Twelve Tons of Hay 

By JoDean Nicolette

Mornings, the land beckons as it stirs, untainted by alarms, road sounds, nine-to-five bustle. Come, begin your day with the earth. It’s my most mindful time, and I don’t mean inwardly mindful, focusing on inhales and exhales, or how my shoulders hang from my neck, but rather outwardly so, of trees breathing around me, of dew lifting off woodreed, of trillium unfurling as I do with a dawn that yawns and stretches from behind the Sapphire Mountains. Today I open my eyes to indigo still cloaking conifer and barn, but in other months to brightening pink and yellow, spotlighting the single cedar that towers among tamarack and ponderosas in the pasture beyond. Regardless of where the earth rests in relationship to the sun, my ritual remains the same: I lift canvas jacket from brass hook, slip into cracked boots and push open the porch door, releasing its arthritic groan as if I have again roused it too early. From the barn, a whinny responds, floating rather than cutting through still air. Light or dark, warmth or chill, cease to matter as I amble, dirt springing against my weight, under the great grey owl making her final swoop with taloned prey toward her brood in the broken-topped cedar.

I drift through my familiar mornings almost without thought, a soothing pattern that eases me from waking to sliding the weathered barn door, immersing myself in whispered nickers and warm nostrils, and steamy exhales that vanish with the night into crisp new sky. I pause to watch all four heads appear over Dutch doors, manes tousled and adorned with shavings and stray stems. The whinnier is usually there first, getting a head start to his feet or from the paddock, after heralding my arrival. This morning it will be Bear’s gray face, his call lower-pitched, hoarser than the others, as if he had been a smoker in his raucous youth. Then Angel, Watson, and finally, Jimmie. I survey the hay portions, assessing size and quality: still green, no dust or mold or evidence of trespassing rodents, then bend to the pallet and run my fingers across each flake’s edge, like book spines. Rye grass, second cutting from the southeast valley. Timothy, solitary cut, from the western lowland, adjacent to the Bitterroot River. Orchard from the elevated Sunset Bench, third cut (the driest time), resulting in twenty percent alfalfa infiltrating the crop.

You feed horses, you feed mixed hay, the old vet had said, around the foot-long mercury thermometer between his teeth. Leg-up those guts to variety, like they was grazing for themselves on the plains. He took the archaic glass out of his mouth and pointed it at me. The way it used to be. The vet was thinking about colic, a stomach upset that can happen when a horse’s intestines acclimate to a single source of hay, and it is abruptly changed. In my barn, in my hands, each flake looks, feels, smells distinct, a product of variable soils, minerals, water, even what breed of cattle grazed the off-season field, or what time of day the sun reached the straining blades. Complex bouquets of grass and summer’s end rise to me and to the diners, who snort and stamp as if to suggest I am moving at a pace unsuitable to their emaciated needs. My fingers vanish under the first rustling pile, scraping worn planks to collect every hank.

The process begins the evening before, when my mind begins its withdrawal from the day’s tempest, thoughts still churning from a clinic, wedged full with patients, Skype  messages, phone calls, questions from nurses and pharmacists. I’ve shed my white coat and stethoscope like a milk snake sheds its skin and begun the drive home from Missoula, dodging traffic until finally, I reach the Bitterroot Valley, shouldered by mountains and hay fields, and infused by life rooted in an earlier time. The river joins me from the west and escorts me south as I release the linear, task-oriented thought that has trapped me for hours, lurching from point A to point B, or from room to room, charging down my list and checking each box.

At last, in the barnyard, I slow as a white-tailed doe and her fawn saunter across hillside sage, note a bald eagle spiraling on a thermal as she returns from the Bitterroot River, listen to the horses snuffling bunchgrass and fescue near the pasture gate. Their inner clocks, like mine, suggest it’s time to seek the barn’s shelter. Inside, I wander among stacked bales, climb, winnow out blades, rub and sniff, at a time when puttering meshes well with my natural biorhythm and my need to wind down. I inhale sweet grasses, slice baling twine with an ancient Leatherman, split bales to examine, to prepare for the next dawn. If I’ve left this for the morning because I arrived home too late or too exhausted, if I must dilute the sun’s rise with barn lights, then scramble, select, cut, and pull flakes, it will set me on edge, as if teetering across creaking, irregular pallet slats portends teetering between appointments, stumbling into meetings. I know what I do late in the day as the lowering sun slices through the stall doors, both illuminating and warming the stacks, will foster my clement morning, when I begin devotions to my herd. 

