Traces

I finished my coffee and looked at my watch. 0930. I had just driven up to my dad’s farm in Maine. The farm and most of the acreage would be going on the market in short order and the cattle fence needed to come down. The last time I was there, he had mumbled something close to, “I might need some help with a few things when the time comes.” I laughed to myself because I knew he wouldn’t ask. That’s just his way. But my sister let me know a few days after the last of his cows were trucked off that he was going to start taking fence down. Two phone calls later he and I settled on a day to do it.

0931. My plan was to be done by sundown. I got up from the kitchen table and said, “I’ll get my boots on, let’s go do this.” I looked at his face and knew he was struggling. This was the last time he would be taking fence down. It’s an annual event. One that he’s done every fall, other than a few years he didn’t have cattle, since 1955. Give or take sixty years, that’s a shitload of fence posts and God knows how many miles of wire. I had missed the fence going up in the spring. There was no way I was going to miss this day.

We started at the gate by the barn, working our way behind the garage out to the road. I reeled the wire on the top line, unwrapping it from the plastic insulators as I went. Dad followed me with the bottom line. Cattle fence now is braided poly-wire, a lot easier and less painful than the galvanized steel wire we used on our farm back in the day. And fiberglass posts, well they’re a lot easier to wrestle out of the ground than cedar posts. And no wire clips on ceramic insulators. Drop one of those clips in the grass and not find it, well you’d think all winter about one of the cows swallowing it in the spring. Suffice it to say, there were very few clips left behind.

We got out to the road and started the long straight stretch to the southeast corner. A few sections in I could hear his heavy breathing and unsure footsteps behind me. I knew he was going to try to keep up with me out of pride. I started unwrapping the bottom line from the insulator before the top to make it easier for him and to slow me down. It just sped him up. I stopped and said let’s take a minute, thinking to myself, “Damn it, George, slow the fuck down.”

In the two or three minutes we stopped, I replayed a memory from Christmas night 1986 on the old farm. We had just finished evening chores and were having a beer. I think there might have been twenty head in the barn that winter. I was a senior in college and heading back to school in a few days to begin my last season on the ski team. Years of training had caught up to me and I was having knee problems. We cracked a second beer, and I told him I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ski at the same level I had the previous seasons. In true GW Rice fashion he stared at the cow shit on one of his boots, took a sip of beer and said, “Well, go as hard as you can, for as long as you can.”

I turned away to start reeling line, but more so he wouldn’t see the smile on my face. The old man, as always, was the living embodiment of every piece of advice he’s given me.

Photo: MR

 We got to the corner, loaded fresh reels and started a stretch of fence in the wood line. A short way in dry ground turned swampy and potholed. I stopped after a hundred yards and walked back to him. Prepared for an argument, I told him I’d reel both lines and suggested he pull fence posts where we had just come from. To my surprise he agreed and said he’d meet me at the back corner where these lines stopped. I reeled wire to the corner and went back to pull the posts and stack them in the field to pick them up later with the four-wheeler. Some of them were old cedar posts and I wondered if any had been put in by my grandfather. Some of the insulators had been nailed to trees. I pried the bright yellow plastic off them with my knife. Walking back to the corner I could see dad standing there waiting for me. I turned and looked back down the tree line. There had been some type of fence there for as long as I could remember. Now there were no traces of it other than the muddy cattle path that had followed alongside.

Photo: Patty Rice

After a short break for lunch we started on the opposite side of the barn and worked our way along the west side of the farm down to the brook and out to the backside. When the ground got muddy again, I told him I’d reel the line, pull the posts and carry them out into the field so he could pick them up on the four-wheeler. Halfway down the backside, where the ground was swampy and the mud knee deep in places, I turned around and watched him driving the four-wheeler through it all picking up the posts I had yet to carry out into the field. I had to laugh.

Photo: Patty Rice

Eventually I made it to the back corner. I piled reels of wire and fence posts together and sat down to drink a bottle of water he had left for me. I watched him driving the four-wheeler, trailer loaded with posts in tow, across the field toward me. I didn’t see the old man who had started out the day trying to keep up with me. I saw a giant. The strongest man I’ve ever known.

 

Photo: MR

By 1500 we had the reels of wire stored, the posts piled and had taken a quick tour of the new house up on the hill by the back corner.

 And then it came time for me to leave.

“Well, thanks, Mike, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

I hugged him.

“Yeah, you could have, Pop. It just would have taken longer.”

 

As I got in the truck, I took a long look out over the fields and the barn. The scene was reminiscent of Frost prose. I remember reading Lathem’s “Interviews with Robert Frost” many years ago. There was a quote from Frost that stuck with me.

“The farm is a base of operations – a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there. Solitude for reflection is an essential ingredient in self-development. I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks – when he “comes to market” with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone.”

This farm was where dad grew up. When my grandparents passed, it fell to him. It’s always been his stronghold. Where he “came to market.” The farm that he and my mother built, where my sister and I grew up, was very much the same. I know from conversations with him over the years that in both places, the time spent tending cattle and the garden, cutting hay and running fence line – all while operating his construction company - gave him that solitude for reflection. The work in the barn and the fields provided the time and a place, alone and on his terms, to sort through the difficulties of life and the inspiration to do it again and again. To go as hard as he could, for as long as he could. He’s still going.

The traces of his time on the land will fade as someone else takes it over. That is inevitable. The good times and the hard times, the work done, and the lessons learned remain in memories, not only his, but also in those of my sister and me.

 

 The Rice Farm, South Paris, ME

26 October 2023