I grew up next door to a farmer who survived four years of trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I and returned to the Seventh Line of Mono Township to farm. When I first met him he was missing one leg below the knee, several fingers off each hand, his left eye was made of glass and he had no front teeth. Because he had so many harrowing tales to tell of life in the trenches, I just assumed these were all war injuries.
It came as a complete surprise when my mother explained to me that apart from Jimmy’s bad lungs, which were the result of a whiff of mustard gas at Second Ypres, all of his other injuries were sustained on the farm. Mother always said: “I like Jimmy a lot. I just wish there were more of him.”
I enjoyed watching Jimmy roll a cigarette with only his thumbs and pinky fingers. He had the dexterity of a surgeon with those four fingers and he was just as swift to bait a hook with a worm or stitch a rupture on a pig. He would sit on a nail keg in the general store and tell horse stories while pulling short little puffs of smoke into his damaged lungs. I would lean on the Coke cooler and ask him to explain each mishap and the result, if captured on film, would have held historic significance today as the first farm safety video.
Jimmy made a much greater impression on me than Elmer the Safety Elephant or Smokey the Bear. He was a walking testimonial of what could happen if you unsnapped the bridles before the tugs, took your eye off the buzz saw for a nanosecond or wore loose clothing around an unshielded PTO shaft.
Thanks to Jimmy’s example, I made it through my early years on the farm with nothing more than the usual bruises and contusions that left a few, barely noticeable scars. I went off to college in the city and spent the next two decades under fluorescent lights where the closest call I ever had was from a falling filing cabinet.
But then I married a farm girl from the Seventh Line and came back home to take up a writing career on a small farm of my own. At our wedding, I noticed that all of my bride’s male relatives limped. Several came to the church on crutches. Again, horses seemed to figure prominently in their stories and I made a mental note to avoid them if possible. Australia has more than 30 poisonous critters that can kill you but the most dangerous of them all is the horse. Deaths from spiders and snake bites are now a rarity, but horses kill dozens of people every year.
It would have worked out better for me if I had also sworn off ladders. In 1996 I fell off a ladder in the barn and broke my left heel. I have limped ever since. Twenty years later, I fell off the same ladder in pretty much the same place and broke my right hip. That evened things out and now my limp is less noticeable. In the meantime, all of my brothers-in-law and most of my male neighbours are hobbling around like veteran bull riders.
The National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in the U.S. tells us that farming is far more dangerous than police work or firefighting. But so are a lot of things, like logging, fishing, roofing, garbage collection, iron working, driving trucks, flying planes and driving around selling anything out of a car. All of these jobs have a higher fatality rate than farming. So things could be worse.
Machinery and large animals pose the biggest risk to a farmer. Jimmy and all the other cattlemen on the Seventh Line of my youth spoke in rhyming couplets and epigrams about daily hazards and rules for living: “If he bites and kicks you mind him well, but the horse that strikes is straight from hell.”
Never turn your back on a ram. Never disengage the clutch on a hill. Don’t raise that loader above your nose when you are moving on rough ground. Never hire a man with untied shoes.
But the advice that holds the most significance to me came from my orthopaedic surgeon: either learn to tie off that ladder or give the damn thing away.
- Dan Needles