Paw Dirt Doggies - Stomp Your Feet

We had another amazing old time dance at the Liberty grange last Saturday. Four fiddlers, three git-fiddles, a mandolin, piano, concertina, and spoons. Two callers and a big crowd of rowdy laughing dancers from ages 18 months to 77 years.

I had a blast harmonizing with the fiddles on my concertina, and playing the spoons. I learned the hard way that my new lighter-weight jeans are not so good for backstopping the spoons. Even though my playing spoons are wooden, my legs were on fire!

In spite of jet lag from his return trip from Armenia, Mike couldn't resist an old time dance that was right in our neighborhood. He wandered over for some visiting, relaxing with old friends in the chairs along the wall or standing in the corner close to the food and drink. I even got him out on the floor for a waltz.

Being in the grange reminded me of the old-time dances we had in Imnaha, many miles upriver from town. There is something comforting about the fact that many of the grange halls have the same building design. A big staircase and porch leading upstairs to the big hall with high ceilings and stout well worn wooden floor lined with chairs along the walls, rows of narrow double-hung windows, and a small stage, a coat room and a storage closet. Downstairs is a cavernous basement with many long tables for dining, several wood cookstoves, a couple electric or gas cookstoves, kitchen sinks and cupboards, and bathrooms (if you're lucky).

At Liberty, the outside stairs and landing are walled in to fend off winter gales and blizzards, with a recently added curtain of deer fence over the entrance to keep out the varmints, pigeons, etc. On Saturday night,  the black mesh deer fence was hoisted up to allow us inside and walking under it made me feel like I was entering some kind of medieval fortress that had raised its portcullis.

It is a tremendously good feeling to be able to gather people together for music and dance in a building that was built a couple generations back by some of the great great grandparents of people still using it. One of the things I love most about the grange halls is that they are often located out on the prairie, or up the creek, or tucked in the hills, where farmers and ranchers can be the hosts, welcoming their neighbors, welcoming folks from town, welcoming anybody intrepid enough to make the trek, homing in on the faint lights of windows peeking out of the darkness at the end of a bumpy gravel road.


From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

The Times They Are a Changing

First snow on the mountains. Garden ready to be put to bed for winter. Last of the squashes and pumpkins ripening under their blankets. Onions in the cellar. Meat in the freezer. Apples to harvest for storage and a few other odds and ends, and my part of getting ready for winter will be done! 

Last weekend I had the unbelievable opportunity to swim in the Wallowa River on the 2nd of October. It was 85 degrees in the shade and I hiked up the backway along the river from Joseph, thinking I would take a dip in the lake. 

When I reached the dam, the water was so low that instead of the usual raging torrent of summer outflow, there was a deep clear pool below the dam. I figured this was the only time I might experience both low water and hot temperatures, so I carefully climbed off the flume of the irrigation diversion and took the plunge into the icy beautiful blue-grey water. Frigid and refreshing!

 

That dip was enough to energize me through a hot sticky kitchen afternoon and the canning of the last of the pears. All afternoon long, my skin carried the velvety memory of that mountain water. 

Now mornings are soggy with dew and early romps through the field with the dogs result in dripping wet pant legs from the knee down. 

The new pup, Punch, (short for Opuntia - prickly pear), is well on her way to learning come, down, sit, back, and behind. Mostly she just races after the big dogs as best she can, but she is smart and if I am consistent on her training, and can keep her from having bad experiences, she will be an asset to the ranch. 

Another month and we'll have the cow herd back in the canyon. We hope to go up Pumpkin Creek this fall as we haven't used that range since the big range fires a couple years ago. I can't wait to be on the river, the frenzy of summer growing, fall harvest, and trailing the cattle, all behind us, and just the steady work of winter - fixing fence, packing salt, herding, making improvements to keep us busy. 

I know there will be long dark evenings where we are hunkered down, fires going,  reading and writing and talking, a few songs on the guitar and concertina, hot cups of tea and a last walk outside under cold and starry skies to send us off to bed. 

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Oxtail and Beef Cheeks

We just celebrated Slow Food Wallowa County's first event, Dig In! 

Saturday the week before Dig In!, I got up to a kitchen loaded with produce waiting to be canned, frozen, or dried. On a whim I called Julia to see if she wanted to can peaches. She is a fruit person--that's what she told me when we met. She did want to can. So I started setting us up for peaches, honey curry pickles and apple pie filling. But after harvesting my cukes, I needed more so I called a garden buddy.


Janie said she had some cukes, but she was up to her eyeballs harvesting spuds and needed to get them in the cellar. I said I would come over and do it and she called me a "miracle from God." Julia and I went to Janie's and came home an hour later loaded with cabbage, beets, shallots, potatoes, carrots, dill, mint and a few cukes. The first produce for Dig In! 


