Another day of misadventures in hard-headedness

       I didn't see the gate swing open, but I felt it. On the ground, i gathered my thoughts. Then got up to make sure Bailyn went in the milk pen instead of the thirty ewes who exploded after her food. Once she was in the pen, I walked her around so that her udders were easy to get at. You'd think that after a year of this milking ritual, we'd understand each other. I guess we're both hardheaded.
     
      Bailyn is hardheaded because she can be. If she flat out doesn't want to let down milk or move, I can only wait her out. Not like she's got a busy schedule. Not like she outweights me by 600 lbs. Myself on the other hand, I'll blame genetics. My dad's hardheaded. Our discussions generally result in dad shouting at me so I walk out and then, the next time I talk to mom, she says that she hopes we can work it out, but the next time I talk to Dad, we laugh about something. A hard head like a glacier is slow to change (although maybe that's changing?).

      When I crossed the James headed north on 45 late on Friday morning, all I could think was, "no bleepity bleepin' way." Two days ago before Emily and I headed home from St. Stephen's market, we'd been talking to Robert about floods we'd remembered and big storms. We didn't expect much that night.

     Earlier that day, my Dad called to catch up and congratulated me on moving the cows to the bottom ground. Said he couldn't figure out a way to do it. Not really true. Before he moved to Tuckahoe full time, the caretaker, a man who I only know second hand through stories, used to graze his cattle on the lowgrounds. This was back in the day (you know, uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow walking to school) before weather.com and weather.gov. Apparently, his herd was on the bottom ground when a flood came up and washed them downstream. Some of the cattle ended up at the Country Club of VA. Tuckahoe tenderloin was on the menu that week.

      So Friday morning, I felt like I'd been caught with my pants down in front of class. I'd completely forgotten about Wednesday night's January thunderstorms. I raced to Tuckahoe fueled by fear. I crossed the tracks onto the lowgrounds and stepped over the electric fence into the herd. I walked south towards Tuckahoe creek and discovered that a 200 yard stretch of my temporarily permanent two strand electric fence was underwater. Not going to conduct much electricity underwater and caught up in flotsam and jetsam. I knew I had move the cows but I wasn't sure how far.

      I called up my brother in law. Even though he lives in North Carolina now, he's a voracious kayaker and learner. I asked him about the river level. He told me it was predicted to crest at 15.6, but looking at the graph, he thought it would peter out and not reach that peak. At that moment, the river was at 14.8. I could see that Tuckahoe creek was up over it's bank and headed into the field with my herd. Down by the railroad tracks, there was standing water, but nothing flowing yet. All good information, but I wasn't settled in a decision yet, so I called my dad.

      From the ski lodge in Utah he told me that 20 feet seemed to be the level when the all of the bottom ground flooded. He also said that if I moved the herd and got worried about the water level that I could just open their fence and let them wander over to Martin Neck which was the highest point on the low ground. Finally, he told me to see how much rain they got in the James River Basin. If they got 10 inches or more west of us, I needed to worry.

      Out in the field with an un-smart phone, I called Emily. After court and between the doctor's office and the post office, she looked on her phone (not while driving of course) and told me that I didn't need to worry. 

      My hard head has ignored Emily's advice before, to the tune of sheep trampling through fences, ewes prolapsing, resulting in grabbing them like a wheelbarrow and tipping them on their heads so that gravity would draw their insides back inside, wasting hours rigging an electric turkey scalder only to use it with a propane tank and many more incidents than I care to type at the moment or you'd care to read about, so I grabbed my step in posts and polywire and moved the cows out of their paddock into one where an eighth of the line wasn't under water and drove home.

      I got home, got some feed for Bailyn and headed out to get her up so I could milk her in the morning because if she stayed out with her calf, Boaz would gulp down all the milk. A few minutes later, that sheep powered gate swung into my head and I found out that maybe a hard head isn't all bad.