Animal Messenger Sanctuary Blog

The winter rains hit hard last night and when I went up to feed the animals this morning and ran my hand over them in greeting, Chloe’s and Charlotte’s wool was soaking wet, Wonder’s and Isabel’s only dampish, and Pegasus’s horsehair coat hardly even damp—indication of where they spent their time in the rain. So Pegasus and two of the sheep mostly stayed in the cozy shelter carpeted with a thick layer of straw while Chloe and Charlotte preferred the outdoors, as they often do, lying on the slope in front of the shelter, chewing and looking contemplative, even in the rain.

The rain doesn’t penetrate their wool anyway. When you reach into their fleece, you find that all is warm and cozy near their skin, even when the outer fleece is soaked. Isabel, a “meat” breed sheep, doesn’t have as much protection as her wool-breed friends. She loves the shelter and doesn’t hesitate to get out of weather. Wonder, though he has the thickest fleece of all, likes to hang out with Pegasus, so if she’s in the shelter at night, that’s where he will be. Like many horses, Pegasus doesn’t mind the rain, but since her dearly beloved donkey died, she has lost her motivation to be out in it. Gabriel used to graze in the wildest weather and there she would be, right next to him.

After I fed everyone, I paused in barn cleanup to look out at the rain-washed vista. The leaves in distant vineyards had turned to gold and the Sonoma range beyond was wrapped in low clouds. All was clear and crisp with fall. I listened to the animals chew and felt satisfaction all over again for my just-in-time hay storage.

The first heavy rain a week ago pushed me into solving the hay storage problem. The used aluminum shed some friends had helped me put up had blown down in a gale last spring—the wind blows fiercely up here on the mountain at times. Since it was near the end of the rainy season, I didn’t try to put the shed back together, but just tarped the hay. The sun breaks down tarps remarkably quickly and the one I had bought was already shredding. I cast around for a more protected place to reconstruct the shed, but none were well situated for unloading the hay.

It came to me in one of those early morning bursts of inspiration that I should use the loft in the animal shelter, which was made for hay. It had no setup to get the hay up there, which was why I hadn’t used it before, but I’ve solved many shelter, storage, fence, and pasture issues over the years, so I set out to find a solution. Rig up a pulley like farmers have done for centuries, I finally told myself, and headed for the local hardware store.

Two guys in the store got totally into helping me figure out what I could rig up (I love local small-town businesses!). We laughed and made jokes and had a grand time. We couldn’t get the one pulley set they had in stock to work and it was too expensive anyway, so we went from aisle to aisle putting different screw hooks and pulleys and rope together until we had something we thought would do it.

When I got home, my brother called. I told him what I had been up to and, to my amazement, he said he had one of those old-fashioned block pulleys I was lusting after. I had tried to persuade one of the guys in the store to sell me the one at his grandfather’s farm since they weren’t using it, but he wouldn’t part with it. And here was my brother who, when he sold his old Wisconsin farmhouse, had dismantled the block pulley on the big beautiful barn and taken it with him, even though he wasn’t moving to another farm and had no use for it. “I’ll mail it to you,” he said. I was thrilled—just the kind of thing I get ecstatic over since becoming the caretaker of hooved animals.

On Saturday, I fed the animals the last of the hay under the tarp. I couldn’t delay any longer and as this was also predicted to be the only sunny day in what might be a string of rainy ones, I went to the feedstore and had my pickup loaded with eight bales of hay. Back home, I opened a section of the fence, drove my truck in, parked below the high loft door in the shelter, and tried hauling up a bale with the new rope slung over a beam. The bale wouldn’t budge. I didn’t want to bother rigging up the improvised setup; the real thing would be arriving and I just needed to find a way to get this load of hay into the loft. I ended up rigging up a system that involved a ladder, the metal feeding trough, a blanket, and the rope.

As I wrestled the hay, I thought how much easier this would be if I had some help, but it is incredibly character building, especially for a woman, to meet these challenges on the farm, and it feels so damn good afterward that it’s worth it. Just as I was wedging the last bale into the loft, my neighbor arrived. She looked at me and said, “You’re an Amazon,” and then studying the system I had rigged up, said, “Ingenious.”

I was feeling an enormous sense of satisfaction (from having solved the hay problem and also from what I call the squirrel factor—having successfully stored nuts for the winter) as I backed my truck toward the gap in the fence—and promptly got stuck in the one-rain-moistened ground. This was what I got for not getting the hay in before the winter rains started. It took me at least a half-hour to get the truck out. I loaded the bed with cement blocks and wood pallets to give the light Toyota some traction, pulled slippery wet straw out of the way, strewed gravel in front of and behind the wheels, and maneuvered this way and that until I finally slid sideways into the right position and the wheels bit to get me out of there. More farm satisfaction—covered with mud and drenched in sweat, I felt great.

Women who grow up on a farm don’t need this kind of character building, but I didn’t and then I lived in cities until my mid-thirties. You can live in the country and still never get the kind of crash course I’ve had, but when you take care of hooved animals and don’t hire work out, you end up on your butt in the mud, laughing at yourself. Which is what happened because, of course, I slipped on the wet straw while I was clearing a path for the truck. Nothing like a roll in the mud to put some perspective on life. And nothing like putting your body on the frontlines of the farm to feel fully alive.

As I drove back through the gap in the fence, bumped across a hazardous dip, and reached the certainty of the gravel driveway, I thought of the bumper sticker “A woman and her truck—it’s a beautiful thing.” Yeah, it sure is.

I thought too of a woman I met up in the Sierra foothills. She had bought raw land there, where she lived with her horses—I think it was six of them—while she gradually built what she needed. Her dwelling for the first few winters was a tepee. A modern frontierswoman. Like another I met when I was 17 and at college in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. This woman was a student at the college too, but chose to live off-campus and alone in a remote cabin in the mountain woods. She brought me to her home once and we had to trudge a long way through the snow to reach it. Her only source of heat was a woodstove and she chopped all her wood herself. I was deeply impressed and the image of her snowbound cabin has stayed in my head to this day.

A woman at the frontier—it’s a beautiful thing.

© Stephanie Marohn, 2007