slip and a handshake could make everything go away. By morning these thoughts would have subsided, and I’d be right out there again, planting and writing rabbit pedigrees, but the haunting stayed with me. Homesteaders with mortgages must sleep better than I did, I figured.
You might also say that homesteaders with partners sleep better, too. Not that I would know.
I’m not going to lie: the pickings in southern Vermont were slim. After living in the area for a year or two, I’d only managed to scrounge a handful of dates, none of them good. This wasn’t their fault; I was horrible at dating. I would get so nervous about the first impression I was making (you know a date isn’t going to end well when you’re all wound up, self-conscious, and scared your mascara is leaking into the dark circles under your eyes). I couldn’t relax. Instead of being the confident woman from the online profile I’d created (one of the only ways to meet people in my area code), I came across as a distracted, fast-talking hurricane, barely able to understand the answers coming out of my own mouth, much less able to digest his. I was a total disaster.
The other major dating issue was less a problem of quality as it was of quantity. There were handsome, caring, and intelligent men out there on the backs of tractors and quarter horses, but when compared to the sheer quantity of single women, it became obvious that there was a serious John Dear deficit. Besides, the few men weren’t that easy to meet, unless you had the timing skills of a stalker and were willing to haunt the local Agway. Clearly, I wasn’t up on my creepy skills, but I had high hopes. Eventually, I’d stumble across some guy who wanted a woman who enjoyed The Daily Show as much as she enjoyed milking dairy goats.
Being a single woman in a rural area also seemed to limit my options to two main categories of men. The first was the backwoods cliché and the second was an awkward grab bag of outsiders.
Now, I appreciated and couldn’t help but be attracted to some of the Good Ol’ Boys on farms, in construction jobs, and working in auto shops. These were the guys who unapologetically stocked their closets with their best suit and tie, running sneakers, and bottles of deer urine. They worked hard, played hard, and enjoyed the aspects of rural living that make them the butt of urban jokes. They hunted, rode four-wheelers, drank Bud, and knew where their grandparents were buried. The good ones were clever, kind, fiercely loyal to their families and faith, and generous with what they had to give, as long as they didn’t feel taken advantage of.
Unfortunately, all these men were married. Moving on.
The second category was the kind of man I kept running into: gentlemen outsiders. These were either locals who had lived their whole lives in the area but never felt accepted or guys who, like me, had moved here, away from their roots, and were trying to start a life in a strange place with uneven footing. For whatever reason, they took a job, or followed a dream, or by some strange set of circumstances discovered themselves in the land of milk and honey (we had a lot of dairy farms and beekeepers) and weren’t quite sure what to do next. They were always passionate about one thing, be it music, or art, or animals, or their career, or whatever it was that kept their hands from being idle and put a spark in their eyes. I was a sucker for these guys. I went on dates with men who did sound checks at rock concerts, wrote screenplays, and played banjo in the apartment they shared with four roommates. The guy with a record collection and a smirk will always win the day over the guy who actually knows how to start a tractor and isn’t scared of horses.
In short, I was an idiot when it came to love.
I’d never had any luck in the love department. I’d only really loved two men in my life, and neither of them felt the same way about me — not even close. The first time was hard; the second time, debilitating. I found that it got harder as I got older, and not because of clichés like “all the good ones are taken,” but because I was growing to know myself better, and with that understanding of what I wanted for myself I had a pretty detailed idea of the kind of man who could fit into that life. I held this ideal in my head, and anyone short of it didn’t get even a wave. Unfortunately, this limited the dating pool to such a thin sampling of the population that it was rare for me to find myself having coffee with someone in a bookstore even.
I also confused friendship with romance all too often. Part of me wanted to blame the fact that I was raised watching Cheers, When Harry Met Sally, and Say Anything. The other part blamed myself. I’d get the possibility of a relationship in my head and fall in love with that possibility before the guy knew what was happening, and suddenly going for a late-night walk to get a cup of coffee was saturated nostalgia for me and only a way to spend $1.89 for him.
I hadn’t given up on falling in love, but the pragmatist in me had trouble believing it would happen. I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel the same way about a man as I did about my farm. Ever since I’d held that first chick in my palm or slammed that first hoe into the soil in Idaho, owning my own farm someday had felt possible and real. Every atom in my body believed I could get there. My faith that I would someday walk out onto my own pasture with a sheepdog at my side wasn’t something I had to question, because farming was always the end result. I had no plan, no money, and no experience, but I knew I loved it, and I could take that blend of hope and willpower and sign those mortgage papers when the time came.
