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overly-close turkeys
Sunday, February 15 2009
I gave Gretchen the gift of alone time today by driving out to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Willow to help Jenny and Doug with some cabling issues. They've been adding an archipelago of out buildings, the most recent of which is a medical center in need of phones and ethernet. The wire had already been buried in the ground between various buildings and only needed to be spliced and crimped to connectors.
I brought the dogs and intended to make a full day of things. On the drive over I was listening to 92.9, the local nostalgia rock station, and they played "Stone in Love" by Journey. For some reason I heard it for the first time, as if I'd never heard it before. It has it all, every well-meaning guitar rock cliché, like a really great song by the Hold Steady, but (since it's a song from the period the Hold Steady is trying to emulate) not even trying (or more accurately, by trying with anachronistic intensity).
The work at the farm wasn't difficult, and, though a little of it took place in an unheated building (the pig barn, where I had to splice wire runs en route to the medical building), the weather was fairly pleasant given the time of year.
At some point in the late afternoon a group of us took a break to walk dogs along Sickler Road, which runs parallel to 212 and doubles back to it, but carries very little traffic. Three of the dogs (including Sally and Eleanor) were black, two of the dogs were white, and one of the dogs was both black and white. And at some point on the walk Eleanor managed to befriend another black and white dog residing at one of the houses. Eleanor naturally assumes everyone loves her, and for the most part she is correct.
Back at the farm, I soldered and taped the ethernet splices in the pig barn and crimped the ethernet connectors at either end of what might have been a 500 foot run. I had two crimpers to work with, and they both were terrible, but they were terrible in different ways, so when used one after the other it was possible to get a good crimp.
Meanwhile, the farm was bustling with all kinds of activity. People (many of them seemingly-hip urbanites) kept coming and going. Four new piglets had just been rescued and humans kept coming to the pig barn to fuss over them. The piglets were unexpectedly playful, cavorting around in the pen and kicking up their pink little piggy feet. It was all very adorable, but it was hard to avoid the thought that they would inevitably grow up to be like the adult pigs on the farm: lethargic thousand-pound monsters who sleep away their days in bristly cuddle puddles. Taking on a piglet is a massive responsibility given what it eventually becomes.
Also in the pig barn were a couple of adult male turkeys who didn't seem to believe in the concept of personal space, standing overly-close in a way that didn't make much sense until Doug said that he thought they were figuring out how to go about having sex with me. Later a female turkey turned up in the mix and she seemed as curious as the males, but in a more intellectual sort of way, singing little melodies and paying close attention to the tools and wires.
Back in the house after the work, I met some friends of the farm and learned about Lizano, Jenny's favorite brand of salsa. She says the stuff is everywhere in Costa Rica but here she can only order it online; she does so by the crate. I tasted some and when I gave voice to my understanding of what the fuss was all about, Jenny gave me a bottle from her stash.
After everyone left, Doug, Jenny, and I had a delicious improvised vegan dinner of wild rice, broccoli rabe, and fake chicken strips in front of the television. Jenny and Doug watch trashier television than Gretchen and I do, and this was how we came to watch a dramatization of the story of an Appalachian Trail killer on a fluff-news show called Dateline NBC.
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