When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Fence Clearing

There being 8 livestock volunteers on a working ranch of 350 acres, and there being no baby animals for the next few weeks, we turn to long-term maintenance projects. The list of long-term maintenance projects is almost exclusively comprised of fence repair.

Step one: Make sure no animals will get out if you tear down the fence.

Step two: Tear down the fence.
The fences are mostly made of 6 strands of stretched barbed wire and a strand of smooth wire that's electrified. They're stretched along T-posts, driven 3' into the ground, standing about 4' high. At the ends, they're wrapped around wooden posts that have probably been in the ground longer than I've been alive. The wire is thick and unworkable, and requires heavy duty pliers and a lot of muscle to unbend from its fasteners.

Step 3: Dispose of the fence.
The barbed wire needs to be coiled in order to be transported and recycled. This requires multiple people and heavy gloves. It's also very straightforward.

Step 4: Clear the fence line.
This step can involve heavy labor, with hacking, sawing, digging and cutting. Or it can involve fire. We did it the quicker, more efficient and much cooler way. We burned the fence line with a propane flamethrower. Amazing. The fence we were working on was near a river which floods, so there was years of buildup along the fence line, with 5' high piles of grass and branches that got caught up as the waters receded. We lit it on fire and had a nice, if brief, bonfire. It's not everyday that you get to use fire as a tool. The whole experience was very enlightening. And very fun. We all felt pretty cool and intense.

Next step: re-string the fence line. Then lather, rinse, repeat on the miles of other fence line.

When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Keeping busy on weekends

The ranch is in the middle of other farmland. We're in central Arkansas, in the hill country just above the flat delta land. There closest major city is Little Rock, the state's capitol-45 minutes away. Closer than that, there's a few towns, but between the towns, not even a convenience store. Gas stations are few and far between and traffic lights are non-existent.

So we're left up to our own devices to entertain ourselves during time off. It's a working ranch, which means work 7 days a week, but the weekends are slower, and we only have minimal chores. Sometimes we get days off in the middle of the week, and those are considered 'weekends'.

One of our options is going into one of the major towns to grocery shop. This is a favorite activity of everyone, since the closest grocery stores are not that high-quality. Plus, everyone's interested in organic products. Can't really find that in the middle of rural America. Unfortunately.

There are a few events in the area, from a Seder celebration to a Mountain Daffodil Festival to a fundraiser on public television that needs phone answerers. We tend to keep busy with the events that crop up.

There's also the library. I've had tons of time to read, which is a great end to the work day, and a great way to spend lazy days off. When I spend 12 hours at work on a work day, I spend a good portion of days off on the couch with a book.

There's a permanent flea market at the next town over that we go to on weekends. We browse people's remnants and hand-me-downs. It's full of kitsch, stories and a few suspicious items. The creepiest thing we found was a bundle of 28 pairs of children's panties, labeled as such, "some only worn a couple times." ...Only in Arkansas.

There's plenty to do on the ranch, at home, with cooking and cleaning piling up to be done en masse on the weekends. There are also copious amounts of potlucks and get-togethers.

All in all, we enjoy ourselves here on the ranch. It's a very close community comprised of people from all over the nation and the world. Not the Arkansas I was expecting to find.

When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Daily Chores

A day starts at 8am. Not bad for a farm-I've dealt with earlier. Also, my commute is a 5-minute walk across a ranch full of animals as the sun rises in front of me. We'll soon start at 7am when the goats need to be milked. We're enjoying the winter quiet now.

We split up and pile into our two farm trucks, one group doling out grain and one group dropping hay. We visit the camels, llamas, water buffalo and bulls first, usually.

Camels, llamas and water buffalo are exhibition animals, kept to educate rather than for productive reasons. The bulls are breeding stock.

Then on to the pigs.

We have 11 pigs of different ages. Gloria, the one standing, is the oldest. We have four piglets that get bigger every day. They'll all get huge soon. Then we eat them. Until then, it's fun to play with them, and throw them a flake of hay, which they tear up, squealing. It's their favorite thing.

And the rams and bucks, kept for breeding.

The goats are everyone's favorite.

There are meat goats and dairy goats. They have such personalities, and will do almost anything for food. They can open certain types of latches on gates, and enjoy running around the farm when they get out. They'll descend on an area and strip it like locusts. They're pretty clever and very strong. I want to get a goat cart, but I can't get anyone to sign on to the idea...
We eventually check the cattle, which are split into a group of fat ones and a group of skinny ones.

Somewhere in there we check on the horses and the donkeys, who are exhibition animals only (they have quite a life--no need to work).

