Taking Off and Landing

Friday was the last day at the farm, which has caused me no small mixed emotions. I loved the rhythm of the place, the simple existence, the un-clutter, but at the end of the day, my calling is in a world that has a lot more odds and ends. Granted, most of them are unneccesary, and that’s where this post starts: what has this month done, and what will be taken back into the world I knew pre-farm?

Before I get to that, I have to say that my first day back was phenomenal:
**Had waffles, bacon, and canteloupe for breakfast.
**Listened to Siamese Dream, which I’ve rediscovered and can’t get away from.
**Watched half of Season 1 of Arrested Development with these friends.
**Came home and watched Brazil get axed by France.
**Napped, and then went to see these guys. Check them out. Their debut’s going to be really nice.

It was a pretty great homecoming.
**

In no particular order, the things that are staying at the farm:

1) Chiggers
2) Composting toilets
3) Goat feces
4) Open spaces
5) African sage
6) Salt stains

In no particular order, that which is coming back:

1) An herb garden
2) Regular exercise
3) Regular trips to the farmer’s market
4) Songwriting
5) Morning devotion
6) Refusal to live without community
7) A farmer’s tan Recognition that life does not have to be lived on fire
9) Financial reconfiguration
10) A little sanity

It appears as if the farm has saved its best for last. A brief recap. In the last month, I’ve:

**Installed insulation in an attic. Nasty factor: 7.6
**Castrated a goat. Nasty factor: 8.4
**Shoved poop down the composting toilet: 6.3
**Shoveled mucked hay for mulch: 5.1

Today, however, topped them all. Today, we went hunting for worms.
**

There’s a group from Missouri with us for the week. The youth pastor is a Truett grad, and it makes my heart proud to see a fellow seminarian who gets it, who instead of taking his youth to the beach for a week, takes his youth to learn about global hunger and to work their asses off. My thesis is that if more kids got up off the couch and sweated on a daily basis, they wouldn’t be so spoiled. Another day. All I’ll say is that every Saturday was work day for me growing up, and I can’t say that I hurt from it.

It’s been slightly surreal being one of the ones they ask questions to about farm life, and finding that I can actually give answers, like when a tomato is ready to pick, or why the chicken coop is off the ground as opposed to in the dirt. The student has become the teacher–as it should be, I suppose. If these things are not transmitted, they’ve been for purely personal and selfish gain, and I’m not sure that that doesn’t defeat the whole point of the place. And so, I’ve been leading little cadres of children in the shucking of bamboo and the picking of peppers.

Today, after we finished cleaning and stacking the bamboo someone donated to us, we had a special project.

Nasty Factor: 9.3: Digging for Worms.

At first glance, not such a bad gig. But think about it. Where do worms flourish? Underground. Specifically, where there is organic material to be eaten. And what’s the most fertile, most organic material on the entire farm? The area right beneath the rabbit cages. Now, to preface this, I have to say that I have more affection for the rabbits than for any other animal on the place. They’re less tempermental than the goats, and have way more personality than chickens. They don’t do much aside from sniff and bounce around, and when they’re fed African reeds, they’re actually pretty darn cute.

In the effort to use all of our resources, the rabbit cages are placed above an extended hole, so that when they crap, their dung becomes part of a large compost pile, creating completely organic and free mulch. When I pulled back the tarp covering half the pile, I thought at first: “This won’t be so bad. It doesn’t even smell.” And then I dug the first pitchfork in and turned over the topsoil. Dark, rich, and stanky as your baby’s booty. As stanky as fifty baby bootys. Fifty baby bootys who had cow turds for breakfast. It was foul. For two hours, we barehanded through the dung looking for a gallon of worms. Love for rabbits: minus 2. Velveeteen or no, ain’t no roses here.

A GALLON. Do you know how many worms it takes to fill up a gallon bag? Approximately fifteen times what we were able to come up with in two hours. I’ve washed my hands fourteen times since noon, and they still smell like crap. I’m getting the Clorox out when I get home and chemically treating my hands until they get this stench off of them.

Thanks again, WHRI, for the lasting memory of being elbow deep in rabbit excrement. Love ya!

“”Ain’t no love, in the heart of the city..”
I said where’s the love?
“Ain’t no love, in the heart of town..”
Yeah..”

Preach it, Jay.

I’ve milked my last goat and escorted my last group of friends around the farm. Jeff Cary commented yesterday that farm life has been good to me, that it’s rearranged some weight. I went in with the specific plan of losing a few pounds, and while that’s happened, it’s been replaced, as Kevin said to me this weekend, with “blue collar muscle.” As I get ready to make the transition back to my own place and away from the dorm and the quiet mornings in the country, I expect nothing less than full-blown cynicism. I expect to completely hate concrete and to pull a Wendell Berry, pining for the simpler life of the farm. It’s true: I have some sort of splinter in my hands every afternoon and nearly ripped my fingernail off on some tomato trellacing yesterday, and while Berry doesn’t really have any good stories about that kind of stuff, that’s part of it. I’ve graduated from sweating my brains out to working barehanded in the dirt.