When Friday rolled around,  I wanted to make my dishes for the pot luck while Dawson was napping.As soon as he fell asleep I started in on my two meat dishes: braised oxtail and braised beef cheeks. 

Braising stock with red pepper and tomato

Oxtail ready for braising

The oxtail was browned and then simmered in a dutch oven for 4 hours in a tomato-ginger-red pepper-carrot-onion-garlic stock.

Browning cheeks before braising

After a lot of trimming, the beef cheeks were browned and baked in an onion-garlic-black pepper-beef stock. Chilled overnight, I removed the fat and then reheated them for the potluck. Both were delicious.

Saturday of the event, I got up early and went to the neighbor's farm for apples. The neighbors came out and helped pick, parking a flat bed truck under the tree and climbing a step ladder from there. Boxes and boxes of yummy cooking apples to share.  

Some yummy produce from the Magpie Ranch

After that I went home and picked all my yellow and green beans, harvested red and green cabbage and herbs, and sorted a box of windfall Bartlett pears to take to the park. 


Around three o'clock, people came to the park to share produce and everybody talked about how delicious the different produce was and what they planned to do with everything. 


Then we had the potluck with amazing dishes, great stories, and good ideas. Monday morning, Julia and I hauled about six boxes of fresh produce to the Food Bank. It was a great way to wrap up a Dig In! weekend.

Now as an Indian Summer ripens the winter squash in the garden, I'm starting to look forward to winter and the next opportunity to gather folks and keep learning how to improve access to fair, safe, local food.  And this very moment-- I'm going to can the last of those pears! 

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Pop Pop goes to Armenia

Pop Pop, as grandson Dawson calls him, is headed to Yerevan again. When Mike was first asked to go to Armenia to work on a pastoral systems project, I had to look on a map to figure out where it was. It's over there next to Turkey, below Georgia and above Iran.

This is his third trip, and the last for this year. He has been too busy to educate me much about it, but so far I've learned that their main breed of cattle are a cross of native Caucasus cattle and Brown Swiss, which they hoped would increase milk production for their dairy operations. The "beef" they raise comes from bull calves that are weaned at three months and put on pasture for a year. They do not castrate and the beef animals do not gain very well and are maybe only 400 - 500 pounds when slaughtered.

It sounds like the villages have some good options for improving their management and increasing the yields from their livestock operations. These could include managing dairy and beef animals as separate herds, allowing the beef herds to be grazed on pastures further from the village, castrating non-breeding bulls, and implementing a range management approach based on

ecological principals.

There was a time when I would not have pictured Mike as a scientist, but now it seems to make perfect sense. If a horse wreck had not laid him up and sent him down the college path, he might have just kept working on ranches as a hired hand. In fact, once he was back in the saddle, ranch work kept him sane while he pursued his education. Between semesters he took winters off to herd cattle at Dug Bar on the Snake River, or summers to work for the US Forest Service Range department. The ranchers we worked for, like Joe Collins of the Hubbard Ranch, were incredibly supportive.

Mike spent quite a lot of the next ten years away from home, three of those in Idaho. I cherished the months, weeks and days when he could be home with us, and especially the ones where the family was all together, wintering in cow camp, herding cattle on the craggy canyonsides. It was amazing to be on the range with him, watching him apply what he was learning, and seeing the ecological system of climate, topography, plants and animals through his eyes.

I drove him crazy with questions and I still do. He is mostly patient. He is mostly quiet. But I know that underneath the hours and hours of hard work, whether building a fence or packing out salt block, calculating stocking rates or planning a restoration project, he sees the big picture and our little place in it.

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef.

Heifer Havoc

I guess this kind of behavior should be expected from a two-year old. But Mike is always telling me to have a positive outlook. In other words, don't assume the yearlings and two-year olds are going to wreak havoc.

So I didn't think about it as we unloaded at the neighbor's corrals. Our day's job: to gather the herd on the Zumwalt and sort off bulls and steers to haul to the valley. We rode through the 400 Acres and down past the pond. The sky arched over us like a robin's eggshell, and the golden grass, cured on the stem, rustled against our horses' feet. It was a beautiful Indian Summer morning.

The cattle were across the draw and on top of the ridge and they gathered easy and trailed easy all the way to the corral. Getting them in was a different story.

We bunched them by the corral gate, where a short fence made a wing to help guide them into the first corral. The cattle balked and milled, and a couple mother cows fought the dog. Then a bull went through the gate and a bunch of cows went with him. We thought we had them. That's when some heifers quit the bunch and high-tailed it north with the dog and Mike in pursuit. Then a little red cow let out a beller and started running and the whole mob broke for the hills.

