A promise from forgotten days of rain,
bold whites and blues and greens
flush the flesh clean as a hawk’s cry
in spring. When we were children
here, we walked within our dreams
of endless rivers crashing and cascading
from the Sierra snowpack into the Valley
ditches and furrows, row upon row
to fill the cornucopia of the world.
But we have pumped the ground dry.
Is this a harbinger of better times, or
have the gods returned to say goodbye?
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
Tagged corporate ag, Drought, gods, rain, sustainability, water, wells
After nearly 2 inches of rain, everything is clean, having traded dust and smoke for mud and puddles, we’re delighted and relieved. Though we’ll be feeding hay for another 3 weeks or so, we expect our hills to be green this week. Though it feels like a drought-buster, long-term forecasts point to a developing La Niña with only a 10% chance of this year’s rainy season being wetter than last.
2.
Drought and dust,
pandemic and the masks
we need to breathe and feed—
day’s end cloaked in smoke
and gin—how tough are we
and every living thing
looking to escape
to a Li Po poem
and Chinese tapestry?
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
Tagged Drought, dust, KNP Complex fire, pandemic, smoke, Windy Fire
Three days ago, this second-calf heifer (9061) was fighting two coyotes off her newborn Wagyu X twins. I got a call from a neighbor who saw the action from the road, but I was 15 minutes away checking our first-calf heifers. I called Robbin who was getting ready to leave for a dentist appointment. She jumped into the Kubota and sent them packing.
Usually twin calves for a young cow is a curse, wherein most cases she abandons the weaker one. If she tries to raise them both, it typically taxes her so much that her poor shape keeps her from cycling to breed back. By themselves near the house this morning, I took out some alfalfa while the rest of the cows were still on the hill. Here the calves are playing while she has an early breakfast in our fourteenth straight day of smoke from the KNP Complex fire in Sequoia National Park and Forest.
I think they’ll make it now.
During hot and dry times
the little birds gather
around the house—
around water
leaks and irrigation—
more dependable
than humans:
woodpeckers clinging
to rainbirds,
bushtits flocking
to timed misters
at six o’clock,
quail rolling to a stop
at the water trough,
and swallows plunging
into the ‘sip and dip’.
But the thirstiest of all,
the nervous Oak Titmouse
at the dog’s dish,
one drop at a time
all day long.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021
Out of the Gulf to rest upon the spine
of the Sierras, run aground on the Kaweahs,
animal shapes spill overboard
after marking months of blazing days
since April showers, we watch clouds
and wonder if it rained on Arizona friends,
or if it’s pouring now on the Kings
or in the Roaring River Canyon, Rowell
Meadow darkened beneath them.
Despite hot monsoon gusts that lift
and twist the dust across the pasture,
pregnant cows sequestered to the shade,
we dare to breathe relief as the sun slides
south—split redwood and Manzanita
waiting ready near the woodstove.
Dust trails behind
plodding black cows off the hills
to water, bellies stretched with calf,
while we drink coffee—
and we are proud of these cows
who grazed uphill to bed
while we drank Tangueray and tonic,
slice of grapefruit instead of lime.
An acquired taste, raising cattle
through years of drought—
a bittersweet love affair
with the ground that sustains us.
We know her every crease
and wrinkle, and which leak water—
all of her magic spots
forever branded in our brains.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
I still call it “the Swamp”
where thirsty Valley Oaks
centuries-old shed their limbs
among barkless skeletons,
bleached bones like flesh
waiting to fall into the next life.
Half-mile across on Christmas Eve,
1955, the Kaweah flowed to the doors
of our ’53 Buick—headlights
diving into oncoming wakes
like Captain Nemo’s submarine.
Not free to run when it wants,
we have held the river up
in the hills for sixty winters,
only to let it run all at once
across the Valley to irrigate
orchards and summer crops—
no kids fishing from shady banks
a lazy river recharging wells.
We can’t fill the dams we have,
yet cotton trailer billboards suggest
that dams can make more water
without looking to the sky.
Our country is dry and short. We’ve pulled the bulls off the irrigated pasture to make room for our bred heifers due to begin calving by the middle of September. We will have to feed the bulls in this pasture where Allie and Terri were driving a few to water last week. Even though we’ve sold 25% of our cows, we continue to step up the amount of hay we’re feeding with no idea of when it will end or whether it will pay for itself in the long run. But if we have to sell more cows, we just don’t want them to be thin.
Cooper’s Hawk
under a rainbird’s shower,
yellow eyes
mermaid and frog
before taking a drink
at the ‘sip and dip’.
Too hot to hurry
in the heat
we all grow tame.
Posted in Photographs, Poems 2021, Ranch Journal
Tagged Cooper's Hawk, Drought, water, wild
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