Last night was poker night in honor of a friend who’s taking a teaching job in Corpus Christi, and for the first time in a long time, I was not the first one out. I was the fourth one out in a ridiculously tough table, and was put out by the eventual winner of the tourney, and I’m not sure that I can give the farm credit for my newfound poker genius. If the shoe fits. If it doesn’t, you can pull a Grimm fairy tale delux and chop off your toes until your foot does fit the glass slipper. So, thanks for the newfound poker smarts, WHRI.

Tonight, I’ll do a little grocery shopping for the farm and cook up a big batch of okra. It’s true: the country really does beat the dog out of the city. Who needs Southpark when you have backgammon?

So, what have you been up to the last month?

In lieu of creating a separate entry with a bunch of witty commentary, you can see all the farm pics here. Feel free to leave witty comments of your own in the comments below, however.

The last week or so at the farm has been pretty quiet. I’ve been helping with a lot of smaller projects: putting a floor into the upstairs apartment, cleaning out some upstairs rooms, uprooting and moving a fence. The garden, however, remains my favorite place on the farm. There’s always something to do this time of year, as something is always ripening and falling off a vine or stem. My favorites are the cherry tomatoes that explode in your mouth, seconded by the enormous crop of okra that is forthcoming. The eggplant should be ready soon enough, and then, I will feast.

I’ve been hanging out with Dave, one of the other interns, during the day as we work on the kitchen floor outside his apartment, located on the second floor of the dorm building where I sleep. He and his wife and baby moved up from College Station in January after Dave finished his degree in Agronomics, with the intention of going overseas at some point. Since it’s my blog, I’m taking this moment to say that Dave is quietly becoming one of my favorite people at the farm, mostly for the humble and quiet way he does things. That’s more or less the general ethos of the place: do what you do and don’t make a big freaking deal about it, but with Dave, this is truly an extension of who he is. All of the other interns have areas of specialization: goats, garden, orchard, etc, but Dave, the newest one, does mostly the never-ending supply of work projects. He installs floors and does insulation, cooks, feeds chickens, and never complains.

In a world of academia, where the implicit goal, even in religious studies, is to make a name for yourself, it is staggering to be in a world where the name that is cared about is Jesus. I scraped up wood putty with a crowbar, listening with Dave to a John Piper sermon that made me enormously uncomfortable. Why was I so nervous? Because Piper was so unnuanced in the way he talked about Jesus? Or because he talked about Jesus in a way that religious studies won’t touch for the most part? Careful discourse is part and parcel of what I’m learning, and to be fair, it has its place. I won’t go around saying that Jesus knew he had a divine and human nature, because I’m not sure that he knew things the way we think he did, and because Scripture doesn’t read like the Council of Nicaea. I won’t say that God causes earthquakes to kill children in the Phillipines because the sovereignty of God and the destruction of the innocent are not the same thing. There’s a time and place for being careful and distinct with how we talk about God, and for knowing that some modes of discourse are real trouble.

There’s also a time for being extravagant. I feel extravagant when I sing and when I pray, but not when I talk. As many problems as I have with Piper’s theology, I can’t deny that when the man talks about Jesus, I get shivers, like the Holy Spirit just tiptoed up my backbone. A few nights back, I listened to the first academic conversation I’ve heard in a month, and it sounded like Martian: words I understood, but was not eager to regurgitate. Between being in Shreveport and being on the farm, I think I can remember that there is such a thing as real life, that it is that existence which is firmly ruled by flesh and blood and animated by Spirit, in service to God and humanity.

All else is vanity. Fun, interesting, bread-winning, food for my mind and soul, but apart from being returned to God: vanity.

If you have a weak stomach, turn back now.

You’ve been warned.

Last chance.

Okay, so yesterday, I castrated a goat. I’m not going to go into great detail as to how one castrates a goat, only to say that it does not involve a rubber band–too much blood. It involves nothing less than a sharp knife and your fingers. Oh, and a helper who is sitting on top of said goat so that you can focus on the delicate task at hand without killing the goat.

Allan had the goat locked in a figure-four and squatting above his head, while I readied myself with the knife, eyes trained on the source of the goat’s anima, his sense of manhood, his seat of passion as it were. And suddenly, I lost my nerve. The bleating began and as the pitiful little cries reached my calloused ears, the goat suddenly had a name, a face.

