on the run

The birch trees are beginning to turn from green to gold, summer inexorably passing into autumn, and everything seems to have an air of potentially being the last. Is this the last warm day before it gets cold for good? Is this the last summer squash harvest before the frost comes in and kills it? The answer to the second question is yes, the summer squash appears to have been completely killed off by a frost earlier this week (Sophie and Arnauld, who had to harvest summer squash three or four times a week in August, were pleased when Sue broke the news). But the warm weather (warm-ish, at least; this is Canada, after all) has returned for the time being. The rain has completely vanished. We've had a string of days that have started out cloudy and cold (but, thankfully, dry) only to slowly clear up, so that by lunchtime I almost regret my decision to put on long pants that morning.

It was sunny when we went to a nearby river last Saturday, after the farmers' market, to check out the salmon run, which is when salmon from the ocean swim upstream to their place of birth to lay their eggs. Colleen's parents and sister were visiting, and though we did not see any salmon (apparently, they don't come until October), we did learn an awful lot about the life cycle of the salmon. Apparently, they expend so much energy in the trip upstream that all they can do once they arrive is mate, lay their eggs, and die. Bad for the adult salmon, perhaps, but good for the bears.

Later that night, however, there was a very different kind of animal on the run. Everyone was downstairs playing Cranium, a party game, but I begged off to bed early -- too tired to socialize effectively. I came downstairs a while later to go to the bathroom, only to find the entire dining room empty except for Colleen's father, who informed me that the cows had escaped. Apparently, there were enough people around to herd the cows back into their pasture that I was not needed. I went back to bed.

The next morning, we moved the cows into a new, hopefully more secure pasture down by the packing shed. This was my first real interaction with the farm animals since I arrived here, and I was pleased to say that the cows didn't put up much resistance. The only way to move the cows from one pasture to the other was down the main road that runs by the farm, and it was my job to stop any approaching motor vehicles. Fortunately, the cows moved quickly enough in the general direction of their new pasture, so it wasn't necessary for me to stand in the path of any oncoming eighteen-wheelers.

Besides the fifteen or so cows, there is a large flock of extremely free-range chickens (they go pretty much anywhere they please), two goats, and eight or nine pigs. The goats and pigs usually stay in a fenced-in yard -- except, of course, when they don't. On Monday afternoon, the piglets escaped. And when we managed to get them back into their yard, they escaped again. Finally, Sue returned from a delivery and put the pigs into a smaller pen, from which, fortunately, they have not yet figured out how to escape.

I said that moving the cows from one pasture to another was my first interaction with the farm animals, but I should have said that it was my first interaction with the live farm animals. On my first night here, Sue and Colleen asked me if I was a vegetarian, and I, still in an airplane-induced fog, replied, "Sort of." What I meant to say was that I was a vegetarian at home, but now that I'm on the farm, I'm willing to eat meat that was raised on the farm. I don't think I quite managed to articulate that much, but they figured it out.

I read a book that Colleen leant me entitled The Way We Eat, about the ethics of our food choices. It essentially argues that a pure vegan diet is the most ethical choice, but I disagree. I think a world without mischevious escaping piglets -- that is, a vegan world -- would be a much poorer world to live in.

(Speaking of piglets... my camera finally arrived today! And I took some pictures, but Blogger won't let me upload them right now, and my time on the computer is about to run out. So it'll have to wait until Saturday.)

Every nice day, every squash harvest, could be the last before the cold weather sets in for good. But you never know, of course. So I'm doing my best to enjoy the relative warmth of late September in Canada while I still can.