We have 4 Belgian draft horses, who can all drive and are all trained to be working horses. We have two giant donkeys, who are large enough to be ridden. We'll probably be downsizing our herd soon.

Back in the Show Barn, where field trips of school children are taken to learn about all of our animals, we check on the rabbits and turkeys, and collect the eggs from the chickens and ducks.

Eventually we head on down to the Bottoms, the flood plain by the river where our huge pastures are. That's where the sheep are until lambing. We feed their three guard dogs, who keep the coyotes away (but sadly can't herd) and check the flock for limpers, stragglers or other sheep needing attention.

After morning chores, we all head to the projects we've scheduled, which we'll do all day, with a break for lunch, until evening chores. Until babies come, everything is sane, with a nice routine.

When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Home on the ranch

I had no idea what to expect when coming to Heifer. I asked, "Who else volunteers for you?" They replied, "People aged 18 to 80." I stopped asking questions.

Well, to be fair, volunteers are all ages here, literally between 18 and 80, but here's the more helpful version of that answer.

18 is the minimum age to volunteer at the ranch, so no one is younger. There are a few 18 year olds, mostly on their way to college, taking a year off between high school and higher education.

There are a lot of 20-somethings, finished with college and on the way to the "real world" of corporate jobs or another few years of education at grad school. They make up the majority of the work force, in all fields from livestock to education to gardening.

There are also a few older volunteers, retirees who greet visitors or staff the gift shop or coordinate maintenance.

No one else seems to be in the middle of a career. Everyone's either evaluating their options or enjoying retirement.

Everyone is very environmentally conscious, and interested in green lifestyles. People buy organic, local or vegetarian or any combination thereof. Also, they like to cook and prepare food. We have weekly potlucks, and often pool resources to make scrumptious meals.

What an awesome society to live in.

Residential volunteers live in volunteer houses on the ranch grounds. I live in the largest house, Valley View, which is divided into two households (upstairs and downstairs). I live downstairs with 4 other people. There are three rooms, with two people per room (oh, the joys of sharing a room... I thought I left those behind after freshman year of college). There's one man all alone in his room, and 4 women in the remaining two rooms. The kitchen is huge, well-equipped and spacious. Each room has a bathroom, and there's laundry right here in the house. It's very nicely laid out, and volunteers are well cared for by the company. It's not a bad set up at all. There's no college feeling around the place, as one might expect, with group-living in provided housing with 20-something-year-olds.

People work any of the 7 days, and get away on fun social activities on their time off. It is Perryville, Arkansas--so quite in the middle of nowhere, but we manage to find things to do.

Live Hard, Play Hard

After 5 days of orientation and no regular work, the weekend was tediously long for everyone on the ranch.

The snow on Monday didn't help everyone's restlessness.

When the ranch closed on Tuesday, that was it. A group of us organized to go play snow games.

We had too few for capture the flag, and too few resources for a productive snowball fight, so we improvised games. After too much running, we settled on frisbee with a 5-gallon bucket lid. Perfect improvisation.

When that got boring, we added in a snowball fight, throwing snowballs at the person who caught the frisbee. Every once and a while the game would dissolve into a full-scale snowball fight as people charged the catcher. Once everyone was sufficiently tired, we would settle down into regular frisbee again.

Making snowballs was particularly hard with my right arm in a cast (and not wanting to get it wet), but luckily the snow had a crust of ice, and small sheets of ice could be prized up and lobbed at other people. I was also able to use my cast as armor, blocking fierce throws of the frisbee that would have hurt to catch.

During one of the degenerated snowball fighting bouts, someone shouted "Look out!" and I was able to look up from prying up a small ice sheet to see the bucket lid whistling its way toward me (in a remarkably straight trajectory, too).

Well, it fortunately didn't hit my nose or knock me unconscious. It did, unfortunately, hit my teeth, chipping one of my front teeth pretty badly.

Crap.

So I now have a chipped tooth, which was rapidly repaired by a local dentist (after two days of drinking meals through straws and self-consciously avoiding smiling).

Although I look normal again, I apparently cannot ever again eat corn on the cob, or bite into an apple or anything else that laterally stresses my front teeth.

Despite our limited ability for regeneration, you only have what you're born with, and everything else is subtraction. That being said, though, you don't get extra points for dying with all your teeth intact.

Here's to stories.

Starting a new job amid chaos

My new job, for the next few months at least, is being a Livestock Volunteer at Heifer Ranch in Perryville, AR.