Repeat this scenario about five times. Every time the three of us got the herd gathered back up, one of the blasted two-year olds would bust loose, leaping rocks and humps of grass, evading me. The cows would bulge through the opening I left behind, while the other riders worked to hold the sides. We really needed at least another dog, but Ruby was left at home to babysit Punch, the new pup. And good horse flesh was lacking. Mestizo still thinks he's a packhorse and gets confused by my agitated intentions. Spurs might have helped. And then there was Zeb, the cowy, but ancient mustang. And Zip, the big guy, all charging here and there and working up an enormous sweat. The lone dog was wore down to a frazzle with a bad leg. It was not a real positive part of the day.

Finally Mike decided we should try a different gate, one flat-on mid corral, at the alley, where they could see the other cattle in the corral. We bunched them, they balked, we bunched them again and drove, and then the lead cow walked through the gate. A miracle!

During the year, I like having the mixed age herd, the generations of cattle working the range together. But when it comes time to gather, those yearlings can be a real pain in the pitoot.

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Windfalls

Mike and I just returned from a few Indian Summer days on the river, where Mike diligently pulled weeds (puncture vine and cockle burr) and I picked blackberries and plums. We are in the thick of the harvest now. Our second wave of Bunchgrass Beef customers are hungrily anticipating their September deliveries. The garden is overflowing its borders in a tangle of pumpkin and winter squash vines. And the trees are weighted down with fruit.

Usually we think of a windfall as a stroke of unexpected good luck, like finding out your old horse blanket is really a Navajo rug worth thousands of dollars. But when it comes to fruit, windfalls are often viewed with disdain, i.e.: those annoying piles of rotting apples collecting in the lawn.

I could have felt that way about our transparents. The tree has been battling some kind of leaf curl, but still produced fruit this year. The small, hail pocked, easily-bruised and quick-to-rot apples were becoming more and more numerous in the grass under the tree. I kept thinking if the apples would just stay on the branches longer, they would get bigger, and I would be more inclined to work with them.

But no, they kept falling off and a little voice inside my head kept saying, "Waste not, want not." Therefore, I added the apples to the growing list of garden stuff destined to be tucked into jars, freezer bags or drying racks. This included: peaches (lots), pears (quite a few), blackberries (the tale end), green and yellow beans (tons), sour yellow plums (plenty), cucumbers (just starting) and raspberries (last gasp).

Looking into the bucket of wimpy apples, I was humbled by the fact that imperfect fruit can still yield great food. Working up the apples reminded me how I love the feel of a good knife in my hands, the weight of a fruit balanced against gravity while the knife does its work. The peel falls away, the seeds are nipped from their bed, and into the pot go the serviceable and delicious remains.

There was a lot of trim on those apples, but after cooking them and running them through the hand mill, I combined them with the tart yellow plums to make a beautifully golden batch of plum-apple butter. Luckily, after the jars were filled, there was a "windfall" dab left over to spread on crisply toasted, butter-saturated chewy whole-grain bread, the perfect snack for hungry harvesters.

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef

Rejuvenation

In geologic terms, rejuvenation is a kind of rapid erosion that takes landforms backwards in time, from older forms to younger, more rugged features.

I imagine this like when the 1,000 year flood came through along the Imnaha River and stripped away the soil and trees, carving new channels, leaving high raw cuts and sprawling gravel bars. A few years later, I stood at the edge of the river and looked across the rapids to the far cutbank and the water line ten feet above my head. I briefly pictured myself submerged inside the roil, and shuddered.

The Missoula Floods cycled through about every 55 years when Hells Canyon was being formed. When I think that what we witnessed was a once in a 1,000 years event, the frequency of those Ice Age floods is staggering. I wonder if I have ever seen water travelling at the rate of 80 mph. How fast was the Imnaha when it was running 20,000 cubic feet of water per second? Even during a normal flood, at 2,000 cfs, the river is frightening.

In contrast to the geologic process, the rejuvenation of body or self is mostly associated with indulgence and relaxation. Perhaps I should reconsider life's threatening situations as another form of rejuvenation, the physical breaking down into new life, the turmoil that erodes feelings down to emotional bedrock, where one can begin building up again.

In 1862, Thoreau wrote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Back when we first met, Mike had a favorite poster with that quote on it. I think it helped me trust him. The quote was like a founding principle that we could always agree on, one that has grounded us wherever we've lived, from the Yukon Territory, to the Andes Mountains, to the depths of Hells Canyon.

Wildness has been both balm and catalyst. Ignition and antidote. It has been one of the best teachers, for two people in it for the long haul.

From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef