STILES
WALLS AND FENCES, boundaries and barriers keep things in. And out. They form aesthetic lines, staffs of meandering music in cedar rails or solid rock foundations in the stones of our land. Fences suggest entry by invitation only. Unless, of course, you are a bird or a seed wafting over, a snake slithering through, or a blade of grass rooting sideways to the other side. The stone fence is bordered by a gate into the Sidefield, is amenable to climbing, sitting and walking. It harbours sempervivum, lichen and the promise of vine.
Elsewhere on the farm the boundary fences contain. There are no gates for egress, for escape. The fences form solid penning, connecting and dividing neighbours. They haven’t always held. The pig who arrived at the back door on Easter Sunday, snuffling and snorting and frightening me before I figured out who it could be, had rooted her way round the rails edging the swamp, crashed one down, lifted another and followed the path to the house. The Easter pig.
Cattle broke through the wire into the Hayfield, ate some of the crop and trampled more. A Jersey bull set up camp on the front lawn for a whole spring day before I could discover who owned it. Goats sail over the top of any kind of fence, are not containable and are not missed. And occasionally a few of my sheep have gone astray through a weak fence and grazed their way to the neighbour’s grass.
In winter every fence has its up point, its area prone to snow, which fills in until the posts are gone, the rails buried and the fence a mere memory of pales past. Skis fly over top with nothing to stop them; the property goes on forever. But by spring, when the ground is firming up, the rails lean forward through tangle and brush, angling awkwardly over and down, and the climb becomes difficult. The kids never complained. My daughter was always an expert scrambler; my son grew so tall he could almost step over. But I begged for a stile, cajoled for a stile, and finally, when the woodsman felled the dead elm on the fencerow, I took short lengths of log, arranged them on both sides of the rail, slipped a board through and I had a way across. It was wobbly and primitive, but it was a step. This motivated Thomas and he arrived with his saw, his sense of order and form and improvement. He tinkered with my mess and turned it into something beautiful and steady and safe. A mirror of himself: a solid stile to help me over any barrier, face any obstruction and get to the land beyond it.
Once he understood about stiles, he took them on. Particularly when he realized he could make them with rock.
All along the inside of the meadow fence is garden. It has grown, over the years, spread from the few perennials that survived the plough, the bachelors and the neglect, into a border that runs from barnyard to road. The garden weaves in and out of the lawn, through the groves of lilacs and cedars, the shade of maples and the worrying noses of browsing sheep on the other side. There is one gate into the field by the house, but it serves neither back nor front gardens well. Though it is rail, the fence is not good for climbing as I’ve discreetly lined it with wire netting that I renew and repair each spring to deter ovine marauders. The rails refuse a foothold.
Rocks have been my rescue. A huge boulder, moved by magic or memory, stands on end in the field, high enough for one big step over the top. On the garden side, amidst short spreading lamium, there are flat flags leading to the stepping stone that boosts me over. Nothing tall grows here but the rock—just short plants the sheep can’t reach through the open space I’ve left beside the stile so Sydney the dog has her own path. She runs at speed, turning sideways at the last moment, and just like Zoë before her, flies through the fence to land with a twist. We can be in the field in a second if we spot a problem or take a whim.
To the south, amidst the blue garden, there is another path of rocks, flat to begin with, then mounding to the lift over the fence, letting me through to another trail to the field. It leads me to harvest the pears, and to prune them against their constant determination to grow up rather than out. It leads me to the locust trees and sumac at the roadside, the escapes of Tulipa tarda and scilla, grape hyacinth and narcissus, which I dig out with my trowel and transplant on the tame side of the fence. Harnessed back into my garden, they only seem to grow to escape once more.
Stiles take me out and bring me back. They are two-way streets that open up my land and return me to its heart. They provide the possibility of a walk most days until the snow whitewashes them away.