He was….#4.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I told Allan.

I’m standing there, sharpened knife in hand, and about to cut the testicle off of a goat. How did I get here? Wasn’t I supposed to be rooting around in the tomatoes? This is Esau work; my life is way more like Jacob.

Then again, Jacob did get the girls.

Pressing onward.

Realizing that once the first cut was made that the only option was to let the goat bleed, I went forward. Moving with the delicacy of a surgeon, I did my work with the help of another intern, and let the goat run free, sans ball. Singular. Goats only have the one boy. Walking away, slightly disillusioned with the stew I’d had yesterday, I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Should I start locking my door at night, hoping that the billies don’t rise up in revolt?

Anyone who tells you that animals don’t have personalities hasn’t spent a lot of time around animals. They’re talking in total theory. Goats, as a general rule, are cantankerous. Even before you subject them to the ball-removal ritual, they’re just cranky creatures. They don’t go where you want to lead them; they bleat pitifully all while butting against you with their udders or horns, whichever is more convenient. And they run like hell whenever they find food. Case in point: the day before yesterday when larger goat, having been milked, decided that the corn fields were perfectly adequate places to graze as opposed to the field of weeds I was trying to herd her towards.
**

My ideals were trailing behind me in a bloody mess, contemplating total veganism, when Allan said, “We’re not done.”

“What do you mean we’re not done?”

If you hate me now, turn back immediately before any shred of respect is gone.

“We need to debud the kids.”

“Debudding” is the process by which the kids (baby goats) are deprived of their horn material. Now, since this stuff is still in its “bud” phase, aka “not full grown horn”, the perfect time to do this is while the kid is between two and five months old. Any older, and they start to sprout horns, along with a whole new set of belligerent attitudes, and you’re done for.

How does one “debud”? Well, any sautering iron really will do the trick, but this one’s a little bit rounder so that it catches the full girth of the horn area. So, while you’re holding down a beautiful little kid, you take this implement and burn it on their noggin for about 15 seconds per horn, all while they’re screaming and squirming. Ignore the rattling throat that you’re having to hold to keep the head still.

Allan says that he’s glad to know where the meat is coming from. And to some degree, that’s true. I have a lot more appreciation for chicken and goat now that I’ve participated in their upbringing and care. And occasionally, they’re kinda pastoral and nice to be around. But I’m not totally comforted about the meat now. I have looked into its beady little eyes and heard its little cries. My only consolation is that the older goats are dumb as rocks.

I don’t think I’ll mind so much eating them.

Today was the day of the goat.

Milking and herding. If you’ve ever tried to chase down a goat free from her burden of milk and jonesing for fresh corn field, talk to me.

My day started around 5:45 a.m., as I got up and dressed in order to be well with the world by the time the 6:30 a.m. goat milking started. I went to the shed with Alan, one of the interns, and into a room with a number of white benches with slats. Imagine every horror film meat locker floor you’ve ever imagined, minus the blood and screaming virgins. After getting the pails sterilized, we herded the nannies in one by one, strapping each of them into their own slat by enticing them with a pail full of feed and then removing it. Once all six were in place, turn the bucket over and let the games begin.

Milking a goat really is in the technique. Frankly, I feel somewhat dirty describing the process, as in all actuality, it’s feeling up goat mammaries. Just don’t think of it like that and you’ll be fine. Think of it as extracting goat milk, or contributing to the natural process of goat lactation. Placing your thumb and forefinger at the top of the lobe, you cut off the valve and then use the rest of the hand to squeeze out the milk. Release. Repeat about twelve thousand times, or until your hand cramps or until the goat decides to step in your bucket of freshly squeezed milk, crapping out an entire morning of work.

I was on my third attempt, having finally gotten into some kind of rhythm when Mama, Goat #7, decided that my milking pail was the absolutely perfect place to put her hind leg. That spot, and no other, would absolutely make the perfect leverage point. I remember a story my mom tells me of my uncle Bill, milking cows at 6 a.m. when the cow did the same thing. He told my grandmother that the “cow put her damn foot in it”, at which point he was slapped. Maw-maw didn’t take too much for cursing. #7 put her foot squarely in the bucket at which point, I informed her that her “damned foot” was in my “f-ing bucket”.

So much for morning serenity and earthen piety.

That morning, the group read from Matthew 24. Given that today is the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year of the millenium, I’ll let you draw out the connection. For a moment, I thought that Mama was the harbinger of doom, the dawn of an age when chaos would break forth. But then I realized, that no, the world was not ending today, but the gallon of goat milk would have to wait until another day, hoping against the day when goats will realize that wooden stalls are the right place for goat legs, that place and no other.

Try it again, and it’s goat burgers, Mama.