Under bobbing heads and flopping forelocks, I drop the morning flakes into each horse’s mesh feeder. Glinting, intense eyes reveal reluctant restraint as they wait for me to step from between their 1200-pound bodies and breakfast. That is, except for Jimmie, whose watchful gaze is muted by the fly mask, worn day and night to protect his ulcerated right cornea. I retreat and listen. To velvet muzzles probing stalks and leaves, to blunt molars chewing, to contented sighs. It’s rhythmic, a gentle current that rocks and lulls me for the minutes I pause in this sanctuary, my mind empty, my feet rooted to the high desert. A field mouse scurries behind a stack of shavings to my left, and rose-breasted barn swallows dart among rafters. I count three nests. In the northeast corner, an orb-weaver picks her way from her web’s fresh trembling edge to the center where she’ll likely rest until night again falls.

I’ve been feeding my own geldings for a year—that’s how long since we fled my fire-ravaged northern California city for these remote Montana acres, amidst sage and fir, among elk that migrate down from the winter peaks, and the occasional grizzly that lumbers through. Where when the wind howls, I pause, listen closely in case it’s actually the Dark Moon pack cutting across the ridge behind the ranch. A horse eats about three percent of his bodyweight per day, which amounts to about three tons per year. That’s twelve tons my gloved hands have hoisted and ricked to last us through winter: Lance’s orchard/alfalfa mix in the far corner, Ted’s certified weed-free rye in the middle, Andy’s timothy up front. The bales, five deep and six high, insulate the wooden structure against our brief summer heat, and against our long winter’s aching cold, not that the horses notice, hay-burning furnaces that they are.

A Lewis’s woodpecker churr-churrs from the ponderosa that overlooks the barnyard’s west edge, directing my attention to the lightened sky. Cattle low from the valley floor and a torpid rooster crows in the distance. A diesel rumble lofts from the road. I consider scaling the ponderosa, taking refuge among the sturdy branches and vanilla mingled with balsam, cradled with the woodpecker and pine siskins contemplating the big sky filtered through boughs and needles. But I’ll have to exit soon, to the world of stark fluorescent lights, computer screens and medical charts, where I pedal pills and elixirs to mitigate suffering caused by fenced lives, as removed from the land as our packaged, processed foods. But first I lift two small droppers and a bucket with chunked apple and carrot from a grain can and head to Jimmie’s stall.

My black and white paint horse buries his head deeper into his feed; if he ignores me, I might go away. Jimmie is my first horse, and has been with me for twenty years, which might be why he lets me touch him like I’m about to do. The Velcro shrieks when I remove his fly mask. Dried tears still stain his right cheek, but he holds his eye open now, a sign that his pain is controlled, and that the ulcer has improved. Under my scrutiny, Jimmie instinctively pivots his head to protect the injury. I’ll never know how he did it—roughhousing with his pasture mates or turning abruptly to hit a low branch. Maybe he scratched too vigorously against a fence post or his stall. It’s one of the mysteries that accompanies living with horses, how they can’t tell me, at least directly, some of the things I need to know. Most information I glean from keen attention to body language, like ears pricked and forward means engaged, like hind leg cocked means relaxed, like licking lips means, Ah, I get it. So the day Jimmie stood quietly at the pasture gate watching for me, way too early to be brought in, I trotted down to see what was wrong. My world lurched at his closed, swollen right eye seeping down his cheek. My heart stuttered as his pain and disorientation vibrated through me. All of me reached for him as I opened the gate. He stepped forward, leaned his shoulder against mine while I re-latched, then walked next to me to his stall, his halter left swinging on the fence pole.