STORM-STAYED
SOMETIMES THERE IS WARNING for our legendary snowstorms, which fill all hollows, mound all hills. We’ve learned over the years to read skyscapes: the mare’s tails and mackerel scales in the clouds, the black northern horizons, the grey streamers fronting in from the west, which herald the steady march of the lake-effect troops. Sometimes the news alerts us to the upcoming squalls. The radio interruptions and General Store gossip in Alderney, the flurry of activity as everyone rushes to the village for supplies while the getting’s good. Canned foods, milk, animal feed. Fresh vegetables and fruit and extra treats for kids who might be stranded at home ravenous from snow play or shovelling. We get a full tank of fuel in the car, bring firewood in from the fencerow and, if the power’s threatened, store water in the tub, for electricity runs the pump from the well.
It’s a Grey County expression, to be storm-stayed. It differs from being snowed in or snowbound, which suggest hot drinks and warm fires within safe walls. Being storm-stayed is serious business in the snowbelt. It can happen in your car, in town if the roads are closed by the police, at home, or anywhere else you might be when the storm hits.
The news is full of ominous reports of an approaching storm: squalls, streamers, blizzards and hazards. But it’s already midday; Thomas left for work long ago without a change of clothes, without a thought that he might be stuck in town for days.
By the time the school bus returns, the first flakes are falling. My grown children walk up the lane, stepping over the drifting dunes of snow while gusts gather in the east. The beast. Aeolus, warden of the winds, raises his gale slowly at first till it swirls and tangles, chills and bites. The snow fingers become full-bodied drifts, hills and valleys rising from the flat desert on the once sandy lane.
My son shovels out the garage then closes it, lowers doors, checks latches, battens down hatches while my daughter and I take the dog to herd the flock into the barn. Their winter fleece is iced pure white; the black sheep is in disguise, in white-face for the day. We shut them in first with a panel then dig the frozen fodder, bedding, manure and snow that fills the threshold, obscures the channel for the massive door, its track high up, valanced, protected. We dig with fork, spade and crowbar, slide the door to, stay the wind from.
After dark the winds explode, volleying white snow off black skies. Eddies and currents pattern the air, dervishing snow into drifts to the tops of fences, to the bottoms of windows set well above ground. Stiles lie buried until spring.
Thomas is stuck in Murphy’s Mill, tense in the knowledge that he is alone on call. The roads are closed to evacuation. I wake often in the night, alone in my bed, cold and agitated with the howling of the blizzard, the weight of the snow, fret for all the creatures I care for here. Responsible.
Dark morning is marbled with the smoke of squalling snow. The Jubilee radio station announces local bus cancellations to the ironic ostinato of “Get up in the morning get on the bus,” but there’s a phone chain too. Buses are cancelled. No school. Pass it on.
Heading out, bundled in my barncoat over a down vest, earflaps snug under my hood, sheepskin mitts and high boots on, I can see that the east garage doors will never open and that I must go out the north way where the path is blown free of snow. The dog doors are clear: two raised panels carved out of the larger door and loose but for top hinges. One door swings in, one door swings out. Sydney paws at her out door gingerly, giving me a woeful look after her night inside. I follow, snowshoes in hand, and find a patch of windswept ground where I can strap them on. I’m equipped now, as I hadn’t been that first year when the snow came up over my hips and each step was a heroic measure of my dedi
cation to this life.
I settle into the giant teardrops of wood and gut and leather and let them carry me across the top of all the mountains and valleys that miraculously exalt my once gentle barnyard. Even if the gates were not down, removed for winter access, they would no longer impede my way—the drifts are that high. Only the tops of the fence posts remain as wedged markers in this new terrain, this sea of white that waves and breaks and continually reconfigures around me.
The lower half of the stable door to the feed room is buried in snow. It opens out, so I cannot budge it. I consider returning to the house for a shovel, or using one of my snowshoes to rabbit my way through to the feed room. I’m flummoxed by the tenacity and intensity and sheer volume of this falling manna. Then the brilliance of the Dutch door illuminates my mind. The door is not just for admitting summer breezes into the stable, for leaning on when gazing out between hay-loads, for hose or cord conduit, for conversation with my Dutch-born neighbour. No, the door, evident in sixteenth-century oils where it spills light into interior spaces like liquid gold, is suddenly my ingress, my access. The bottom section latches with a hook and eye on the stable side, but the top—wide tongue-and-groove boards hewn in another century—has a toggle latch, a curved metal handle on the outside, a bar and catch within. I lift; it rises and the top of the door pulls out and around, rests against the barn wall, held fast in the wind god’s open palm. I take off the snowshoes, hoist up, over, drop down and I’m in!
