What surprised me was feeling them recognize and agree with the point of view. They are growing up on the range, it's part of their family, and they are old enough to express that now.
"Jack rabbit darts, blue grouse starts, the roll of some distant thunder, it won't stay long, its moving along, that's how it is on the range."
I'm happy they like this song because so do I. And sometimes when I'm far from shelter and a storm up and dumps on me, I think to myself, "Dark clouds roll in, its darker than sin, he heads for a rock overhang, the rain comes down fast, but he knows it won't last, that's how it is on the range."
Or when my tongue feels halfway parched and stuck to the roof of my mouth and I can feel my organs sucking the moisture out of my skin. Or when the cactus flowers. Or the baby fawns rocket from their nests. Or when the pines reach out their arms and I have to go over to one and smell its bark. That's how it is on the range.
"He's searching around, then catches the sound, the lilt of a laughing woman, he listens again, then sees that sage hen, he shivers and knows he's alone."
Lately, I've been negligent in my attendance at social functions. But I do read the paper most weeks, so I know there's a birthday party and art opening at the art center, and a music bash at the rodeo grounds, and fair starts Sunday with first the dogs and then the horses and then the fat stock and land products. And there's a geology presentation on Tuesday and an entomology presentation on Thursday and there's lots of people going out to the woods to pick huckleberries in their secret huckleberry picking patches. And I know I won't go to any of it.
Sometimes it's hard to describe the melancholy part of being in love with land that we'll never own. The other day a line in the poem How Heavy the Glass from Cameron Scott gave me pause, "My greatest possession: this animated world." There is that word, possession, which once meant occupancy and later, to have control over, as in things we dominate. The rangeland that I love I have no desire to dominate. And no one can really control it. But there is another meaning that appeals to me. To possess, to maintain within oneself.
To carry inside me some presence of what lies below and upon and above, what grows and births and dies, what lingers and what expires. A grain of sand, a column of basalt. A mariposa lily. A vesper sparrow. These I would like to possess and be possessed by.
"Life is so rare, but persistent out there, the prairie is open and true, we make a small mark, then fade in the dark, that's how it is on the range."
From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef
