Down on the Farm

I am something of a novelty at McGill, despite the fact that my advisor calls me by number and I have never made eye contact with a professor. You see I am a true blue, born and raised, cow-chasing, tractor driving, honky tonkin’ farm girl. I spent my first seventeen years twenty miles outside of Buttfucknowhere, Alberta. If you’re interested, go ahead and look on a map for Little Smoky, AB. Then throw that map out because you’ll ruin your eyes squinting to find it. Come take a walk in my cowboy boots….

Being twenty miles away from the nearest form of civilization and no television to be heard of my childhood was marked by excessive boredom. I once collected rocks from the driveway and rubbed them with a dandelion until they turned yellow(ish), then set up my wares on the side of the dirt road to nowhere to sell for a reasonable price. The dust from the two cars that drove by that day turned my rocks back to brown. Another summer I made a two-story fort out of hay bales in the loft of my barn, which is an architectural feat if you know anything about hay bales and torture if you know anything about allergies.

Of course it wasn’t all wild roses and fields of gold. If there are any fellows who are particularly squeamish about their balls you should probably skip this next section because I’ve castrated more cows than I care to count. Rural legend has it that one time the neighbour lady couldn’t reach her knife so she used her teeth to cut through the tendon connecting balls to their owner that you probably didn’t even know you had. While I personally have never eaten a prairie oyster, I have definitely walked into the laundry room to find a big ol’ bucket of testes soaking in the sink. Chewy, I hear, but then so was most of Mom’s cooking.

When I was ten or so my brother and I were given a flock of sheep to generate ourselves some spending money via lamb chops and wool. Since they didn’t have the luxury of indoor plumbing in their pen we had to carry five gallon buckets of water everyday after school to those greedy bastards. If that wasn’t bad enough our goat ‘Billy’ was in the same pen and for some reason had a personal vendetta against me. He used to pee on his own beard though, so clearly he wasn’t the brightest in the flock. When he saw me coming he’d lower his head, paw the ground a little for effect, and then charge at me repeatedly with his pointy little horns. When I complained to the boss about unsafe working conditions, Pop handed me the baseball bat and told me ‘Git back to it’. This ain’t little league no more.

One summer I got promoted to work in the fields for the illegally low wage of $5 an hour. I ploughed the fields from sunup to sundown in a tractor with no air conditioning and a radio that only worked at the far end of the field. ‘Course those days doing u-turns in the combine would serve me well when I finally got my very own pickup truck: a 1992 Ford F150, 4×4, extended cab, stick shift, pure gold. She was a purdy off-white colour between the rusty spots, with two gas tanks (nothing gets better mileage than a Ford) and a button on the floor than you had to stomp to turn on the brights. I once parked on a hill and left her in neutral only to watch her roll away, but you just can’t kill quality.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the only way out of that one horse town would be to ride the damn thing. So I took Socks bareback down to where the dirt road met the highway and stood up on her back waving at the traffic. Unfortunately, the circus didn’t drive by that day and sweep me up as expected and when Socks shifted weight I got a butt full of gravel. Since I was too short to climb back on her without a boost my pony and I made the long trek back home side by side. At least the tears kept the dust down.

~Brittney Drysdale