Frontenac and Lanark, my fall kittens, now half-grown cats, mew and burr with excited trills as the snow and I spill into their demesne. The sheep salivate for their breakfast, the chickens cluck and the rooster struts. He’s far past his morning crow and ruffled at my delay. I feed out, check resources and observe that waterlines flow, doors enclose, roofs imbricate. I hope the thick layer of snow that has blown through the barn cracks onto the hay and straw in the mows will insulate rather than melt and ferment my forage and sour my fodder. I mentally check through the beasts and tasks and shut the lights. But the door is much higher from the inside, and is hard to mount. There are shovels in here: my crusty square blade with the bentwood handle, a spade, the long flat scoop I use to gather sheep pellets from the cemented barnyard in summer. But I need to get out to dig, and the wind is wild and the snow continues to fall in pages, in books.
Back in the stable I find an apple box. A square wooden structure with a flat top, it’s the perfect height for picking low branches in fall or climbing through the top of a standard Dutch door in the depths of winter. It boosts my trip over and out and onto the snowshoes again. I dig in my toes, navigate an about-face, latch the top half of the door and head house-ward, secure in the knowledge that the flock is fed and cosy and the storm is outside their day.
All week I snowshoe to the barn every morning and every night—even after the roads are open and the lane is clear and the kids are back at school. It takes that long to blow out the barnyard to the point where I can take my shovel and carve a path to the Dutch door. The flying Dutchman brings the tractor, the snowblower, and carves tunnels through the drifts after the wind abates. He once told me that they don’t have Dutch doors in his part of Holland. And I’m sure they don’t need them for weather. But they weren’t wrong, the old masters. And nothing reflects light like snow.
SHEEP PATHS
To follow like sheep.
As if mindless.
Thoughtless.
Stupid.
SHEEP FOLLOW IN AN AGE-OLD pattern of order. Like Sydney, who takes after me through the stile, they trust their leader. Sometimes too well. It’s a trust both exploited and denigrated, encouraged and denounced, but singular. When the alpha sheep sets off down a path, the others are sure to rattle their dags behind. But you do have to get the leader going. She alternately heeds the siren’s call and fears the terrors of innocent barriers: the Scylla of a misplaced stone, the Charybdis of a shadow. My first few sheep were pets, all named. But they didn’t readily learn to come when I called. They followed their dreams, but with no discernment between the gates of ivory, the gates of horn.
In the first cold snap of the first sheep-autumn at Lambsquarters, before the barn rebuilding, before the arrival of the sheep-herding dog, I carved a beast hole in the stable, which looked like an oversized urban cat-door, covered with a sheet of sacking, to woolgather and wind-hinder. Though the sheep could only benefit from this come-and-go door, they suspected something on the other side of the small straw-bound threshold. Circe’s spell? Neither fresh hay nor warm shelter could entice them to cross the threshold. The door was new, unknown, untried; they would not risk being turned into swine.
I zigzagged behind the mob, small as it was, snapping my fingers and clapping my hands. They clustered, flocked, moved forward then broke free, scattering right and left, winnowing in the formation of some ancient country dance. But they did not go in. Would not. Their eyes widened, their nostrils opened in fear at the approach, and they split into two concentric patterns away. We cycled and cycled until, in frustration, I finally remembered that sheep follow. Cream rises: sheep follow. So down I got on all fours in the barnyard. I eyed the flock over my shoulder, created the track and took myself through the door. They were there behind me, all in a line, calm, noble, trusting. They formed their winter path. And I learned that day to lead.
JUST BEFORE the January thaw there are no sheep paths at all, except for the pacing-trail in the pen and the line scuffed away at the base of the mangers, which exposes the dry, hard, frozen manure pack. On the coldest storm days, when the bitter east wind attacks through the updated sliding door, which is left open the width of two pregnant sheep in wool, there are no tracks at all. Just a huddle of beasts, frosted white on cream fleece, white on white, winter white. On those days the frost itself makes tracks, outlining whiskers otherwise unseen, frosting catfish mouths. The sheep look like kittens who’ve been sniffing in flour tins, with sparkles.
