Tracks to Clementine

FWIW, when I was in my late 10's & teens my mom & stepfather owned a very smallish "farm" on the road to Mt. St. Helens. Something like 15 acres, just barely big enough to keep a couple of cows, lots of chickens, ducks & geese, the occasional goat, and about a half acre garden plot that most years only fed the deer, despite 10 foot high wire fences surrounding it.

And we didn't actually LIVE on the farm. Several times a week and most weekends we'd make the 80 mile round-trip after the adults got home from work to check on things, feed, clean the chicken coops, mend fences, rake, weed, harvest, etc. The property had a small house on it built in the 1880's, making it one of the oldest buildings in the area, a barn and a very large chicken coop - mucking it out would take an entire day about once every three or four months, if it was let go too long.

On regular occasions, one of the cows would make with a bovine jail-break, and we'd get a call from some "neighbor" or other informing us that Bossy or whichever was wandering down the road, and we'd all pack into the International Travel-All (a late 1960's SUV prototype apparently) at a moment's notice to go cow-tracking.

At the end of each summer a man would come out with a large panel truck, shoot the cow through the forehead with an oversized zip-gun like device, hoist the carcass into the refrigerated back of the truck with a crane & winch, bleed it into a 40 gallon garbage can, & then haul it off to be sectioned. Usually, we'd split the meat with my stepfather's brother, my mom's parents, ourselves, and maybe her brother. In later years, after I'd left home for college, my mom would still send me back to school with brick-hard packages of steaks and hamburger wrapped in white paper, with the cuts and butchering dates written on them in black grease pencil.

Chickens were dispatched with more frequency, usually 10 or 20 at a time, and I can still recall the first time I actually did watch one run around with its head cut off, although most just sort of flopped around spasmodically on the ground until their nervous systems finally collapsed. Next was the boiling, and the plucking, and the gutting, and eventually the skillet frying.

To a 12 or 13 year-old raised mostly in cities and suburbs, the novelty of working on a farm, even sporadically, wore off pretty quickly, particularly since most of the experiences involved some sort of enforced drudgery or manual labor. But, I do recall a few memorable experiences, mostly involving my long-deceased grandfather, who DID in fact grow up on a real farm (as did my mother), and who could perform amazing, seemingly superhuman feats such as: actually successfully "witch" for water (okay, we had to drill 50 feet to hit the aquifer - but it was there!), and who could lay out a quarter-mile long fence line with pinpoint accuracy, just by eye-balling where each post needed to be.

I grew up on an 11 acre plot with a handful of horses and ponies and a huge garden, along wtih the occasional cow being kept for my grandfather. Mostly this meant feeding the horses, chopping wood, "helping" build a small barn,breaking the ice on water troughs in winter, planting things and breaking beans on the back porch while watching for bluebirds and barnswallows. It was definitely an idyllic childhood, but our livelihood never depended on the "farm".

In my early teens I worked on a much larger horse farm with the full range of farm animals, plus an orphan baby deer for a summer, and a de-smelled skunk. There I lived over the summers in these tiny cabins with no running water, tiny outhouses, solar showers (in the woods, so they never got warm, and cooking over open fires outdoors.

Oh, and then in later teens I worked on a dude ranch, taking people out on mountain trail rides with my friend Joie.

so, yeah, animals, but not Western Washington style crop farming.