Joshua and I had talked ourselves into a bad mood. We weren’t mad at each other necessarily, but we had been having a hard conversation that we both knew wasn’t going to come to a resolution any time soon. We disagreed. But on top of that, we had a big job ahead of us, and it was already dark. Sometimes, in the short days of winter, no matter how hard you try, the sun is ready to end its day before you are. Tonight, we had to load the sheep onto a trailer to take to the sale barn early the next morning. It was now or never, and we were out of daylight.
Joshua is 18. He is my oldest son. He is a full-time student at Berea College in Kentucky, and he was home for Christmas. I’m a high school principal. Having difficult conversations with teenagers (and adults, too, for that matter) is what I do for a living. Joshua can articulate himself better than most young men. Communication wasn’t the issue. On our drive home together, we had been speculating and pontificating about potential relational outcomes of the guy/gal variety, and as it turns out, dad was a little more concerned than son. The real problem though, was that we were worrying about the future. Neither one of us could predict it, so we got stuck, the sun went down, and the work was still there in front of us adding to our frustration. We sat still in the truck for a moment, procrastinating into the silence of unresolved conversation.
“I don’t feel like doing this,” I said.
“Do we have a choice?” Joshua asked.
“I don’t reckon so,” I said, and we got out.
A month ago I had made a stop at our local farm supply store. Deer season was in full swing. The aisles were chock full of the inevitable salt blocks, bags of feeder corn, camouflage everything, and all manner of scented sprays to bathe oneself in–even sprays to block scents. There was a camouflage ball cap that read:
“Catchin’ Deers!”
It made me smile. An image of a burley ninja-hunter came to mind: all decked out in camo and doe urine, hiding up in a tree stand, waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting deer and wrestle it to the ground with his bare hands. “Catchin’ deers,” I mused.
Tonight, the work we had in front of us would make that image seem less ridiculous.
We moved to this farm a year ago. I had sworn I would never move again, but we moved anyway. Our sheep had outgrown our original place five minutes down the road. When this place popped up for sale, with 4 times as much space, it seemed like an opportunity, and the price was right. One of the many difficulties would be that the new place didn’t have a barn or adequate fencing. We got to work on the fencing immediately. We only made our neighbors angry a handful of times as the sheep did their work of showing us the spots in the fence that still needed attention. Before long, we were moved. Still no barn. Which brings us back to our job tonight. We were going to be “Catchin Sheeps.”
It made the most sense to me that we would back the livestock trailer into a corner of the one-acre lot, open the gates, and funnel the sheep into the trailer. Sheep can be nervous. They’re suspicious animals too. That’s what keeps them alive. Friendly, trusting, naive sheep, are stupid. They make good pets, but they also die easily because they need to be coddled. Our sheep are neither friendly nor stupid which makes them tough and tough to work. On our very first try, we walked through the field, the sheep running away from us and toward the corner of the pasture where the trailer was open and ready for them to walk in. They went up a small ramp and right into the trailer. At this point, I began to sprint towards the trailer, flashlight in hand, to shut them in. Upon entering the trailer they took one look at the back of it, realized they had been duped, and out they came, running fast, heads down, ready to charge right through anything that got in their way. I was too slow getting to the gate, and so they were free again, and I was left panting beside an empty trailer. Strike one.
By this time Joshua’s younger brother and one of his sisters had come down to help. We tried several times to form a line with the four of us, spread out, arms fully extended, holding cattle panels and sticks and anything else we could find to make ourselves look big and intimidating in order to move them back into the trailer. But the gig was up. The sheep knew our game, and they were not going to get back in that trailer willingly.
We were ready to quit. We had been tripping and falling and sprinting and failing. We didn’t have the equipment. We could barely see what we were doing. So far, none of us had been head butted, but we’d had some close calls.
“Joshua. I’m afraid we’re going to have to try to just go in and tackle these guys to the ground.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work Dad.”
“I don’t either, but I’m out of ideas. Let’s do like we’ve done and try to get the bunch of them into a corner and then you or me can run in on them real fast and try to grab one before they get away. Maybe we can just drag one at a time to the trailer that way.”
This was not a good idea. I knew it. But we were out of good ideas and moving quickly into the realm of regular ideas, or even bad ideas. There were several things that could go wrong. We could simply fail to catch them as they continued to evade our reach each time. We could get head butted, which hurts (That’s why it would have to be Joshua or me going into the group of them. His twelve-year-old brother and sixteen-year-old sister wouldn’t weigh enough to even stop one of these guys). We could get drug through the field as had happened to me just a week ago when I was able to grab one we intended to butcher. I had managed to get both hands around its neck that day, only to slide off to the side while it drug me across the ground for twenty feet. I was still scratched up from that little adventure. Lastly, we could overwork them and literally run them to death. That’s the outcome Joshua said worried him the most.
