A deep, stagnant trench borders my aunt and uncle’s farm in Upstate New York. This remnant of the Chenango Canal lies to the east of the pastures by about a third of a mile, hidden by tracts of trees and swamp reeds and a field or two of alfalfa. The mules and barges were retired decades ago and the corridor is claimed now by wood ducks and muskrats and widowed farmwives walking off their sugar before bed. It was my home course the few summers I lived on the farm, waking each morning to the snap of the mudroom door—my uncle departing for farm calls—to soak my running shoes in the wet grass of the towpath.

The easiest access to the canal is almost a mile away, around the hairpin curve of Woodman Pond Road and over a narrow-lane bridge. I showered myself with dew from the branches of swamp oaks and sugar maples as I ran along, thrilled to not suffer the hot, county-highway pavement between dry rows of corn.

The towpath borrows a runway from the county airport for a stretch, so I periodically ducked two-prop planes bringing in Colgate University donors for meetings with the dean—the same folks I’d see at the swanky country club on the edge of town, pausing before each hole while their caddies chased Canada geese away from the green. The local farmers were already busy as I returned from these runs, offering me two-fingered waves from the steering wheels of their tractors as they overtook me on the final stretch of road, brimming slurry tanks in tow. 

The farm: an 1830s farmhouse, a few dozen acres of rocky upstate soil, and a tired old cow barn resting in the shadow of the Adirondack mountains, halfway between Rochester and Schenectady. Charming and bucolic, if not a little dilapidated. It’s not a money operation. The ewes are kept to promote the flock, and all but the biggest, brutish rams with the most shotput-like testicles swinging around their hocks are sold to farmers in need of semen. Sometimes a calf or a piglet or two find their way to the farm from auction. Then from farm to freezer. From freezer to dinner plate. There is no industry. It’s just a place sustaining itself.

My summers there—three, while I was in college—I spent heaving bales of hay, corralling yearlings, toting buckets of water, and collapsing onto the mattress in the spare bedroom at night with the waxy cologne of lanolin on my skin. The work existed in perpetuity and permanence, and was as long and deep as the summer days that held it, the satisfaction as uncomplicated as the fatigue that bore me to sleep. 

My uncle makes his living as a veterinarian, winching calves, stitching cows, and deworming bad-mannered trailer park hounds. My aunt answers phones, balances books, and dons leather falconer gloves to wrangle teed-off, half-doped, just-spayed barn cats in the back room of the clinic. I shoveled shit. 

The lambs come in January, quaking and steaming in the chaff. In the spring the only monument left to this miraculous event is a thick stratum of hard-packed manure and straw spread across the whole floor of the barn, the sheep having been turned back out to pasture. That layer of stale bedding has to be broken up and carted off. So, each May, my aunt and uncle would buy me a bus ticket from Cleveland to Utica and hand me a pitchfork upon my arrival.

The world aged the farther the bus bore me from the streamlined art deco terminal on Chester Avenue. The farm fields in the ramshackle heart of the agricultural East are not like the perfect grids of the Midwest, the pivot-irrigated circles of Colorado, or the laser-leveled plantations in California. They are queer, lopsided creatures, teetering crescents and cantilevered quadrilaterals clinging to steep hillsides and narrow valleys. They are squashed between ponds and thick bands of deciduous forest. The roads that run through them are marked every half mile by cupolaed antique stores.

The first time I made the trip, a man on the Greyhound asked where I was heading and I told him. “Farm life, yeah? I worked on a farm once. Gassed minks in Wisconsin,” he said, showing off a gallery of shiny scars on his forearms. He was carrying a rotisserie chicken in a plastic bag and wanted to know if he could have my sunglasses. He told me he was going all the way to Albany, but got off in Syracuse to fish cigarette butts from an ashtray and the bus left without him.

Days on the farm are full of simple tasks that belie a deeper complexity: turn the sheep out into the fenced-in fields of grass, supplement their roughage with scoops of grain, feed corn, and mineral blocks, fill the water tubs, and shear the flock before they start rubbing. Keep things mended with fresh coats of paint and stain-treated boards nailed up in place of those that are old and rotting. Cut back the dogfennel and pigweed and milk thistle from the pastures. Gather the ewes together in the loafing shed to administer penicillin or Lutalyse. Go to the barn at night and shoot the mangy, snarling raccoon that’s been dragging off the chickens. Hold the line. Maintain the order.

