DRY CRIK Journal

Our friend Jess Cox and his wife stopped by with a bag full of cherries about the time I was digesting the transformation displayed online of the Battle Mountain Ranch (see May 19th entry). In recent years we have exchanged vegetables, fruit, jam and olives in season and Jess knows that I enjoy his practical perspective as well as the fresh produce. But when I blurted-out disconnected phrases about the things that disturbed me so about the New Battle Mountain, he just grinned and offered, “Don’t go back!”

What I heard unsaid was “don’t subject yourself to the turmoil, it’ll just make you miserable.” He was right, there was no changing the chateau-like landscaping in the middle of the Tule River’s scrub brush, the Zen temple, the impractical south-facing deck where an egg would fry in the summer, the disrespect for Native culture, etc., etc. It was more than just offensive to me.

Not unlike the sycamores on Dry Creek that were clear-cut for a rock and gravel operation in 1991, I was sick to my stomach. In both instances major changes were made by the owners of the property – and as a staunch advocate for private property rights, I shouldn’t have felt sickened.

Beyond politics, one disrespects a place out of ignorance or arrogance, and either way it seems that the lack of understanding about a place, how it works within a watershed and the larger surroundings, as well as its history, are at the root of my stomach problems. Recent clearing of heritage Valley Oaks in Three Rivers without a permit or consultation with the County, and even the orderly plans for an upscale town in the Yokohl Valley, fall into the same gut-wrenching category for me. Not looking for new crusades against growth and progress, I realize that my age is showing.

Whether documenting or writing, give the place you live a voice before it changes.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The threat of communism was not only a call to arms during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but it also kept corporate capitalism in check, geographically and philosophically.

As each piece of rotten economic news is revealed layer by layer, we’re terribly saddened by the lack of ethics that seems to have spoiled our prize onion on Wall Street. Peeling it back to find where the contamination ends has been a slow and agonizing process, so orchestrated, one assumes, to avoid a sudden, global monetary collapse – and perhaps to allow the better-informed to get out with their skins.

Blaming the young buck executives and high-paid CEOs may help illustrate unethical behavior, and blaming politicians and the SEC may help redefine their responsibility to the people, but I suspect, before these revelations are over, there will be more than enough blame for all of us. We let it happen. We were part of it.

We let ourselves believe in the purity of capitalism, its durability over communism, an icon that the world assumed would lead every nation to prosperity. But like any successful economic system, the potential for graft and greed flourishes if left unchecked – and as long as the machinery seems to be running well, no one bothers to look too closely.

We’ve had a pretty good run on credit and consumption for the past two or three decades, sharing corporate profits through 401Ks and IRAs, a perfect daisy chain where Everyman is a consumer, taxpayer and beneficiary of the State, but with the additional incentive to become a shareholder in Capitalism, or so we believed. Like buying a lottery ticket, the fortunes made during the dot.com and housing bubbles perpetuated ideals for success that no longer required long-term commitments to planning or work – that did not value a man’s reputation or word.

In this growing crisis, I would hope that we can get beyond the non-sequitur of the Democratic and Republican parties, that a sense of nationalism and respect for the working man, especially family farmers and ranchers, might unite us toward a more common good, a more responsible and substantive quality to life, perhaps even a legacy to be cherished by our grandchildren.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

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=

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:58 AM | 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 (2)