DRY CRIK Journal

I had thought that day I started
when the summer sun used to break
in long white shards over the Sierras

to blind, spread and fall onto the Valley
floor, onto Uncle Lou’s Red Malagas:
translucent bunches hung from a canopy

of canes at first light like offerings
to deities to be picked, packed and hauled
to the shed for weeks – how glorious!

Dust subdued with dew, foreign smell
of sawdust on empty boxes nested in
tall water grass – I had a job with men

along the avenue bustling with lidding
lugs, loading and unloading trailers
towed by the faded gray and red Ford 8N.

One to a long row of intertwined vines,
a dozen women plucked raisins and birdpecks
before placing each bunch like fat soldiers

into the box. It was an art to tuck each
with shoulders up into a mounded ocean
of crimson berries, then press the last

row of generals in, green stems up for
unpacking somewhere East of the mountains.
Dad and Louie made a deal to hire me

to swamp full lugs out and empties in – at
the beckon of women deep in the field.
Just eleven, but old enough to earn

seventy-five cents an hour to order
and buy a twenty-gauge shotgun
from Sears & Roebuck through the mail.

Quite typical of the San Joaquin Valley culture after World War II, the heyday for family farmers producing 25% of the world’s produce, it was important to be a man – to have a job and earn a man’s wages, (though the going rate at the time was ninety cents an hour). Each with a few acres of Red Malagas, Dad and Louie paid me separately, insuring my gross wages per employer weren’t enough to have to take anything out of my check for Social Security (or to have to match it) and so the seventy-five cents was explained to me. Shrewd men, often not easy to work for, but it was a great time for a boy to expand his world. Though tempted to sell it a couple of times, I still have the shotgun.

Gray fog's moved-in with the dawn, 20% chance of rain.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Awoke this morning to two-tenths of an inch in the gauge. Though more than the five-hundredths I went to bed with, still not enough to start the grass. With low clouds cloaking the foothills most of the day, I harbored a hope for an afternoon thundershower.
No such luck!

Next chance next Wednesday – 20% according to the professional prognosticators.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I grew up with Hereford cows. Today 90% are black, predominantly Angus with a ‘tick of ear’ from leaner years. In that evolution, we’ve always had a Hereford bull or two around and Robbin and I have increased their numbers lately. Once in awhile the genetics line-up to get a straight Hereford-looking calf out of a black cow. The purpose of cross-breeding is to develop heterosis or hybrid vigor in your calves and perhaps add a few pounds in the process.

Just out of college, I thought my father may have been exaggerating when he said it took a lifetime to develop a herd of cows. Breeding is an aspect of it, but at the time I didn’t realize that it took awhile for cattle to acclimate to a place, to its feed, terrain, predators and weather; I didn’t realize there was more than just getting your calves on the ground in time for California’s winter grass. And very much like developing an individual life, what we learn from our mistakes influences the direction of our future decisions. In that sense, of course, one’s never done.

Weather's changed!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Shortly after responding to Sharon O’Toole’s comment to my September 22nd post below, I realized just how ambiguous ‘boys without authority’ sounded. Mulling it over since, I offer the following:

I remember the exhilarating feeling of leaving the house as a boy with a .22 rifle in hand, visually plotting various routes over foothill cowtrails to the near ridge and into the next watershed. Whether after school or an all-day, weekend adventure, I went alone but had to be home before dark.

At an early age I was my own man, free to roam unsupervised under the auspices of shooting ground squirrels, but more often than not I’d return with rattles or a snakeskin that I’d shot along the way. Worried and chagrinned, my mother understood them as a measure of my impending manhood. By September of my twelfth summer, I had killed twice as many rattlesnakes that year as any man on the ranch.

Years later reading Gary Snyder’s “The Incredible Survival of the Coyote,” it was not difficult to place myself within the ‘heroic and epic West’ played-out as a boy away from home and the influence of my parents – “…beyond the reach of the law, which is to say the Nation State patriarchal figure archetype,” Snyder goes on to say, “the West is psychologically occupied by boys without fathers and mothers, who are really free to get away with things for a while, and that’s why there’s so much humor and lore in the West.”

In retrospect, it is not surprising that I created my own myths early-on, trailed by buzzards and watched by hawks, I garnered a natural ethic as I got in touch with a wilder world, ‘grandfather’ oaks acting as my conscience. It was indeed another dimension, my reward beyond my chores and homework, and from this I attribute my early sense of place.

Much later during the ‘90s while fighting a rock and gravel operation within the channel of Dry Creek, I was dismayed by the ‘outlaw’ behavior of the operators and lax enforcement by the County as I watched the microcosmic exploitation of California, and the West, unfold before me. As they changed the landscape, I realized that some of my personal stories were triggered by certain trees, certain landmarks, and once removed, so too were my memories. It cut me deeply.

Unfortunately for many today, the icon of the cowboy unjustly represents this irresponsible mindset of the West. And as we in this cattle culture face public and political pressure for more accountability, i.e. the National Animal Identification System, any reluctance to comply merely reinforces their misconceptions. Furthermore, we have failed to tell our story – we have failed to communicate beyond the meaningless political divisiveness that infects much of this country.

Only now, on the shorter end of my string, do I realize that the political aspects of nearly every issue are simple-minded diversions enhanced by the media to keep people from thinking, on-going dramas that tend to desensitize us to real issues at hand. Somehow, to get beyond this ‘non-sense,’ we Westerners need to get back in touch with our nature, both wild and human, to relocate that sense once common to us all.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)