***

Poet Wendell Berry’s words were the first I encountered to describe my experience in remote places: “The Peace of Wild Things.” Like Berry, I never sought solitude in the wilderness, never retreated there to be alone, but instead to sink into connection with a tangle of life unfettered by calendar boxes, un-ushered by schedule lines, unburdened by covert, complex motivations beyond most basic needs. A life comprised only of what is happening now, in the feral space around me—spinning the last ribbon of an expanding web, gliding to roost with a fledgling’s meal—without worry about what box to check next, or what suffering will descend when my ordered life reveals itself to be illusion. And I try for this now, to shun forethought of grief, as Berry and his wild things do, to not worry about what could happen if Jimmie’s eye won’t heal, becomes infected, scars, and leaves him blind…Worry that he’ll be left with a puckered socket and constant unease at his hindered vigilance.

Horses are prey animals, most comfortable with sweeping views offered by their peripherally placed eyes. Without moving, they can scan almost 360 degrees for skulking predators who zero in with their binocular, forward-     facing gazes. I’ve seen horses robbed of their panorama, edgy and rarely relaxed, poised to bolt at a cracking twig or a ground squirrel’s bustle, or any sound that emanates from behind the curtain shielding half their lives. I can’t stand to think of Jimmie living that way, and yet there are days I can’t stop thinking of it. And so I falter in my here-and-now goal, positive I can’t do this. My mind isn’t that disciplined. My heart isn’t that strong, or if it ever was, it has leaked dry its capacity to face authentic, raw life. To wander blithely through today without thoughts of the toppled Douglas fir whose naked roots desiccate in mountain air like a fish on the lakeshore. Or of the fawn’s delicate bones laid bare by melting snow in the pasture’s northwest corner. Or of the kildeer’s frantic hop and flap as the garter snake slithers away with a suspicious bulge interrupting its slender body. I long to wake suspended above all of it, swaddled in the ponderosa’s riot of needles, or to flee even farther, to the bustle of lives cocooned by computers, TVs and high-     density housing, the only nonhuman entity in view a well-coiffed, miniature bonsai on a Pledged and polished end table. Instead, I struggle to care for my oldest companion who sustained a devastating injury in my pasture on my watch, in order to prevent a future that I am not supposed to be thinking about.

Which is why what he does every morning is miraculous and grounds me next to him, among shavings and scattered hay, winnowing me from the future the way I winnow the hay blades, when I enter his stall with my forward-facing eyes. He straightens from his breakfast, rising to his full 16.2-hands, towering like the lone cedar, and placing his head out of reach. I turn to hang the carrot and apple bucket, to remove pressure from my predator focus but also to display trust that he won’t strike me down with a razor-sharp front hoof or perform a split-second spin, honed from evolution on the plains, and cripple me with a double barrel kick from his powerful hindquarters. Jimmie is a better teacher than any poet because after a barely perceptible pause he steps and lowers his head to the bucket, leveling his right eye to my nose. And I absorb myself in caring for him, wiping the crusted tears with a damp cloth, parting his lids with my thumb and forefinger, and instilling the anti-inflammatory drops and antibiotic ointment, before resting my forehead against his neck and inhaling his untamed scent. For that perfect moment in my imperfect life, in the twelve-by-twelve space among pine boards and three kinds of hay, my herd chewing unperturbed on both sides, I am present and unaware of the day advancing with the sun.

~~~

JoDean Nicolette is a writer, physician and teacher. A graduate of the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Pacific University Master of Fine Arts Program, she believes in the healing power of both nature and the written word. Her work has appeared in such publications as the Sun, the Print Row Journal, and the Rappahannock Review. A Pushcart nominee and Editor’s Choice recipient, JoDean has been awarded the Scribes Valley Prize for Short Fiction and the Maine’ Review’s Rocky Coast Grand Prize for Prose. Her debut memoir Trail Magic: A Physician’s Journey Through the Appalachian Mountains (Choeofpleirn Press, 2024) was awarded first place in memoir by Feathered Quill and top finalist the in the Kenneth Johnston Contest for Nonfiction and top finalist in the Indie Book Awards. JoDean lives in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley with her husband, dogs, and horses.