Forget Groundhogs

The humble groundhog gets nearly all the press when it comes to spring and predictions thereof.  We've learned around here, however, to trust the birds not the ground-dwelling furry mammals.  The geese and ducks have been returning in droves these last few weeks and to us, that is truly the onset of spring.  The equinox came and went unnoticed - what did not was the endless v's of chinstrap and Canada geese wheeling overhead, the lead bird in each case barking out the rhythm like a coach in the back of a rowing crew.

"Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!"

This year we have seen more mating pairs of geese return to the farm pond than ever before.  We've even spotted signs of Gus, our goose who thinks he's an alpaca.  The birds have arrived on the river near my day job in their usual predictable order - first coots, then geese, then cranes, then endless ranks of ducks.  However, there was a new sight this year in some of the bogs and wetlands that sit in the mountain valleys through which I drive each day.

Floating on the tranquil waters were several snow white bodies, serenely sleeping with their heads tucked under wings.  It wasn't until one lifted its head in idle curiosity that I realized these were swans!  I don't know how long these visitors will stick around, but for now they seem content to eat the water plants along the roadside and sleep quietly in the morning mists.  When they leave the valley will be a little sadder for their parting.

Alpenglow, Sort Of

Okay, so we don't have high enough peaks around us for true alpenglow, but I like to think we can get something similar.  Last night as I rode the bus home I was treated to a rare occurrence - the sun was down behind the trees to my right but the topmost faces of all the trees to my left were still shining in the sunlight.  Coupled with the low overcast layer it was truly beautiful to see those smiling faces under the dark grey sky.  I reveled in it all the way home.

It's a Process

There are times when I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  The farm we may someday still own.  The house we may still someday inhabit.  And then, there are days like today where the feelings of failure and dismay at the loss of our house and the ensuing difficulties with friends, creditors, and neighbors weighs heavily on our shoulders.

Like everything, losing one's home is a process.  Today, the process just happens to suck.

Silence is Golden

I was walking through the parking lot at my day job the other day when I noticed a repetitive shh-shh-shh noise over my head - like the sound of someone walking too briskly in corduroy pants.  I looked up to see that the sound was coming from a large crow heading for the trees across the street.

I love that I live and work where you can hear the sound of a bird's wings.

Making Babies

Okay, our menagerie does not include sheep, but you try to find an old timey graphic of a baby alpaca.

Seriously, though, Jen has been working hard during the breeding season this year.  Not only has she been trying her darnedest to get our small herd to grow, but she's been working near full-time at our friends' farm with their girls as well.  As of this telling a couple of ours are showing signs of buns in the oven and more than a few of our friends' are as well.

I don't know if it's the weather this year, or the especially heavy fly load, or even just the phase of the moon, but we seem to be having a difficult year for breeding.  Females that usually have no trouble settling down for a male are suddenly choosy and coy.  Males that have never failed us are disinterested or, in the case of one male, incapable of "proper entry procedures."

We also have a number of maiden girls this year, and at least one boy is trying this for the first time.  However, in a few years of doing this we've never had so many failures.  Alpacas have an 11 month gestation, which given the delay thus far in successful breeding means we'll be having babies a little later next year.  Oh well - it's an excuse for our daughter to get busy sewing new jackets for the babies.

All in all, though, life goes on and continues in its own tenuous pattern to grow on the farm.  We continue to get settled in our new place and our new lives.  It's getting easier, but winter is on the rise and I can't help feel a little unprepared for it.  Until then, there's lot to do and enjoy.

The Devil Inside Us

I'm taking a moment out from our regularly-scheduled farm news to talk about something I see every day and which has come to a head for a fellow blogger and homesteader.  Jenna Woginrich has been writing a blog at Cold Antler Farm for years, cataloging her life and exploration of homesteading - all the while sharing every aspect of her life without restraint.

Her blog is fun to read, often beautiful, and all-encompassing.  She writes both about her successes and her failures, most poignantly about those times when failure or misstep results in the loss of an animal under her care.

The bottom line is, it happens.  Even the most conscientious, most compassionate farmer will lose an animal now and then.  Individual life is tenuous - even more so when that life is mute and generally unable to express its pain or discomfort.  Sadly, the latest to depart Jenna's farm is her old cat, George.  George had a good long life, even before coming to Jenna.  She gave him a warm hearth, a soft bed, and many many birds to watch through the windows.  It was simply his time and all evidence is that he went peacefully.

Sadly, some of her readers have taken it upon themselves to "instruct" her in how she should have cared for George.  They have blamed her outright for his death and said some very awful things about her ability and desire to care for animals "properly."

I see it all the time - people making comments on the web that in person would be unthinkable.  Painful things said, awful names called, all in the name of internet freedom.  Why is it that so many think that words typed into a computer are not restricted by the tenets of good manners?  Why is it okay to destroy a person online when (I hope) most would never think of doing so to a person's face?

Now and then I despair for the human race.  Network news makes me feel that way.  Television commercials make me feel that way.  Dealing with my mortgage company makes me feel that way.  So do things like this.  Hate and ugliness are just so sad.  So very, very sad.

Moved But Not Settled

We are no longer in the City.

I can't begin to express how good that feels to write (or say).  We've pulled up stakes, packed our various and sundry belongings, and traded loud trucks and angry drivers for endless pine trees and deer in our yard.

To be fair, we moved a while ago.  We've been in our new place for a couple months now and after all this time it is just starting to feel like a reality.  I no longer fumble in the dark to find the door to the bathroom in the mornings, I no longer search for the latest random place where I left my keys.  I'm still kicking the dog-food container every time I go through the laundry room, but I'm kicking it more gently these days.