Most of my time was spent knee-deep in manure, rubber boots and the bottoms of my uncle’s old spruce twill overalls lost in a heap of feces and straw bedding. Morgan, the feral tortoiseshell cat who hung around hunting pigeons and barn swallows, usually observed my toil perched on a rough-hewn support beam, tail swishing in the curtains of cobwebs draped across the rafters. At best, her expression was unimpressed. At worst, disdainful. Sometimes she basked in a window well in the whitewashed stone wall and idly cleaned her paws as I busted up season-old manure with an antique tamping pick. 

All the while, the land leached its aroma into the summer heat just like the black polyethylene bunk feeders that baked in the sun. Hay dust and manure particles hung in shafts of light like air bubbles in motor oil, floating, lackadaisical, in the aroma of tilled-under earth. Breaking up the manure pack in the barn, I ran wheelbarrows of the stuff up a warped two-by-ten board to the back of a beat-up Toyota pickup my uncle had used as his vet truck for the first 300,000 miles.

A few dozen hens and a couple cocky roosters—black Jersey Giants, Cherry Eggers and one or two Cinnamon Queens—pecked around the edges of my work, foraging for half-digested bits of grain or corn that was spilled in the chaos of feeding. A timid, bullied turkey, too old for the axe, sidled up whenever I rested on the fifty-pound sacks of Purina Honor Show Chow lamb feed stacked in the corner. (Medicated for growing and finishing sheep. Good source of crude protein. Reduces incidents of water belly.) I’d throw her a handful and shoo away the roosters while she chased oats across the cement floor. Outside, the flock idled in the heat, grazing, lazing, and shitting. Always shitting.  

The one member of the farm I had to watch out for was a big marsh daisy rooster I named Leroy Brown. Old Leroy was the ringleader of the motley flock of chickens that stepped raptor-like around the farmyard, scratching and pecking in the grass, foraging for crickets in the shade of the ivy-covered silo. He was mean and keen and strutted around flaunting his stiff crimson comb and thick, orange hackle. He guarded his harem jealously against the other roosters and terrorized anyone who came into the barn, sometimes sneaking up while my back was turned and striking out at my legs with his talons and long, curved spurs. My uncle, who had once dealt Leroy a flattening blow with a bucket of grain, was the only person exempt from the rooster’s reign of terror until I crept down to the barn at twilight one evening and grabbed Leroy by the feet while he was sleeping on a shit-caked length of metal piping and used a pair of long-handled secateurs to lop off his spurs. He never bothered me again. Years later, Leroy was overthrown by a young barred Plymouth, and my aunt said he went and sat in the middle of the road until a car came and hit him. She used a spade to scrape his once-emerald sickles off the asphalt. 

Death was predestined for some on the farm: the four gangly, speckled jakes whose dismembered feet would join their predecessors’ dangling from the sun-bleached, wasp-infested swing set in the backyard, and the two portly piglets who ate the compost from the house. But it hung as a palpable presence over everyone else, too: a reaper lurking in the shadowy corners of the barn.

One summer I fell off the manure wagon behind the sugar house and hit the ground flat on my back. All the air in my body left with a rush. My lungs ached and my wrist stiffened from some attempt to catch myself. I stayed there, spread out in the tall grass, not wanting to ever move again. The skin was scraped off below my knee, and blood ran down my shin. The pitchfork had landed before me, tines up, just to my right. Had I fallen four inches to the side, I would have been impaled and bled to death quickly and quietly and no one would have known for a while. Ben, my thirteen-year-old cousin, probably would have found me later that afternoon, all pale and dried up, four shiny metal points reaching up through my stomach. 

A few months into my second summer on the farm, an elderly ram died in the pasture. Ben and I discovered the old man in the morning when we went out to the field with buckets of grain. He was crumpled in the sun, unnatural and bent, with the last gasps of his lungs bubbling spit on his lips. We dragged the ram across the barnyard, his spine popping and cracking after lying stiff for so long, and gathered the corpse to our chests and lifted him into the bed of the truck. We drove the dead ram to the Pit out back—a hole in a field for interring the dead—and tipped him in with a two-by-four. 