You see, you can love a farm and spend a lifetime dedicated to it and know that it doesn’t have to love you back. I knew my farm would sustain me and heal me and occupy my body and mind in a way that was not unlike love. Farming is physical and emotional, and you get out of it exactly what you’re willing to put into it. Like any other relationship, it has its high and low points, but the deep undertone of pure, unadulterated love keeps it pumping blood. It’s something you can have if you’re willing to work for it.
Sadly, it’s not easy to find people who are interested in this sort of life. A guy who still enjoys eating chicken after slaughtering thirty that same morning and isn’t tired of weed
ing in August is a rare find.
I have no idea who this guy is. I just hope he has a decent record collection, likes dogs, and has good timing. In my experience, one of these is always lacking.
SAVING SARAH
ONE BRISK FALL MORNING I found myself standing in the sheep pen with a fiberglass staff, yelling commands at a young sheepdog. I stood there under the red maple, watching my confused sheep circle in panic from the little black-and-brown dog turning them around the pen. I suddenly realized how absurd the training session was. I had only been involved in the world of border collies for a few months, after all. I’d been diligent, sure: attending trials, training sessions, and lectures. I’d read books, visited farms, helped at novice practice sessions — but now I was standing in a pen with my own sheep and my own sheepdog, trying to remember how to go about this.
In the haze of the confusion, though, there was also real joy. Ever since I’d first learned to knit, I had secretly wanted my own fiber animals. When I finally took the plunge and started homesteading, I bought, raised, bred, sheared, spun, and knit from my own small herd of Angora rabbits. But sheep are the ultimate homesteading beasts. You can eat a sheep, milk a sheep, or wear a sheep. This was an animal that made you everything from roast, to ricotta, to rag-wool socks.
The more I learned about them, the more I made them a part of my life. I stopped buying polar fleece and switched to wool instead. My dogs ate lamb-based dog food. I went to restaurants with lamb on the menu; bought sheep cheese, fleeces to spin, yarns, and books. When I started to eat meat again — after almost a decade of vegetarianism — it was pastured lamb that first passed my lips. I was becoming a hard-core advocate of the ovine marketplace. I did this because I wanted to support the product I would be producing on my own land someday. Helping the sheep industry was helping myself, along with all the other shepherds who were trying to make a go of it.
Deciding to dedicate myself to the noble hogget meant I had to face some pretty harsh realities, though:
1. I couldn’t run a sheep farm by myself.
2. I’m single.
3. I needed a border collie.
I could be a shepherd if I only had some help. A good, dependable working dog was just what I needed — an animal that moved sheep, kept them at bay when I was pouring grain, separated sick ewes from the flock so that I could administer medications, watched and protected the herd. Having a sheepdog was about so much more than herding sheep; it meant the freedom to farm as a single woman. Yes, I only had three bum sheep and a rented backyard, but getting a young dog trained and started would mean that when I was ready to buy a farm and start working my own flock, I would be prepared. I needed this dog to become the farmer I wanted to be.
And so there was Sarah, a started dog versed in basic herding. She was around a year old, and already herding dozens of sheep a day on a small farm in upstate New York. A member and trainer I had met through NEBCA had been working with her. She had come to the trainer’s farm as a reject. An elderly gentleman had bought her as a puppy from a working-dog kennel, thinking they would live out their days together on some rural property upstate. But he became ill and had to move back with family near the city. Now this farm pup was being raised in Manhattan — total sensory overload for a dog bred to focus on one intense job at a time. Predictably, the confined spaces, high stress, and family life proved too much for the little girl. The family sent her away to a shelter: sadly, the fate of many pet border collies whose owners think they’re getting a cute and cuddly family dog but end up with a puppy that circles their children’s playgroup like a land shark. Border collies, especially ones bred from strong herding lines, are not golden retrievers.
So Sarah was sent to a shelter, discovered by local border collie–rescue activists, then sent to Barb and Bernie Armata’s farm, which is where I met her. She was in her glory, smiling and panting, working a large herd of Scottish blackface sheep every day. Her character review was stunning, her demeanor calm; she was a love bug and already tuned to the work I needed to be done.
I felt prepared to take this step. For months I had been immersed in this world. The trainers and club members knew me and understood my tenacity and willingness to dive headfirst into this lifestyle. So many of them had once been in the same position, just starting out with a few sheep and looking for a working dog. So when I put out the word to the border collie community that I was looking for a “started” dog (meaning a young dog with some professional training under her belt — in other words, a puppy I couldn’t screw up), I heard back from Barb and Bernie. They thought that this ex-city-livin’ farm girl might be a good match for their ex-city-livin’ farm dog. We chatted over e-mail and sent photos back and forth. Sarah was a tricolor rough coat and small — only about thirty-five pounds. But like most working border collies, she wasn’t bred to meet a physical breed standard; she was bred to herd sheep. She was floppy-eared and scrappy, and her coat, while technically rough, was only an inch or two long. She was the picture of a farm dog to me, though, and had that bit of wildness in her eyes. So I made arrangements to meet up with Barb and Bernie at the Fall Foliage Sheepdog Trial in Cooperstown, New York. I could hardly wait to meet the dog in the photographs.