Aside from this, three months later and we're still not settled in.  We still have way too many boxes leaning together in huddled silence in our garage.  The shop is populated by little groups of my tools and garden stuff, waiting to be organized and given a home.

Honestly, the chaos of our new home has more to do with happenstance than general laziness (though I'm sure there is some of that - it's been a long summer).  We are as busy as always, working a day job for which I leave early and arrive home late, various little medical issues that seem to always crop up when we need to get things done, school and sports and cubscouts for the kids, one of the most difficult breeding seasons we've had yet on the farm (darn it, girls, get pregnant already!) - all conspiring to leave little time and less energy for the inevitably onerous job of unpacking and setting up shop and a home.

Winter is coming.  We will get it done.  We have to.

Spokane Fair 2012

We've just barely recovered from the excitement, the exhaustion, the enjoyment of the Spokane Interstate Fair (really just a County fair, but with a little more hyperbole).  We had a great time in the llama barn at the fair, next to our friend Ester and her huacaya alpacas.  Three days of craziness later we have several ribbons (two HUGE ones won by our kids for herdsmanship), three very tired alpacas, and four very exhausted humans.

The fair itself is rather huge, given that Spokane is the second largest city in Washington state.  We must have talked to a couple hundred people, most asking how our male, Romeo, can see through his dense bangs, and chatted with our fellow llama and alpaca farmers.  The barn hosts were awesome, working their rear ends off while also taking care of their adorable baby girl (who gave out smiles like they were going out of style).

After our second year at this I've learned that there are a few main types of folks at the farm.  There are the city-folk - who point at the alpacas and say things like "what a funny little llama" or "don't you have to trim his bangs?".  There are the greenie city-folk - the people who talk about urban beekeeping, goats milk soap, and organic veggies but whose fingernails are spotless and hands are uncalloused.  There are the country-folk - who can't for the life of them figure out why we would want to raise what look like long-necked sheep.   There are the self-righteous, telling us that keeping our animals in such small pens is cruel and that naming an animal with human names is insensitive to their culture (seriously, only one person said this to me but it was funny enough that I had to mention it).

For the most part, however, people were pleasant, curious, and engaging - asking all kinds of questions and generally having a good time.  We arrived on the day when schools took kids on field trips to the fair, and those were the best visits.  Indy, our first alpaca, love children and she reveled in the oohs and ahs and general expressions of "how cute!"  Her head is three sizes bigger now and it will be a while before we can convince her she is not the queen of the castle, but she appeared to have a good time so we're happy.

Thanks everyone who came out to see us.  We can't wait to be back next year - hopefully with more babies this time.

Remembering

I remember where I was.  Chances are if you're 20 or older you remember where you were.  I remember calling to my wife to get out of the shower and see what was on TV.  I remember the painfully blue sky behind those awful images of death and hate.

But I choose to look at life since then and I am amazed at the changes 11 years can make in a life.  11 years ago I was working in IT in a small computer lab and studying like mad to become an airline pilot.  I had my private pilot's license by that time and was working hard on a multi-engine rating. I had gardened once or twice but never to any scale or success.  I was a pilot.  I was all things gas and power and speed.

Now look at me.  I work in the public arena - something 11 years ago I swore I would never do.  I work with an Indian Tribe, striving to better their living conditions and their economic situation while simultaneously watching mine deteriorate and fade with the harsh reality of the new economy.

But that is not the most important change.  The last eleven years have made me a father of two amazing children that are so much smarter than myself.  I have raised my own chickens, not only once but twice.  I have eaten a fresh egg from my animals (many more than one, actually). I have eaten a meal almost entirely of my own making, from seed to full stomach.  I have raised alpacas and bred them and made more little babies to increase our herd.  I have survived unemployment only to find another position that, surprisingly, fulfills me almost as much as my farming does.

11 years ago we lived in a mildly backward town in the middle of nowhere Arizona.  We looked forward to an urban life, the food and the shops and the entertainment foremost in our minds.  Now, we have just moved from the city to the country - now caring for 10 acres and almost 100 alpacas (thought not all ours, I must say).  We don't look forward to restaurants and movies and shopping.  We look forward to the day when the land between our toes is our own and the animals in their pens are our own and the food in our kitchen is our own.

Eleven years does not seem like such a long time but the changes I have seen in that time amaze me.  I can't wait to see what the next eleven look like.

There Are Ghosts in the Valley

The past few days I have been unable to catch the bus into work.  This isn't the best, as it requires me to drive 40 minutes to the office and Angus does not get the best gas mileage.  He was purchased for his broad back and heavy muscles, not his appetite for gas.  The additional cost is tempered, however, by the fact that in my truck I can see the world around me better and I get to notice the little morning rituals of the Pend Oreille valley as I drive.

This morning I became aware that there are ghosts in the valley.  Not the coalesced personages of times gone by, not these.  I imagine these ghosts are the assembled spirits of all the varied and incessant life that pulses through the tussocks of rye grass and the tule reeds that rise out of the edges of the little moors  dotting the valley.  For every turkey I see crossing the road or every coyote who stares furtively out of the woods as I pass, there is a multitude of creatures and growing green life in the brush.  

As the sun rises and touches the waving pastures these ghosts rise up and twine through the reeds, leaving their misty trails in the hollows and meres.  Slowly the day warms around me as I drive and the mist of their communal presence rises up the valley into the trees above, eventually curling over the peaks to the east and west of the river before dissipating to await the next morning, the next sunrise over wet and bowing grass.

Simple mists they may be to you, but to my eyes they have a life of their own.  Each day, save for the hottest part of the summer, I watch them go through this cycle before the warming sun grows too much for them.  Each day they seem to wend their way in new paths, higher and higher.  They are as much a part of mornings in this river valley as the deer and the geese and the sleepy drivers making their way to work.