When Joshua was younger, about eleven years old, we had a barn at our old place. One day I had told him that I needed him to run the sheep into the barn, where I would be waiting to close the gate behind them after they all came in. This was before we had Jack, our blue heeler, to help us with chores like that. A twelve-year-old boy is a fine substitute for a working dog, with just as much or more energy to burn. So I went to the barn and Joshua went to the sheep. A few minutes later in came all the sheep, and I closed the gate behind them. I didn’t see Joshua though. When I exited the barn, he was still in the pasture, chasing a runaway, stubborn ewe that had decided not to follow the rest of the girls to the barn. It can be a tricky thing, depending on your set up, to get one sheep to go where you want her to go, opening the gate at just the right time so that she’ll run into the barn without simultaneously letting the others escape. It was eighty-five degrees and sunny on this humid, Kentucky summer day. I called to Joshua, “Be careful buddy! It’s pretty hot out here, we don’t want her to overheat!” We tried for a bit longer, the stubborn girl circling around and around going anywhere but the right direction. To both of our surprise, after a few exhausting laps around the pasture, the ewe fell over. Initially we thought, “Good, we’ll carry her in and cool her off.” But when we caught up to her, she was dead. Joshua broke. Big, quiet, twelve-year-old tears came down his face. He was mad. First at the ewe, then at himself. Then he was saying, “Dad, I’m sorry, Dad I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to Dad.” He wasn’t a particularly sensitive boy, but he understood that he had been the reason the sheep had given up, it hurt, and it taught him something.
That story stuck with him. And it was with him now when I told him that we were going to have to catch these sheep–as in, run around the pasture, get the group of them bunched into a corner and then run in for the take-down: tackle or be tackled. We needed six all together. They ranged in size from seventy-five to one-hundred-fifty pounds. If they got brave, they wouldn’t hesitate to bulldoze one of us over. Joshua isn’t afraid of anything. Like most good eighteen-year-old boys, he still believes deep down that he’s invincible. It wasn’t catchin sheeps he was afraid of, it was killing one of them again. But it was cold tonight, and these boys looked like they believed the fun was just getting started. So we began again.
Walking in a line, arm-length apart, the four of us proceeded toward the corner of the field where the rams had regrouped. We were a human fence closing in on them again. We put the two youngest kids on the ends of our four-person fence so that when the time came, when we got as close as we dared without spooking them, Joshua or myself could run head long into the group and attempt to grab one before they all scattered. Having the two younger siblings on either end of our walking line also allowed them to get out of the way more easily if a ram decided he wanted to escape in their direction (farming isn’t always Child Protective Services approved; neither is catchin sheeps). As we approached slowly, the sheep began to bump into one another, getting nervous, planning their escape.
“Joshua, do you want to go first or do you want me to? One of us has to hold the flashlight because whoever runs will need both hands to grab them.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
The rest of us froze. I held the light on the group of them. Bursting out of our line, Joshua charged in fast, bear hugging any wool he could get his arms around. The other rams were gone in no time, Joshua was on the ground, holding tight with both hands to a fiercely kicking leg of one very unhappy ram. Before long we were both on top of him and had the ram flipped onto its hind quarters where it sat dumbfounded (a ram will cease to fight when it’s positioned this way). We all took a deep breath, checked for injuries, and then began to laugh. It had worked. No matter that the truck and trailer were on the opposite side of the pasture. With Joshua on one end and me on the other, we hoisted the big animal into the air and walked it all the way to the trailer. “Five more to go!” I said, once we had closed him in. And on we went, one after the other. As fate or fear or circumstance would have it, Joshua caught four more that night and left one for his old dad. This particular ram decided he would try to jump right through me and rammed his big, hard head directly into my gut. I fell, but held on tight as we rolled a time or two, the young ram kicking to pull free. That was the last one of the night. The work was done. Thankfully, although we all came away with plenty of scrapes, no one had been seriously hurt.
Joshua, his younger siblings, and I had spent the last three hours sweating, stumbling, falling, wrestling sheep, cheering one another on, celebrating, high-fiving, losing our tempers, and generally doing hard work. For our part, Joshua and I had completely forgotten about that tough conversation in the truck beforehand. Not only that, but it didn’t even seem to matter anymore.
Sometimes a problem can take up an inordinate amount of space in our heads. Sometimes such a problem can seem unresolvable, either because we can’t yet see the resolution, or a resolution genuinely doesn’t exist yet. I have found that one of the most useful things to do in such a circumstance is to get back to work. More often than not, what may have seemed an irreconcilable difference of opinion before the work has all but dissolved into unimportance after the work is done. Hard work has a way of clearing our minds of worry by head butting us out of our rumination about how bad the future might be and into the present–even if the present is pretty bad itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own after all. Doing the work demands we give our attention to the present problem and leaves us with no time to worry about what hasn’t happened yet.
And what if I had carried on our disagreement in the truck anyway? What good would have come of it? We had reached an impasse. If there had been an argument to win, and if I could have won it, what would the cost have been? Often times, the requirements of love and the requirements of winning an argument are in opposition to one another. Love is more important than proving to loved-ones that we’re right, it is more important than demanding that they acknowledge our rightness. It’s more important than “I told you so.”
Once we had the rams all loaded up with hay and water for the night, and closed up the pasture, the younger kids walked back to the house while Joshua and I hopped in the truck to ride back.
“Joshua,” I said, “You know that thing we were talking about in the truck before we got started on this crazy job?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it’s gonna be just fine, you know it?”
“I know it… But we do need a barn.”
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Now that sounds all too familiar. But, the kid is right, you need a barn.