Tobacco Ruminations No. 4

I hurt as I walk up the lane, and I hurt when I sit down on the rocks to smoke my pipe. Wrist, neck, shoulder, and back aching, piriformis knotted up like a walnut—each of these reminds me of the big fence renovation project now nearing completion. A little over 3,000 feet of ancient perimeter fencing supported by hand-split black locust and shored up by metal T-posts we’ve put in this past quarter-century was badly in need of attention. Rusted barbed wire, long since “rotten,” as our since-deceased elderly neighbor would have said, held it all together. Two massive oaks were sprawled across one section.

The fence had long been part of the ever-growing, never-ending list of work requiring my attention. The list is full of jobs I have postponed, revised, shifted to higher priority and shifted to lower … and then, one day, this particular project at last won the lottery and moved to the top. Three weeks after tackling the fencing—having carried out hours of chainsaw clearing, digging fresh holes for wooden posts, setting fifty-plus T-posts, stringing close to two 1,320-foot rolls of new barbed wire with not a speck of rust, trudging miles up hills and down, in woods and in pastures—I’m almost finished. And I hurt.

I sit and I think, why? It’s a question I don’t on many days have an answer for that really works or makes sense. Here on the rock, sitting as I have on frequent occasion these past twenty-six years, I try once again to make sense of the why while smoking my old Barling. I purchased this pipe at an age when many young men buy such markers, thinking they will make them into something recognizable, confusing an object with an accomplishment. Mine predictably lay in my drawer for decades until I matured enough to be able to smoke it again without those youthful conceits.

Perhaps today these aches and pains acquired all for the sake of some damn cattle and their seductive up-in-the-stratosphere auction prices would be one answer to why I continue the hard work of caring for this land. Another could be that the Big Guy has deemed suffering, for some unknowable reason, to be the price of stewardship. Whatever He wants me doing, I wish He could have asked for it on a farm with far fewer rocks and a far flatter landscape.

I grouse to myself a while longer before looking around. Just thirty feet from my perch is a new wooden post, anchored firmly in the ground. Stretching from the post down into the woods are gleaming strands of fencing, all firmly clipped to new T-posts. This is a big part of my current job. And I call it good, even if it hurt to build. A single small act of creation, mixed with sweat and toil and done well, becomes a pleasure to behold.

Many years ago, a kid who worked on the farm and who is now married with a kid of his own helped me to build a different fence. One day we were driving around in the farm truck on a back road in the valley. He pointed to a sagging, haphazardly constructed fence, and then he made the comment: I am glad to know that I helped you build a good fence.

I think, at least for today, that that is also part of the answer. I finish my pipe and limp on down the lane.