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Light and intermittent rains have kept the grass coming, though colder with frost and ice Friday morning. We’ve managed to brand some small bunches between storms since the last post, still only half-way done – the balance of the calves will be bigger than we prefer to mark them. As the “Rain Gauge” indicates in the sidebar, we’re behind on rainfall as well this year.
No other way to watch TV
after a long day’s friction –
joints giving to the gravity
of wear, but with Advil and
gin, there’s nothing left to do
except to conclude: there’s
little peace in the minds
of men and even less good
will to get the job done.
Home and decompressing from the Gathering in Elko, we have been waiting for a promised inch of rain for the past three days with less than a few hundredths to show as the series of storms in the Pacific begin to come onshore. So positive seemed weathermen that the branding scheduled for today was canceled two days ago at the Ainley Ranch in Elderwood – at daylight, though, it’s plenty dry enough to brand calves. More importantly, the third to a half-inch received the day we left for Nevada had returned our short gray slopes to green by the time we got home. With less than five inches for the season and about 25% of normal snowfall in the Sierras, everyone in Central California needs the rain whether they know it or not. And judging by what we saw driving through, whatever spills into the Great Basin won’t go to waste!
I continue to marvel at the friendships developed over the years (19) at Elko and that so many of these relationships center on poetry and music (of all things). Incongruous as it may seem for the generic image of ranch people, Elko has become the hub for creative expression for land-based people of the West, which with current technological advances, has effectively expanded to some very artful video presentations. When one considers that we treated the magic anomaly of the Gathering like a fragile artifact in the early years, it is apparent now that it has a vibrant life of its own. Credit is due the WFC directors and staff for their vision and implementation, to the artists for fresh expression and to the audiences traveling substantial distances to be an integral part of it.
But you can’t see it all. At the top of my list for what I missed was Andy Wilkinson’s “A Way in the West: Women on the American Frontier” performed by Trudy Fair at the Great Basin College. As we circumnavigated the back streets of Elko with Earl at the wheel of the shuttle, the twenty-minute, extemporaneous review of the play from a middle-aged female left me longing for a ticket. Congratulations, Andy – I just barely shook your hand.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, work waits as real life settles-in with the gray clouds in this canyon as it tries to rain.
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December 20, 2006
Sulfur
lettered
upon the roofless remains
of someone’s private dream.
Small, white-walled skeletons
open to the celestial, weathered
by wind, snow and rain, just
north of two rusty relics –
round-bodied pickups
nosing the placid surface
of white skiffs and sage,
rising out of the desert
like two brown trout
kissing.
for Jessie Smith
for showing me another way
home
The opinions expressed in the Western Folklife Center's Deep West online journals are those of the online journal participants and not the Western Folklife Center. The Western Folklife Center does not moderate these journals and as such does not guarantee the veracity, reliability or completeness of any information provided in the journals or in any hyperlink appearing within them.