le poop

I suppose that working on any farm, you can expect to get dirty from time to time. And I suppose that at one point, all dirt was poop. But the dirt on Sue's farm in BC was comfortably removed from its poopy origins. Once you got used to digging around in the ground, it really wasn`t so bad. The dirt was primarily an aesthetic problem: it got wedged under your fingernails and stuck in the creases of your hands, and, of course, all over your clothes. So you scrubbed your hands extra-hard and threw in some more soap with your laundry, and you learned to live with a little bit of dirt in your life. It was alright. It didn`t smell or anything. You probably could have eaten it if you wanted.

But on Lise and Carrol's farm in Quebec, the poop is still very much poop.

There's never any shortage of poop on a farm with hens, geese, six cows, seven calves, a dozen or so pigs, a couple dozen rabbits, some horses and ponies and more sheep than you could ever possibly count. With so much poop being produced, it was of course necessary to clean the animal enclosures once or even twice a day, lest the poop pile up so high that it starts to ooze out the gaps between the wall boards of the barns. Poop-shovelling is a Sisyphean task; often, one of the cows or horses pooped immediately after we had cleaned out its stall, as if in mocking defiance of our measly efforts at cleanliness.

It took a while for me to get used to the poop. There's the smell, certainly, which lodges itself in your nostrils and has a funny way of popping up again when you're eating dinner. And it takes a while to figure out how to navigate a wheelbarrow full of poopy hay through the mud to the dumping-ground. But the hardest thing was to get used to touching the poop. I wear gloves whenever possible, and of course I tried to use shovels and pitchforks to move the poop, but the fact is that at some point your bare hand is going to make contact with animal waste, whether you want it to or not. I learned not to let it bother me so much, and to wash my hands really really really well.

Anyway, I shouldn't make it out to seem like life in Quebec is all poop, all the time. The farm is located on the Gaspé peninsula, the part of Quebec north of Maine and south of the St. Laurence River. It's sort of like a seaside version of Vermont. Very windy, too: windmills dotted the landscape around the farm. Not the sort of fabric-sail Don-Quijote-type windmills, of course; these were of the modern, skyscraper-high, jet-wing steel variety. I could never really decide if they made a positive or negative contribution to the landscape, but I'll leave that for you to decide. Here are some pictures:

I was planning to stay on the farm for five or six weeks, but things didn't quite "work out." We disagreed about the amount of work that should be expected out of a WWOOFer -- I wanted more time off to explore and do some reading -- so I left on amicable terms. It's too bad, though; the farm was beautiful, and the family was wonderful, too (eight children, all under age 14).

In any case, I'm here in Quebec City now, convalescing for five days before heading off to the next (and hopefully final) farm before I come back home in time for Thanksgiving. If you're reading this entry, then leave me a comment, sil vous plait, because I'm kind of going crazy in the absence of any native English speakers and I'd appreciate some reminder of the Mother Tongue. And if you have been checking regularly, I apologize for the delay between postings, but the dialup internet connection in Gaspesie did not want to make friends with Blogger. What's your excuse?