The Pit held many creatures: stillborn lambs, roosters that got carved up by other roosters, and odd animals my uncle couldn’t save. One time we had a Holstein calf on the farm who came to us with an E. coli infection. Her ears drooped more and more each day. 

“Never a good sign, once those ears start to go,” my uncle said as the two of us leaned on the rail of her pen one night. “I keep thinking she’s going to rally. One more day, one more day, I keep saying, but I just don’t know.” 

“She drank half a bottle today,” I said.

“Should be drinking two and wanting more.” 

We stood in silence, watching the calf in front of us. I brushed away the moths that fluttered in my face, chasing the light of the single bulb glowing above our heads. The barn was silent except for the sound of the cicadas outside. I rested my chin on my arm and watched the little Holstein flip her tail feebly as flies pestered her emaciated back end. Her knees—knobby already—were swollen to the size of softballs, and she stood in the middle of her pen, too tired to lie down.

“I guess we’ll just have to see how it goes,” my uncle said. Then he turned out the light and we walked back to the house. The calf was dead in the morning and Ben and I drove to the Pit and dumped her, too. 

Order always decayed like this. Barn cats less savvy than Morgan vanished without a trace, carried off by owls in the night. Swallows’ mud cups covered every beam in the loafing shed, and the birds swooped and dove around my head as I pitched manure, furious with my proximity to their nests. Love-drunk rams pawed and slobbered at the plywood blind between their pen and the ewes’, bending, pressing, warping the wire fence in their fit of insatiable lust. Woodchucks dug holes in the fields that caught the front tires of the antique tractors. Life on the farm was always straining at the fence lines with just as much fever as that which crept in.

I re-sided the barn my first summer on the farm, so I found myself slathering the new boards with a coat of ruby paint from thirty feet up on an extension ladder the following year. A few rungs from the top, arm extended to just below the peak of the roof, a board wiggled under the pressure of my brush. I prodded it again. It rocked back and forth. Just as I was weighing the effort of retrieving some nails, a dark creature popped out from behind the loose board, hissing, squeaking and startling me so bad I jumped. My right foot slipped off its rung and, in the ensuing scramble, the top of the ladder began a ponderous arc across the apex of the barn. My palms left two long paintless smears before my fingertips finally caught the lip of a board. For a few eternal seconds I remained flattened against the fly rails, straining to keep my fingers wedged, staring back at the furry, snub-nosed bat that continued to hiss and chitter. In a blink, it vanished, withdrawn into its hideout, and I was left perched on the cockeyed ladder, peering out over the hump of pastureland to the dark row of trees that hid the canal. Then I hollered for Ben who was on the other side of the barn shearing a lamb. 

That next weekend my aunt, uncle, and cousins took a trip to Cedar Point and left me to watch the animals. I pulled on some boots after dinner and scuffed down to the barn in the nighttime shadows of the trees. The sheep were out grazing, but the chickens were roosted on the bars of the outmoded cow stalls and the turkey had cozied up to the bags of fleece in the corner. Morgan was nowhere to be seen. The hayloft door clapped in the breeze and I pulled it shut on my way out.

The yips and cackles of wild canines drifted up from the woods below. Sometimes I’d see coyotes slip off into the brush along the canal, traveling backstage to the fields where they hunted garden-fat woodchucks in the foggy hours, predawn. Now it sounded like they had banded together, chasing something bigger.

The manure truck was in the yard, so I pulled it around, the tires rubbing against the bumper that was lashed to the chassis with baling twine. I drove around the barn and let the truck crawl forward on its own, the one working headlight pointed down the dirt double-track lane that ran the length of the farm. I rolled down the window, listening to the coyote frenzy coming closer along the canal. The trail led to the tiny valley behind the farm where we sometimes spread manure, but then swept along the inside edge of that meadow and back up to the neighbor’s cambered hayfield atop a small hill. 