Heifer is a non-profit organization that operates on a global scale to end world hunger. They operate on a sustainable and continuing model of social and economic growth. Instead of giving starving people milk, they give them a cow. And many other things, like the knowledge and support needed to care for and profit from a cow. And those previously-starving people, once they have food, motivation and even some income from their cow, must pass on one of their cow's babies to another family in need, who have been appropriately educated. That's the simple version, and that's how Heifer is going to end world hunger.

Amazing.

So I'm here at their educational ranch, enlightening the general public. We're an educational facility, and I am here to help raise awareness of world hunger and how Heifer is working to end it.

And in order to do my job, I need orientation. Two whole weeks of it. Heifer is a huge agency, and has many protocols and procedures that all volunteers must learn. It's surprisingly corporate, even though I'm just here working for free. I'm coming from the theater world, where I'll work for a company for a day or a week or a season; where we're all friends and the organizational structure is lax; where no one's really an employee and everyone's a starving artist. The first week of orientation here was a welcome into the corporate structure, where titles carry meaning, people have desks in offices and promotions are sought after. And I thought I was just gonna herd some sheep.


Departmental orientation (week two) was interrupted by 'massive' snowstorms. There were a whole 4 inches of snow on the ground on Monday. Arkansas shut down for 3 days. Two weeks into my sojourn on the ranch, I still had no idea what my job was.


There are only 6 new volunteers this season, with the rest of the volunteer staff being filled out by returning volunteers rolled over from last year. That's an extremely high retention rate, giving everyone the sense that they've seen it all and done it all before, and making orientation haphazard for us new folks, especially with the snow.

I will be working with sheep, goats, cows, camels, water buffalo, llamas, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, pigs, horses, donkeys and bees. This should be good.

Into Lands Unknown

Seeing as I had spent 3 months mostly in one city (some forays into New York and Delaware excluded), it is time to move on.

On to Arkansas! I will be working for Heifer International as a Livestock Volunteer on their educational ranch in Perryville.

Things that I knew about Arkansas without investigation:
1) It's pronounced R-Kansas (like, the 18th letter of the alphabet and the state that's friends with Nebraska)
2) It is in the South.
3) It's flat.

Things that I have found out about Arkansas through investigation:
1) It is west of the Mississippi River.
2) The density of churches here is higher than in Rome.
3) There are mountains in Arkansas (the Ozarks and the Ouachitas).

Also, it is an 18+ hour drive from Philadelphia. In good weather.

It was certainly not good weather this weekend. The largest winter storm of the season hit the southern US, shutting down everything from Oklahoma to North Carolina. It took me a little longer than 22 total hours of driving. But I broke it up by spending the night (in my car--how else?) Saturday night.


Here's a brief state-by-state greatest moments list:

PA:
Ready to go at 11:30am Saturday, January 30th.

DE:
I crossed the border from Pennsylvania under typical grey overcast winter skies. 20 minutes south, I saw a couple snowflakes. 30 minutes south, snow covered the road.

MD:
(At this point the storm had done its worst, and no one could find a plow) So superhighways have banked turns. Apparently those banks are pretty steep, which you don't realize until you're crawling along bumper-to-bumper in a foot of slush. You realize it when the car in the slow lane, which is now 10' above your head, slides sideways into other lanes of traffic. Hilarious when not terrifying.

VA:
Kudos to Virginia for its snow removal services. By the time I got to I-81, I was cruising along at regular speeds. It was just me and the trucks. Occasionally I would pass a herd of plows trudging along at 30 mph, sparks flying from the plows hitting the asphalt. Pretty cool to see at night...

TN:


My bike was strapped to the back of my car. About the time I hit Tennessee, I discovered that my poor bike was encrusted with ice, slush and road salt. Same with my car... I've never gotten it this dirty before. Luckily the gas station squeegees take off road salt pretty well. Just don't forget to squeegee them dry too.



Mississippi River:
I have never seen the Mississippi before, although I have flown over it several times. I came upon it quite suddenly. I was driving through the rolling hills of western Tennessee, counting down the miles to Memphis with the help of the road signs, when all of a sudden, a big pyramid building pops into view and the land falls away on every side. I was hustled over a bridge and across the river by the time I realized it was the Mississippi. I turned around and went back, visiting Memphis briefly and taking pictures of the sunset over the huge river.


AR:
After crossing the Mississippi, the roads were straight, flat and deserted. I set cruise control and was able to sit with my hands resting in my lap, my legs crossed on the floor. It was an interesting experience to be carried along in the car while I was supposedly in charge. It was also very late, and it had been a long weekend of driving. And NPR had given way to religious sermons. I had to entertain myself somehow...


And like all good road trips, it ended. I arrived at my new home.