Tonight I transitioned from a wannabe farmer to an actual working farmer. I didn’t know I hadn’t made the shift until it happened. I thought I had been a farmer all along.
We do a lot of watering around the place by pulling hundreds of feet of hose from one location to another. I had been watering the boys’ (our four male sheep, Forrest, Sundance and Butch, our wethers, and (Stud)Muffin, our ram) north pen for a couple of days and went out to make one more move before it got too dark. I don’t water overnight, but like to get things set up for the next morning.
It was nearly dark which at this time of year means it was about 9:45. I moved the boys’ water and walked over to where they hang out chewing their cuds in the evening. There were Sundance and Forrest and Butch and as I was chatting with them, Muffin walked up behind me. On the wrong side of the fence.
Muffin is a very docile ram, but like all sheep, he can get himself pretty excited when things are different and I firmly believe that they sense and feed off of our energy. I greeted him like nothing was amiss and asked him how he came to be “out here” with me. He was mum on the whole thing (I have never heard him make a sound) and came over to have his chest scratched. After a moment or two to calm him and make a game plan, I started walking around the fence to where I could get him back through a gate. Of course, at that precise moment, he decided he wanted to wander off in another direction. I know my boys pretty well, and know that they really want to be together, so I made the other three get up (using my high pitched excited voice) and got them to start following me inside the fence over to the gate. Once I rounded the corner, I broke into a run, hoping that Muffin would notice all of us running and join in the fun. He did. I am not afraid of him, but 150 pounds of male sheep at a full run is not something to trifle with and I got my 48-year-old farmer’s legs pumping, reaching the gate just before he did and with barely a nanosecond to spare to get it open and between him and me before he crashed into me full tilt. Amazingly he put on the brakes just in time, and I pushed the gate the other way and into the pen he walked. Whew! Now I had gotten very lucky and thanked dear St. Francis for the assist.
Since Muffin wouldn’t tell me where he got out, it was time to walk the fence looking for his escape route. It wasn’t where I thought, a weak spot on one side of the cabin where the fence wire is just a tad short, leaving a gap that an insistent sheep could be tempted by. No, he had pushed the fence off of the other side of the building, crumpling it pretty well. Darn. That one wasn’t going to be so easy to fix, and by now it was closer to dark than dusk.
Fortunately I had recently purchased some t-posts, so up to the shed I went to retrieve them and the post pounder, pliers and some wire. I trudged back under my load to the cabin and after some creative language combinations, fought back the prickly bush that resides immediately adjacent to Muffin’s escape route. Of course all of the boys were there to assist…truthfully they are more like a CalTrans road crew than actual assistants, but I enjoyed their company anyway. We got the post in the ground, the fence uncrumpled and attached to it, and the boys got a special late night cookie treat for their sweet natures.
Surprisingly, it was only 10:20 when I got back inside. I was sure the whole escapade had taken much longer than that. I was filthy, tired and starving, but I had that very deep satisfaction of meeting a challenge and handling it as if I actually knew what I was doing. And that was it. That was the transition because in fact I DID know what to do. I wasn’t faking it or making it up as I went along. The knowledge of how to handle the sheep and fix the fence was right there, right in the front of my brain. It made me feel really powerful, competent, bigger somehow. Fitting way to start my 49th year ―a full-fledged farmer with a lot to learn, but knowing much too and with the confidence to figure it all out.
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