Tag Archives: rain

Though the impacts of our four-year drought are fresh in everyone’s mind, and far from mitigated by recent rains, our approach to work has changed. With most stockwater ponds less than half-full and Dry Creek just beginning to run, no one dares suggest that the drought is over.

But instead of gathering and branding calves in the dust this year, we are watching weather forecasts trying to get our calves marked between storms. But so are our neighbors with whom we trade labor. It’s tricky business, though a welcome change.

Trying to get anything done between Christmas and New Year’s Day is usually futile, but with a promise of over an inch of rain early next week, we’re branding another bunch this morning. We gathered Tuesday and Wednesday, cut wood for the branding and cook fires, planned a meal, and even had to weed-eat the grass in the corrals so we could rope today. The pace has been tough, but with an eye towards the coming El Niño, no one is complaining (too much).

Eight inches to date on Dry Creek, more than the 2013-14 season.

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Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged branding, Drought, Lee Loverin, neighbors, rain, weather

Mustard Greens

Posted on December 20, 2015 by John | 7 comments

A beautiful day Friday, I took my camera while checking the calves we branded, photographing this one resting comfortably in a bed of mustard greens, along with the gray cow and calf born late September.

We’re taking the whole bunch back to Belle Point this morning after a slow 0.30″ rain yesterday afternoon and overnight–the same rain we raced yesterday morning while branding Tony Rabb’s calves just over the ridge in Antelope Valley.

Forecast for 8:00 a.m. up until the last moment, skies were clear at daybreak as the storm approached from the coast. Tony made the call and we hustled through 100 calves before the first drop landed at 11:30 a.m.

I note, not so much for posterity but to jog my failing memory, that we had a lot of fun at the quickened pace, far from ‘old people slow’. My first opportunity to help the neighbors brand this season, I took Bart, Robbin’s wonderful gelding, who worked well-enough to have some fun himself, a tough little horse hard not to like.

I also found the Burrowing Owl in his digs Friday while checking the heifers just recently exposed to Wagyu bulls. The first wave of family arrives today. ‘Tis the season.

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Posted in Photographs, Ranch Journal

Tagged Bart, Belle Point, branding, Burrowing Owl, family, mustard, neighbors, rain, Tony Rabb, Wagyu

SPIDER WEBS

Posted on December 14, 2015 by John | Leave a comment

Now that I can see beyond the dust
and dead oaks crumbling, begging
for some purpose yet as cordwood—

now that I can breathe, inhale wet,
clear channels to broaden my senses,
taste and smell the green air stick

to my thirty flesh with these rains,
I can think about this distant planet
and its people we are lost among,

the overlap of corporate nations
profiting from wars—projects to busy
and worry a populace to pharmacies—

I feel no less helpless, no less
inconsequential than a fly
trapped in a barn of spider webs.

TEARS OF RAIN

Posted on December 2, 2015 by John | Leave a comment

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Between Jeffers’ jagged edge
and Snyder’s Sierra peaks,
we graze grassy folds of clay

on cold fractured granite pushed
through titled sheets of shale.
Dealt deep canyons, ridges lined

like sunlit face cards: hearts
and diamonds glint with winter
dawn. We gamble lifetimes,

season after season with the goddess—
a diaphanous myth embodied
in the least encompassing the greatest—

more humane than the currency
of unreasonable religions,
or governments—she comes and goes

as she pleases, teases us like children
and we obey. No other mother
more erotic in a storm

pushing rafts of limbs and leaves
down a creek rising—our faces
streaked with tears of rain.

RAINY DAY

Posted on November 25, 2015 by John | 6 comments

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                        — I’ll get there and back
                         and just for a second
                         maybe play.
                                 – Gary Snyder (“Sunday”)

The wood desk waits
beneath the bound
and unbound scraps

of poetry,
manila folders stacked
beneath unopened mail—

the ash and dust
of years anticipate
an inside job.

Shop repairs
count passing storm fronts
upon the roof,

want to work,
to be useful
after a rainy day.

So much saved,
all beckoning
can wait.

First, we must graze
these green grass hills—
maybe play.