Tag: farmer

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Mountain Men

Swiss mountains are unforgettable. So too are the people you meet up there.

Last year my wife and I were hiking a remote trail high in the Alps. We came upon a farmer repairing a stone wall. He was a burly fellow with a mutton chop mustache. He looked like Obelix the cartoon character, or an agrarian version of Lemmy from Motorhead.

As we passed I wished him a “Guten Tag”, this being the German part of the country and greetings an essential part of Swiss culture. He raised his hand in a Roman salute and responded “Salve”. His greeting was Romansh, an ancient derivative of Latin used by only a handful of Swiss, yet still one of their four official languages. It was a moment straight out of another millennium.

I regularly hike up a mountain trail behind our house.  Three hikes out of five I will find a man there, sitting alone on a mountainside bench. He is my age and from the Middle East, either an immigrant or an asylum seeker. He sits and smokes and gazes with sad eyes over the broad Lake Geneva valley. We nod and smile at each other as I pass by, but we have never conversed: he speaks neither English nor French nor German. Still, he has become a fixture on the mountain. I miss seeing him when I find the bench empty.

Just today I was hiking alone in high mountain pastures when a storm boiled in. It began to rain hard as I made for the shelter of a stone cattle barn. I sat there under the eaves as a wicked thunderstorm rolled through. It was glorious.

Then out of nowhere three Swiss farmers appeared. We greeted each other. They began to prepare the barn to milk cattle. One of the farmers wore a baseball hat that featured a Canadian maple leaf and the silhouette of a bull. I pointed to the hat and said, with some pride, “Vive le Canada!” He responded with a smile and perfect English, “Yes! Canada! That’s where I get all my bull semen from”.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

 

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The Possum

I would like to thank Eloise, Wordsfortheweary editor, for her guest blog post last week about a Ugandan chicken. Her story was in large part the inspiration for this one, which took place in Canada. Different continents, same absurdity.

It was past midnight, and there was trouble at the henhouse.

The shrieking chickens woke the farmer from a deep winter’s sleep. He threw back the covers. It was bitterly cold, and he usually slept in the nude. He fumbled in the dark for his shotgun. He stepped through the door to the bedroom balcony to get a better view.

But in his bleary state he had neglected one crucial detail: there was no bedroom balcony. It had not yet been built. So instead, he stepped through the door into thin air and plunged two stories into a deep snowdrift. He still clutched the shotgun. He was still nude.

Now very much awake and with a chapped butt, he struggled out of the drift and through the snowy field towards the chaos in the henhouse. He flung open the door. There sat a large possum, contentedly making a meal of one of the hens. The possum was dispatched. With order restored, the farmer walked back through the snowy darkness to the farmhouse.

Which was of course locked. The only thing open was the door up where a bedroom balcony was supposed to be. He stood in the snow calling up to his wife. Nothing. He yelled. Nothing. He went round and knocked on the front door. Still nothing. Then he pounded on the door with all his might.

Finally the farmer’s wife rose from a deep winter’s sleep. She threw back the covers. It was bitterly cold, but she slept in a sensible flannel nightgown. Thankfully, she did not venture through the void to the unbuilt balcony. Instead she trudged downstairs and wearily opened the front door for her shivering husband. He was nude, he was holding a shotgun, and he had some explaining to do.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]