March 9, 2006 Issue

There is a reason people who work and live in the country never retire to the city.

Every year during the winter, I am fortunate enough to spend time in a small town in northern Walton County. Life is different here. There is a different pace. There are different priorities. Things look different, smell different, and sound different.

We raise horses on our property. We also grow trees (for sale), flowers, vegetables (we had a community winter garden with turnips, mustards and collards), and we hope to soon have litters of Australian Shepherds. But it’s mostly about horses.

There is something about horses that keeps things centered. We raise Paso Finas. And we have the prettiest sweetest horses anywhere. Feeding the horses is not a chore. It is more of a privilege. It is something that has to be done every morning and every evening and the days are built around those two events.

We have the same barn rules as everyone else. If you open it, close it. If you lose it, replace it. If it doesn’t concern you, don’t mess with it. If you turn it on, turn it off. If you break it, fix it. If you move it, put it back. If you throw it down, pick it up. If you ride it, feed it. If it drinks water, give it some. If you fall off, get back on. Not a bad set of rules for all aspects of life.

We travel to the feed store once a week. Like many places in the country it serves as more than just a place of commerce. People talk about how much alfalfa to mix with the sweet feed and protein. They argue about who farms the best hay. They talk about which beans and peas will grow the fastest.

One of the more unusual aspects of our local feed store is their magazine placement. Most checkout lines in convenience and grocery stores have People or National Enquirer prominently displayed. Here, the lone stack of magazines by the counter is High Times, the counter cultures’ guide to illicit drugs, primarily marijuana. Every month, its centerfold has a photograph of marijuana buds. In our county, as in agrarian based areas almost everywhere, growing marijuana is as much of an art as it is an enterprise. As law enforcement gets tougher, the growers get more creative. I only know through hearsay, but I can tell you that the latest preferred place to grow pot is not in the ground.

Violent crime is minimal in this part of the county. There is more of it here than there used to be though, and it is attributable to the scourge of rural areas across the country, crystal methamphetamine. A neighbor recently encouraged me to keep a gun handy in case of an intruder. We have guns I assured her. However, they are kept in a safe to which I can never remember the combination. We would probably survive an attack; as long as the attacker would give me some time to figure out how to get in the safe, and then help me decide which bullets went in which gun. Well, you have dogs to protect you, she reasoned. Yeah, right. My dogs are much more concerned about the horses than about any human intruders.

Growing up I always had dogs as pets. But I’d never had working dogs. There is a saying up here that “it costs as much to feed a worthless dog as it does a good one.” I’ve got good ones. Obie and Aussie keep things moving. They watch the horses constantly. They keep the horses from lying down. They keep them from fighting. They catch ‘em up. They protect them. And when we ride trails, they chase everything in the woods, from deer to squirrels, wild hogs, coons, armadillos, and coyotes. They’ll locate rattlesnakes. If we ride 10 miles, they run 30.

Most of the activities here eventually revolve around hunting and fishing and eating. The hunting is not what it used to be, but it’s still better than most places. Deer are rarely shot in green fields; rather, they are stalked along the river bottoms and shot from portable tree stands. Fishing takes place on the river, the creeks feeding the river, and the lakes that are created when the river is high. I grew up catching bream, or blue gill. Bream fishing here is a bit more specific. There are shellcracker, redbreast, yellowbreast and white bream. There are chinquapin, shorties, chub, and warmouth. And those are just the varieties of bream.

Food is taken every bit as seriously here as it is in Cajun country. Lunch is called dinner and dinner is called supper. People who think that Barnhill’s Buffet and Golden Corral have a decent array of vegetables would not understand this food. As in all great cuisines the secret is in the quality and freshness of the product and in the love and care of the preparation.

There is a certain hedonistic aspect to life here. Hedonism is defined as “pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially to pleasure of the senses.” These are not the kind of folks likely to work 100-hour weeks and run off to a week at a Club Med or a Hedonism resort. They couldn’t begin to tell you how many hours they work in a week. Their work and their lives and their pleasures are too closely entwined.

In the past few months I have not heard a word about stock prices or hedge funds or the fed rate. No one up here is “flipping condos” or obtaining options on parcels of land. No one knows who the new Federal Reserve chairman is. Or cares. Folks who routinely load and unload 150-pound sacks of feed and wrestle bales of hay don’t have time to discuss the merits of yoga, Pilates, or Tai Chi.

My father instilled in me a love and almost a need to read the New York Times. I’d just as soon he not know this but I haven’t read a Sunday New York Times in months. I know that our president is still George Bush; but for the life of me I can’t remember the vice president’s name.

The consensus all-time favorite movie among the men up here is Lonesome Dove. I was talking to an elderly couple last week and when the subject of that western classic came up the man looked at his feet and his wife’s face grew stern. “That’s the only movie he ever watches,” she said. “And I’ve told him if I catch him watching it again, I’ll shoot him.”

This past weekend was a lively one. There was a small-animal auction in Paxton on Saturday. It lasted from 2 pm to midnight. There were two kinds of llamas, four breeds of goats, pot-bellied pigs, 20 varieties of chickens (some looked more like Parisian hats than birds), ducks, and huge, long-eared rabbits (for pets or meat). On Sunday, we had a trail ride in Wausau, the home of the world famous possum festival.

Sunday afternoon, after the horses had been unloaded, washed and fed and returned to the pasture, things got quiet. I fixed a glass of sweet tea, got a book, put on some George Strait, and sat on the back porch in an old rocking chair. The porch faces east and looks out over hundreds of acres of cypress stands comprising the river-swamp. In the reflected light of the setting sun the river bottom turns beautiful colors. I watched a red-shouldered hawk bust a dove –poof—feathers burst like a puff of smoke. Two yearling deer slowly, cautiously walked along the crest of a hill. Martins dotted the sky as they flew about their house, jockeying for position and replenishing their nests. The Australian Shepherds chased bumblebees. When a bee would come within range of the porch, Obie would leap, front paws outstretched in a sort of doggie swan dive, snapping at the air.

There is a den of coyotes just over the break of a hill on the edge of our pasture. Just after dark, they found something to kill and in their excitement they let loose with a hair-raising mixture of howls and barks and yips. There are about a dozen of them, but they sounded like a pack of hundreds.

I’ve watched Lonesome Dove a couple of times myself. My favorite scene follows the death of the young Irish boy who had the misfortune to ride his horse through the river into a bed of water moccasins. At his burial, the reticent cowboys can’t think of anything to say. Augustus McCray steps up to deliver the eulogy.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Life is short; shorter for some than others…now let’s move on to Montana.”

Life is short. But up here you feel as though you might cheat it just a bit. You may be able to steal a little time. You may be able to live longer and simpler and better. In this chaotic, fast paced world, there is something to be said for life in the country.

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