I had friends visiting from Pennsylvania the weekend of the trial. They were coming up to Vermont during peak foliage time to see the farm, have a small vacation, play some music (they’re both fiddlers as well), and join me for my three-hour pilgrimage to Border Collie Mecca. I explained to them that this was one of the most prestigious trials in the Northeast, and people would be competing from across the East Coast and Canada. They were sweet and polite about it, and more than willing to tag along, but clearly my enthusiasm wasn’t contagious. They did know about the potential farm dog, though, and were as excited to meet her as I was.
So the three of us drove south to Cooperstown, with Jazz and Annie along for the ride. Our little caravan of dogs and ladies rolled through the autumn glory of the Hudson Valley, and we found ourselves being bowled over by it. The entire Northeast was at its most colorful, but traveling only three hours south, I could see how much louder the color became. Vermont was looking good, but New York was putting on a fireworks display. The sight of it lifted my spirits even higher.
We arrived at the trial fields around ten in the morning and set up our camp of folding chairs by the gate near the starting post. That sounds more exciting than it is, actually. The starting post is not some latched series of gates that release a pack of sheepdogs, like at the Kentucky Derby. It’s simply a white post, maybe five feet high. It marked the starting point for all dogs being put through their paces. While my friends went about setting up their chairs and backpacks for optimal sun and comfort, I was scanning the crowds for Barb and Sarah. I could not wait to meet this dog.
I finally found Barb talking with some other trainers near the main tent. We shook hands, and Barb told me that Sarah was over near her car and went to get her. When she returned, it was with a long thin lead of braided leather attached to a little sprite wagging her tail. Barb handed me the lead, and I knelt down to meet Sarah. She paid some attention to me but kept darting her head back to the right. She was fixated on the sheep. At the time I took this as a great sign, but in retrospect I should have understood the warning. She was intense. She was a working dog through and through. New people, a crowd, cars, trucks, hot-dog stands … she didn’t care. Sarah wanted one thing in this whole world, and it was covered in wool on the other side of the fence. I had signed up for a herding dog, and this was it.
We spent the trial together, and for the first time in all my herding club adventures, I had a dog with me. I saw a well-known trainer I had spoken with at a few events. He knew I was hurting for a dog, and bad. When he came upon the happy couple of girls smiling in the early-afternoon sun, he called over, “Jenna, you got your dog, huh?” We parted, and as I walked away with the little black dog by my side, I felt different, better. Having a few sheep in the backyard was one thing. Hav
ing a sheepdog meant I was serious about this sheepherding business.
A few weekends later I drove back to Barb and Bernie’s farm to pick up Sarah for good. It was a rainy day. It was also the open house for Barb’s new venture, a top-of-the-line boarding facility for dogs. Barb was living the dream: she was finding a way to make shepherding on her farm a full-time job. Bringing the business of people and their pets to her home would provide a paycheck and the peace of mind of being near the flock.
Sarah and I stood together in the corner of her office, among the crowd of people there to see the kennels. Barb showed me where to sign the papers, then took us out to a small training field with a few quiet sheep. She handed me the staff and showed me how to use it to signal to Sarah and keep the sheep between us. I was walking backward while the flock charged toward me, with Sarah weaving and darting on the far side of the ewes. The lesson was short but good. I understood my job, mostly, and Sarah seemed to know what was going on. (I realized any sheepherding lessons would be more for me than for her.)
As we were getting ready to drive back to Sandgate, she sat calmly at the end of her leash and seemed to catalog everything going on around her. After some well-wishing and waves good-bye, I pulled out of the driveway as a shepherd with her collie. Sarah was in a crate in the back of the station wagon. I was unsure of how she’d be in the car (I was told she wasn’t fond of them), and to avoid the risk of a freak-out on the New York Thruway, I kept her boxed.
Once home at the cabin, she made herself comfortable on the couch with me, and we ended our exciting day by watching a movie rented from the NEBCA library, A Year of the Working Sheepdog. It was a documentary about a working farm in North Devon and the dogs that kept the show running. I watched it, amazed. The shepherd in the film, David Kennard, was a true farmer, a pro. I was a kid who’d just gotten her first tricycle and was watching the Tour de France. I sighed, happy. In the morning we’d work those three sheep in the backyard like Barb had showed us. But that first night was just about scratching ears and letting Sarah know she was home. She slept well and deep, and I had my collie. We had both come quite far. Devon would come another day.
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