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For some
it comes down
like a sprinkle of rain
as if from heaven –
a slow soaker, shirt
matted to the flesh, that
bare-chested feeling
reborn again – even
spun in summer’s clutch
of dust and drought.
No urgency or rush
to that last embrace
when winter waits
for everyone, each
moment counts
like drops of rain.
Kaweah River as it enters the Valley
Robbin’s collarbone seems to be healing well. Shorthanded without her, and Chuck on another fire in Napa, Clarence and I have enlisted my son’s help. We’re tickled with his youthful humor.
The weather’s warmed into the 100s, shorthanded we continue to wean calves. Fires around the state this past week have pulled our right-hand man away from Dry Creek. Robbin’s collarbone is healing, which leaves the gathering, feeding and processing to Clarence and I, 10 years his junior. We’re plodding methodically towards an end that’s not yet in sight, but making progress.
Red-headed Decons
Yesterday, while fevered-up with some new foreign strain of the flu, I was nodding in and out of sleep as Errol Flynn played Custer on the Western Channel. “They Died With Their Boots On,” the 1941 version of George Armstrong Custer as a duty-bound hero who rode to the Little Big Horn apparently knowing that he and his men would not return. I thought of my friend Henry Real Bird and the Crows’ annual reenactment of that battle, the Canadian-Montanan phrase “the last-best west” and James Earle Fraser’s sculpture, “The End of the Trail” that slumped among Visalia’s Valley Oaks at Mooney’s Grove for 48 years.
But nothing like a fever to take you down a notch or two, or undermine delusions that we Americans have the inside track on good management decisions, both political and business, but Roger Cohen’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (June 2, 2008), “The World is Upside Down” is the ‘tailor bob,’ the end of the thread that most Americans cannot yet wrap their minds around. Link: (copy and paste)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/opinion/l02cohen.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=
With nearly an inch in the gauge at daylight, I can’t ever recall this much rain at the end of May. As low pressure circulates from Nevada’s Great Basin, rain has been sliding into the Central Valley and south along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range. Snow was forecast above 6,500 feet, but cloaked in clouds, we can only see the near hillsides below 1,000 feet this morning.
Though the temperature change is delightful, the impact of this much moisture will likely leach the nutrients from the dry feed that we’ve so judicious saved to get our cows through the coming fall. It may even start the grass again, however short lived in our typically 100-degree days this time of year.
In 1948, according to stories from my father, he had to ship his steers at the first of April after a dry spring following the drought year prior. But he shipped them in the rain, and it continued raining through May, germinating the grass again, green feed through June. This year’s weather has been strange and unusual, but not unprecedented for California where anything can happen. We’ll wait and see what tomorrow brings.
In this business, there’s nothing like an injury, and potential tragedy, to make one consider quietly retiring from this lifestyle in one piece. Unlike so many other professions where the workplace is predictably safe, there’s always that wild card when handling livestock.
Loading cows in less than ideal facilities, Robbin got crushed against the gooseneck and run over by a cow that had become suddenly snuffy. Ten times Robbin’s weight and on the move, we feel fortunate that the cow only broke her collarbone.
After two weeks of unseasonably warm weather followed by high winds, temperatures dropped into the low 70s last Thursday, but there was an electrical freshness in the air Friday morning as we gathered the cows to be hauled. Sorted afoot in the corrals, none of the cows had shown themselves as being the least bit agitated, but one of them jumped out of the gooseneck to the end of the short lane and back again to put two of us on the rickety fence. It all happened in a second or two. At the door of the gooseneck, Robbin couldn’t get away. Just to get to the asphalt on the way to the hospital, as in most rural parts of the West, can take a long time over rough dirt roads.
Midday today, it’s 57 degrees. It has been raining since four this morning, accumulating about .25” – our first rain since March 30th. If the rain continues tomorrow as forecast or evolves into afternoon thundershowers, it would do the dry feed we’ve saved more harm than good.
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