I steered off into the grass, leaving tire marks through the weeds, and parked in sight of the trees by the canal and left the engine running. The whines and yelps and howls were all around me now, the calls echoing off the hills and clamoring into the sky. Somewhere not far away I heard a splash and some barks and the tramping of brush. A doe burst into the field and stopped, rigid and ethereal in the glow of my low beam. Her fur glistened with water and mud and her torso heaved from the chase. I stepped out of the truck. She twitched at the sound of the door, but my movements were hidden by the headlight which made her eyes glow green. 

The coyote’s riot diminished, leaving only the croaks of bullfrogs, the hum of the truck engine, and the patter of bugs beating against the roof of the cab. The deer sniffed the air. Then she huffed and stamped and leapt back into the woods with her flag of a tail in the air. I stood in the field for a long time after she left, listening to the chatter of coyotes that rose again and moved away through the forest, rising and falling as they caught the scent of the deer or the hills played tricks on my ears. Then I took the keys from the truck, which turned off with a sigh, shut the door, and walked into the woods. 

It wasn’t far to the canal, picking my way through the underbrush in the dark, and once there only a short distance to the spot where the deer had plunged across the water. The whole place shone with moonlight save one black hole in the goop. To the left and right, as far as I could see in the dark, the ditch lay long and straight, carved by the same brawny men who dug the Erie Canal in the 1820s. What was once a thoroughfare of commerce now had its banks snarled with snags and brambles, clean human lines returning to the wild. 

I’d always thought of my role on the farm as staving off disorder, as maintaining predictability and sense, preserving the natural order, and sometimes I’d become frustrated with how easily and often all things went to hell. The undoing was pervasive: sheep loosened boards as fast as I nailed them up, tongue-and-groove siding warped in the sun, piglets rooted up steel gutter covers and lived at large in the barn. Even my rubber boots had been jaggedly shortened by my cousin’s little Sheltie. But there in the woods I thought I might be wrong, that the status quo wasn’t the order I tried to preserve, but the disorder to which all seemed to revert.

I stood by the water until the scum closed up. Then I turned and walked back through the night until I found where I had left the truck. I started it up with a roar and cast the headlight in a wide circle around the field and followed the lane back to the house. 

The next morning I got up early and ran the long way down to the canal and followed the coyote tracks in the mud along its banks, wondering if I’d find the carcass of the deer, if the coyotes had caught her in the woods after we met and brought her down in the midst of their troupe, cackling, delighted, and hungry. I hoped they had not. There were too many deer, my uncle would say if he had known, but I saw the place the deer had leapt the canal, gleaming and dripping with life in the headlights, and the image had stayed with me all night. 

I ran for twenty minutes but found no corpse. The coyote tracks eventually vanished in the hard dirt at the edge of a cornfield. I turned to jog back along the water, but was halted by a hulking form dragging itself across the ground. A snapping turtle, colossal and lumbering, like a mud beast resurrected from the primordial soup. Me there, oil-slick-wet with sweat; she, carving a trench through the gravel with her ventral shell. Her body was still black with wetness, coated in algae and scum. Tattered bits of spatterdock clung to her serrated tail and duckweed dotted her legs.

Her appearance among the robins and rabbits and other morning creatures made me stare, salt stinging my eyes, as she hauled herself away from the canal and across the tracks of bar-tread tires, dredging a line toward the soybeans to deposit her clutch of eggs. I gazed at the turtle in unabashed wonderment and thought about life outside the pastures and the wildness with which it ran from death, the intention with which it crawled toward survival, not succumbing in languid indifference but leaping, desperately, across a broad, dark chasm, laboring up from the depths. Bolting, creeping, deliberately and always, toward life.

I left the turtle and ran back home, away from that tangled bank, its turbid water and expansive lily-pad rafts, a long seam of decay running through the heart of farm country. I was late to feed the sheep, to scatter the pigeons out of the tilting barn and nail chicken wire over the cracks behind them, late to walk the line of nine-wire fencing and fill the holes where skunks and woodchucks got in, to shovel shit for ten hours while somewhere—just beyond the sheep-cropped grass—coyotes trotted along the defunct canal, tongues lolling, and snapping turtles heaved themselves out of the muck.