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| No bigger than a breadbox |
Funny how we use words to make things. And funny how the words we make into things can remain silent inside our minds or be turned into sounds or symbols to mirror or unravel our selves. Words to describe worlds, to make war, to figure, to forgive, to boast or fail. I like the way our Magpie sign does its job, the way no giant standard can.
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| River restoration project. |
Funny how traipsing can be purposeful, like a kind of time travel. When I follow the driveway across the river and past the restoration project, I see fifteen years of burning, seeding with a rangeland drill, and weeding, all reflected within the bursting green.
Like a painting repainted layer upon layer, and one of the layers would show the old feedlot with its hundreds of cows crowding the feedbunks, knee deep in manure. Ground grubbed and trampled, a century worth of annual weed seed ripe for germination. I prefer the grassy thickness with it's rabbit lairs, its thrum of insects, its darting birds.
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| Bluebird Canyon above old feedlot |
There were up to six feedlots in use between 1960 and 2002, three on the west side of the river and two on the east side. One lies beneath the box canyon we call Bluebird, where an ephemeral stream splatters down the rock face in a sparkle of water mostly hidden in clumps of currant and thickets of hackberry. This is where friend John took his first walk after being confined and sick. Where his wife Debra saw the year's first bluebird and thought John might survive his cancer. And he did.
This can be a place to reconcile with death. Where predators and accidents and disease subsume life on a daily basis and leave behind a puzzle of scattered bones or rawhide twisted corpses, or the transient peculiar smell that Dawson, now eight, describes as 'kind of good and kind of sickening'. I pass two dried-out toads, one upright and mostly whole; the other grotesque and interesting, supine, with legs splayed and part of its head missing.
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| Dessicated Western Toad |
Why not describe what they have given up by dying? Those words are much harder for me to come by. Not knowing what they loved in life, their favorite smells, their easing into the water to lay their eggs, the best insect catch they ever made. Nor what gave them spite or fear.
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| Second toad mummy |
When we arrived at the river, the 'big boys' had been there for a bachelor party. I was greeted by a new message on the chalkboard at the back door. I thought it was the perfect decree for a man about to marry. Then I realized it was also the perfect decree for me. And I gathered the doubts at hand and set them in the past and walked inside.
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| Abandon all DOUBT Ye who enter here |
Last year Dawson made his first solo entry in the ranch journal. I found it later and was surprised and pleased. Drawings and words! A richness of meaning recognizable in any language.
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| Dawson's first solo entry in the ranch journal |
When Mike saw my illustration of day two of the bridge redecking, he said it reminded him of Harlan Hubbard, and I almost cried. Of course, my drawings are mostly not this accurate. But I cherish his comparison, which makes me think of Shantyboat, and how I longed while reading it, to be back on the Yukon Queen with Mike. Sufficient with little, our homemade wooden raft calmly riding the vast fizzing opaque boil and suck of the Yukon. And at the end of each day, the hard pulls on the sweeps to get us a half a mile to shore, nestling up to the bank and tying off in the twilight of a midnight sun.
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| Bridge work, Day 2, seen from Witch's Hat |
Mike's few journal entries tend to be practical, where you can look back and find stuff. Like what day we branded two years ago, or when we put that new gate in upriver, or how many stays and posts we used fencing off the toe slope. Still, his practicality doesn't stop him from using words like 'winter wonderland'.
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| January 31, 2017 entry by Mike |
How different from today, when nearly everything seems green. I know this tropic lull will parch into brown soon enough. Spring has been longer and colder than normal, and so very welcome after the oppressive snows we struggled through last winter.
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| Columbia Spotted Frog habitat |
In this moment of abandoned doubt, I wave away the raging flood, the wild fire, the dangerous trail. And open my arms to acceptance and courage.
From Sara at Magpie Ranch home of Bunchgrass Beef
