Saturday, May 29, 2004

Ranching carries a kind of romanticized mystique about it, some of which is true. This mystique is what we love to love about ranching, which also carries an oftentimes harsher reality to it. This reality is what we love to hate about ranching.

On the grounds of the homesite here on the ranch, stands a wonderful Flowering Crab. Having now blossomed and today being somewhat past its prime, looking a little wounded, as the aftermath of that blooming, the tree is leafing out beautifully. The day the tree had completely blossomed, I went out to stand beneath its limbs. The tree hummed, droning to the wingbeat of thousands of honey bees; the sound reminding me of the massive pulsing drone of W.W.II bomber formations of which T.S. Eliot wrote:

As I looked closer, I began seeing the bees as they flew across the interstices between branches, limbs, and twigs, then as they crawled on the flowers. What a pleasant and sensory surprise in the rough-out West.

We also have a new foal, born in the early morning hours of May the first. Like most foals, she's a beauty: all legs with a white, left, hind hoof and a tornado looking white blaze on her face (it twists to the left by the time it reaches the end of her nose), a silvery-gray baby coat. We're guessing what her adult color will be. The odds right now favor blue roan. We'll just have to wait and see. Her mom, Ginger, is doing well and takes very protective care of her little girl.

There is not a lot of romantique mystic in the above: no riding and roping, no sunsets to ride into, no stars to sleep under, but those things fall under the category of what we love to love about ranching.

Here, then, are some of what we love to hate about ranching. First, it's been way too dry for way too long; but I'll bet that after it finally rains for a week (making a very optimistic assumption here) and everybody is grinning big because we have water in the ground, there will be way too much mud. We certainly don't like to deal with cold-natured machinery on super cold days or with knothead horses on any day. (Knothead is a technical term for: Sale or Trade.) We hate not having the right supplies for a job because we're so far from town, even though we really like the distance from town; so we don't like inefficiency and wastefulness or making mistakes, particularly when someone is watching; and we do not tolerate dangerous carelessness. There is no percentage in being a statistic on the negative side of the scale.

We really love to hate being snagged, dragged, or slapped in the face by a strand of springy, unruly, barbed wire, being kicked, bit, or struck by that knothead horse; we hate fixing flats. This is all on a scale relative to the weather; hard-winter, subzero cold and mud at night being on one side of the scale, warm days in the garage with shop stools and no cool beer being on the opposite extreme and both being what we love to hate.

We have the beginnings now of a new crop of buffalo calves. If you have never seen one, try to make plans to go somewhere to see them. Everybody loves the calves, a golden brown color, tiny compared to its mother, but able after only a few hours of life to keep up with the herd. However there is a flip side to this new-baby watching. The mother of a very young calf will take her baby away when the viewer is no closer than 1/4 mile away. It's a great survival strategy but can be a little tough for viewing.

All these really nice things have a not so nice side to them; so when we talk about what we love to love about ranching, don't ever forget that we are very ready to kind of swell up with pride when we talk about those few little things we love to hate about ranching.