To close them in and out of the weather on such days, I create a path for the track door, which after all the snow and ice cannot find its channel and slide. The sheep watch with worry as I attack the frozen mass of straw, manure and snow. It isn’t easy work, and it isn’t quiet, and it certainly isn’t warm. I dress in typical bonhomme fashion, in long johns, jeans, wool socks, sweater, scarf, mitts and toque. I don the snowsuit my father-in-law left behind from a thinner time and felt-lined boots. And I begin to shovel and to chip. The crowbar, its weight lifted and dropped, asks gravity to make a breakthrough. Slowly, a bit at a time, the debris comes away and a trench forms. The axe would work faster, or the heavy maul, but I’d need steel-toed boots and they aren’t warm. So I play it safe and struggle on. The sheep disappear behind me in a steam bath of mutton-breath. The spade lifts out the pellets of frozen dung, the chopped bits of straw, the cubes of ice. Somehow there is never much loose snow. In strong winds it travels, fills up the stable far beyond the door, swirls up the walls over inside stones and through the boards high in the mow, salting the stacked hay as if to preserve it from rot.
If sheep leave few tracks in the storm, the mammals in the mow redeem them. Cats, their claws pulled in, use furry mittens with pink suede palms to mark the snow, and the sharp skeletal marks of rodent feet run just ahead of their tracks at a clip. The chase is circuitous and confusing to decipher, tracks sashay and shuttle in the macabre dance of cat and mouse.
In the stable the sheep huddle for warmth, wear a circle in their bedding, and punctuate it with the deep commas of naps in the straw. They pace eventually, more bored than cold, and yearn to follow, to move in a line. When the wind stops, I dig once more in new snow, haul the door along its groove and watch as cooped critters try to bound through, three at a time. They wedge themselves in the doorway until one gives up and retreats, and they fall into their famous follow formation. As they make new tracks in deep snow, I fill the channel with straw, cover it with a board and wedge it tight with the door. The digging will be easier next time. I’ll fork instea
d of pry.
Before the white deluge, they had their path to the Sidefield, their tracks to the apple trees, where late fruit still fell on shallow snow, and grass could be uncovered with the scrape of a hoof. They filed one by one, through a narrow passage between garden and gate, then fanned through the field on the worn gullies of previous Gullivers.
At dusk on those days the order dissolved and mayhem reigned in a moment of remembered lambdom. Heels kicked, heads bunted and all the gambolling of youth condensed into a few minutes of late light. They ran in; they ran out. They led; they chased. Imbedded tracks dissolved in the dark, making the field a mass of jumping wool, which moved like wheat in the wind. You had to be quick to catch it. Like glimpsing the kneeling oxen on Christmas Eve.
Winter trails are limited, hindered by snow and cold. A good storm will fill the barnyard, bury the feeders, block the gates. The adventurous can step over fences on white walkways, wander to the fields beyond and be gone. But nothing beckons from the blue-white wilderness, so the sheep stay, stalk circles and lines from feeder to straw, from shelter to sun, back and forth on the slippery board over the threshold. They click or stomp or jump right through, leaving neat hoofmarks in a narrow swath.
SHEEP LAMB behind closed doors. They make their labour track in a corner, dig a nest with a forefoot, walking back and forth in the timeless distaff pacing of early contractions. Afterwards they follow me as I lead carrying their newborns to a special pen, where tracks are impossible to lay.
On the first day of spring, when the doors open to the light, they rush to be first to the path, the familiar route to fresh green heaven. They run in full-footed jumping gambols, in sideways kicks, in neck-turning tumbles. All the pent-up energy of winter gestation, labour, birth and nurturing explodes in a May Day festival under the sky. They head down the chute between the Meadow and the Hayfield, nibbling and bleating, putting fresh prints in muddy paths silted over in the thaw—and forget their lambs.
Lambsquarters Page 18