DRY CRIK Journal: May 2008 Archives

Late May Rain

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.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Strange Weather, Broken Collarbone

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.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

ODE TO MRS. HORSE

            the cow that died to give its hide
            to make you look so shiny...
                                                - Ed Brown

And you did, the sheen of your synthetic
leather-looking top gathered tastefully
below a deep crevasse of tanned flesh,

Ed’s blue ballpoint upon a napkin cloth
in the half-lit darkness of the White Horse
bar, on a roll after dinner and a reading –

the complete poem framed on the wall
reminds you of that evening twenty-five
years ago: cowboys come to entertain

when were young-enough to be irreverent,
but with scars-enough to know better.
A crossfire of fresh rhymes ricocheted

around the room, as around the West
in those days, but Ed had the pen
and final say as to what went down.

for Jeanie White

Parallel retrospectives in the rain, Elko’s 25th and where Robbin and I were twenty-five years ago…a pensive day.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MOWING DREAMS

I’ve wanted to be a tractor driving man
since I was six – wear an engineer’s gray
and white, striped cap and be someone

who could get the job done. I helped
put this pasture in right after the Feds
condemned the top fifteen feet of clay

for the earthen core of Terminus Dam –
right after a summer of lifting rocks
into the ’42 dump truck, flathead Ford.

Took thirty years of water and cattle
to make topsoil again –I cut deep swaths
across it, riding high atop the diesel’s

steady monotone. Each new round leaps
into the headed rye to fix upon a fencepost
or notch between oaks, holding my thoughts

in a straight line. I feel my father grinning
in the middle of this green mowed field –
keeping me busy at sixty still on the ranch.

Very near to weaning, it’s been over a 100 degrees these past few days as we finish-up cross-fencing the irrigated pasture where we’ll background our calves with a regime of vaccinations before we sell them. As an experiment, I’ve decided to mow the pasture, hoping to keep the tall grass and seeds out of their eyes and thereby reduce doctoring for pinkeye. The flies are horrible – worst I’ve seen in decades. I think the mowing will also help the pasture.

I borrowed a wheel tractor and rented a mower and found a few rocks that we missed in 1961, (or that have worked their way up to the surface since). From the summer 1991 issue of Dry Crik Review, Jim ‘Tex’ Raths’ poem, “John Deere Dreaming” also came to mind more than once. But our country is not the smooth sandy loam of the Valley, and as with most tractor-driving endeavors here, used farm machinery succumbs to our harsher elements. Half-way done, I’ve got a rental tractor coming while we try to fix what’s wrong with my neighbor’s machine.

5.21 We start weaning the first bunch this a.m. - Still editing the poem online, adding a stanza and changing the last line slightly. High temperatures forecast down into the 70s through the weekend with a chance of T-showers. Crazy weather!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)