Two weeks into weaning,
we celebrate real progress,
the gather, sort and haul—
the harvest down deep-rutted
dirt tracks, 4-wheel drive,
low-range gooseneck tow,
bawling calves to the asphalt—
our early peach
tequila margarita,
just-picked berry
and last season’s lime
juice frozen into a star.
Blank page and pencil,
this year rattles
everywhere we go.
We meet at the end
of generations
of pioneers
here
after 160 years,
all related since
that first local election
cast by 27 men—
the tie broken
by a trapper
from Dry Creek
wined and dined
at Nate Vise’s fort
a week before the vote.
Mom and pop cow outfits and farmers,
we tend and claim our space—
our own language
and hands-on humor
handed down
by surviving
miscalculations.
More and more
we lean on
the old sayings
we were raised
to recite.
Most of what we know
we learned
the hard way
about ourselves—
but most of all
we’ve learned to laugh
at change
at last.
Posted in Photographs
Gathering our lower country, we’ve begun weaning our calves where they’ll ‘soak’ in two different corrals for a week before the steers go to the auction yard in Visalia. The heifer calves will go to the irrigated pasture, open to plenty of dry feed, until the replacements are sorted in July.
This year, after separating the calves from their mothers, we processed all with Inforce 3, a respiratory booster to the vaccination received at branding that is administered nasally. It acts immediately and should relieve any respiratory problems during the stress of weaning. Also, the calves received a topical dose of Cylence for the control of flies. Due to the tall dry feed, we had a number of eye problems, primarily foxtails that we doctored as we processed them.
All of these calves were sired by Vintage Angus bulls and weighed an average of 700 lbs., the heaviest to date from our lower country. We are pleased, of course, with their weights, but happier yet to get started with our weaning. Lots of music in the canyon, cows and calves bawling for one another.
We begin to gather
all the good news
showered upon us
from the sky,
harvest the grass
in the flesh of calves,
and like every year
we will weigh them,
measure our good fortune
with a number
to judge a season by.
We will turn the cows out
back to grass, back to homes
they’ve made on ground
good for little else
but wildlife—four-month
vacation with the girls
gossiping in the shade
without bulls
or nagging children
to disturb them.
Not a bad life
when it rains.
Cultivating a native life,
we pause for totems,
let them tell us
what they think—
who they are.
Some count on us
to stir the grass
and follow,
and some to listen
when we drink
coffee or wine
outside.
Claiming the roost
of loving crow mates,
a Golden Eagle lights
for a closer look at us—
and we are blessed.
Finding his feather
left ahead,
we believe
in something
more common
of the wild,
of talismans
from moments
we never forget
and hope to leave
as much.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2016, Ranch Journal
Tagged Golden Eagle, photography, poetry, TALISMANS, TOTEMS
Photo: Terri Drewry
In a world tall with grasses,
wild oats and rosy thatches
of dry filaree, we seldom see
our feet upon the earth.
In frequented places
like water troughs and barns,
like vegetable gardens
saving trips to town,
we are prejudiced—
react without a thought
against a race of snakes
that want no trouble
to claim the space
in which we travel
with a shovel.
for Terri
At their feet, I must leave home—
the house, the canyon, to see them.
At the overpass between Exeter
and Visalia, when at cloudy dawn
they became my mother’s rumpled
bedclothes as she courted death,
the Sierras cloaked in a gossamer mist
that embraced me. Or just south
of Lemon Cove, up the Kaweah’s long,
open throat, sharp-toothed peaks
of granite scree reach for the sky,
changing moods in every light.
A man must have mountains
to shed the nonsense to get to—
a distant and steep ascent
for the spirit, soul and flesh—
a place safe to wander fire to fire,
star to star, to drink from snowmelt.
Wide arms open, they welcome me
as I come home from town
to lay down at their wrinkled feet.
Long stiff with the sweat of years,
I see myself beneath its dust, retired
from the common ignorance of haste.
All the timed events, all the wild cattle
made by the chase are scars etched
in fragile leather, some in my brain
as sweet memories of riding high,
shoulder to shoulder in the gather
of good men shaped by this landscape
that will outlast us in the end. Too soon
old, they say, too late wise, I could
always have taken better care of time,
thrown away the watches and clocks
and invested it in the real observation
of other living things—even the smallest
of which has a mission to teach us
the hard way. And what I fail to see—
this slow creak of bones will illuminate.
If you are a fish
you find an eddy
behind a boulder
or a cutbank
shadowed
by a tree root
where Snallygasters
ride the current
snowmelt.
We swim upstream
for the perfect place
to make our livings—
where rivers start
close to the stars,
deep in the pines,
where water falls
fast and cold
all year long—
but always swimming
against the flow
just to hold our own.
Muggy morning beneath a raft of clouds
docked against the Sierras steals molecules
of oxygen beside the last hole dug for granddad’s
gravel that now traps tailwater from the pasture
in the summer, its dark, stagnant pool teams
with amoeba and paramecium, a fermenting
stench swum only by cormorants and mud hens.
Sweet fragrance on a gust startles my senses
to search the dry grass for color, tree limbs
for blossoms from willow to sycamore,
blackberry to cottonwood, but none in flower
before the forecast Mother’s Day thunderstorms.
Perfumed tendrils cling like Christmas lights
from branches and I am drenched, taste damp
sweetness as I become wild grapes in bloom.
