You can't go wrong with a St Patrick's Day pie. Especially if it is from the fruit you picked last year and froze and it's mulberry, blackberry, blackcherry. Especially if it is for your 40th wedding anniversary. That's B for berry.
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| 40 year anniversary pie |
It's hard to believe we've been partners for 43 years. The first three years, while dating, we were mostly far apart, sometimes on different continents. Alaska, Germany, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Yukon Territory. When we finally decided to get married and go to work on a ranch, we thought we might be spending more time together.
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| Bridge railing supplies |
We soon found that ranch work involves long distances and often long separations. I've always loved working with Mike, even though sometimes we 'disagree' on how to get things done. He decides. I consider. Then we negotiate. About half the time we come up with the same solution. The other half of the time I'm right, or he is. Either way the jobs get done, or they don't, but we try hard and mostly we do good work. Together.
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Gabe and Mike install railing on new bridge
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Sometimes when Mike worked for McClarans, if we wanted to spend a night together we had to sleep in the old travel trailer at the heifer lot on Cow Creek. All four of us. Mike and I bunked on the bottom and the two kids bunked on top, about 18 inches over our heads. This was BZ. Before Zeke.
Our home place back then was at Brown Canyon near Imnaha. Mike only got one day off every few weeks and most of that was spent driving back from Cow Creek, doing laundry and fixing stuff. You can see why I thought the heifer lot was better than nothing.
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| Don't fall in the river Mike! |
Gabe and Prairie had a blast getting into stuff, helping chore, 'driving' the truck. I think they were three and four. It was the same year Grey Ghost, a McClaran pack horse, went berserk packing fence material. She bucked off her pack and ran all the way back to Cow Creek, where she jumped off a little rim, knocked open a swinging gate by the yard, gathered up the saddle stock and ran them into the pasture where the kids and I were walking back to the house. The horses thundered towards us with Prairie obliviously running ahead of me to 'win the race.' I yelled at her and she stopped and saw the horses. Maybe she was petrified, but she stood stock still while the running horses parted around her like a river around a rock. Scared the beejeezus out me, but I learned something. A horse isn't likely to run over you if they can avoid it.
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| Abby 2 1/2, looking like a little Mongolian |
Just like Prairie did, Abby sometimes wears attire that I concoct from whatever is on hand. I made Prairie overalls and dresses on my beloved treadle sewing machine, using fabric cut from old garments, curtains or tablecloths. Sometimes I got wool at the mill in Pendleton. With Abby, it's mostly my vests, when she forgets her coat at the house and the wind comes up when we're choring or fishing. It's not quite in keeping with her fashion standards (she takes after Cammie), but she tolerates it.
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| Cammie and Abigail on the way to Witch's Hat |
McClaran's are celebrating 100 years on their ranch this year. Sometimes when I meet Scott on the river road and we stop for a chat with our windows down, we talk about all the changes we've seen over the decades. The people who've come and gone. The people we miss. And sometimes we marvel at the fact that of all the people who have come and gone, we're the ones still here following the cattle, riding the range, packing salt, driving bad roads.
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| Skinny cow that tried to take Sara down |
There's a saying that there are only two kinds of cowboy poetry. The kind where somebody dies, which is tragedy. And the kind where they survive, which is comedy. So I guess it was comedy when a cow almost gored me back in March It was right after Snowmageddon and she was so poor I could count her ribs. We kept her in when the other cows trailed back to the bench so we could feed her hay by the box elder grove. I was hauling a couple buckets of water for her from the river and I looked up to see the 'feeble' cow jumping over her pile of hay and coming at me like a freight train, head down, horns forward.
I dropped one of the buckets and backpedaled as fast as I could over the hummocky hard ground, yodeling for Mike, who was somewhere behind me at the truck. "Drop the bucket and run!" he shouted. But I couldn't. The bucket was the only thing between me and the cow and she was already butting it. Right when I started to stumble, I heard Mike come up behind me with a stockwhip and the cow reversed gears. I dropped the bucket and turned around, wobbling my way to the truck. For days, I cringed every time I thought of those pitchfork horns just wide enough to fit one on either side of me as long as I stayed on my feet. Every time Mike thought about it he laughed.
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| Weston made it to the top! |
That's the nature of a good partnership, reliability. If you add up all the disappointments and the disagreements and the misunderstandings and the frustrations, they still don't amount to near as much as the times you saved each others' lives, which in the ranching business seems to happen more often than usual.
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| Mid March and still snowing |
And even if all you need is moral support, you can count on a partner to share the load. Whether it's bad storms, a sick horse, a brokedown truck, climate change or social upheaval, when you're the one down, your partner helps you see the future with a little more acceptance, a little more gentleness. And when they're in a dark mind, you take your turn to paint a picture of good things that might come again.
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| Hallelujah! The grass is growing at the end of March! |
And so green finally came to the canyon again, transforming in its magical way the hungry bodies of ruminants. And I'm thankful for all the animals who can rise up on this nutritious food, and for the power of spring to rejuvenate us in this corner of the world. And I think of the people who have lived here for thousands of years, and the ones who have been here just a hundred years, or maybe even just forty.
From Sara at Magpie Ranch, home of Bunchgrass Beef
