In honor of my husband, who has knocked the hide of all his knuckles fixing up the hay swather before putting it away for the winter, while simultaneously installing dry wall on the ceiling of our son's future bedroom BY HIMSELF. The man deserves a standing ovation, but we'll settle for a song from our amazingly talented neighbor just to the north of the border. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans:
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
The Curse of the Missing Man
Among the innumerable addendums to our old friend Murphy's
Law is one that reads: Whatever can go wrong will, as soon as your husband
leaves for a week.
I don't know about town women, but I guarantee all you ranch
wives know exactly what I'm talking about. Every horse on the place will be
sound and healthy as a…well...horse, until your husband's truck disappears over
the hill. Then one of them will immediately fall over and start kicking at its
belly. While you're leading the horse around for the nineteenth hour straight
per the vet's instructions to prevent the dreaded colic, one dog will jump up a
porcupine and get a face full of quills while the other gets hosed by a skunk,
and the wind will blow the satellite dish off the roof so the kid is whining louder
than either of them. Right then your husband will call and ask, "Hey, honey,
how's it going?"
And that's why we call it a Curse.
And that's why we call it a Curse.
The most recent incarnation was when my husband drove my car
out to South Dakota to visit his mother, leaving me his 'field pickup'. This is
shorthand for 'pickup consigned to the field because it's not safe at highway
speed'. I didn't notice the shimmy until I was almost to town. When I parked at
the office I saw a front tire was low, so I drove it straight to the tire shop.
Problem solved.
Not exactly. An hour later they called me over to take a
look at some big metal brace attached to the front tire and explained that it's
supposed to curve down, not up, and wow, they'd never seen one bent that bad. And
by the way your tire is shot, your spare is dicey and we don't have anything
for under a hundred and fifty bucks that will fit it. Then I wobbled almost home
(it was a lovely evening to hike that last mile after the dicey spare went
flat) and Dad asked if I could haul a couple of plastic water tanks up to the
horses and roping calves because the big stock tank had sprung a leak
overnight.
Yep, the Curse had struck again.
Yep, the Curse had struck again.
Vehicle wise, the worst case was in Oregon on a Memorial Day
weekend. My husband had barely cleared the state line when my pickup
overheated. I watched in dismay as the radiator puked the last of its contents
onto the pavement and a neighbor somberly informed me the water pump had gone
out. Know how many auto repair shops are open on the last Saturday in May?
Zero. That left me with nothing to drive that didn't run on hay, and I was entered
in a rodeo on Tuesday night in Caldwell, Idaho.
I hitched a ride to the nearest auto parts store, bought a water pump and a repair manual for a 1989 Dodge Ram and invested two and half days and all of hide on all of my knuckles doing what would have taken my husband one afternoon. By golly, though, I made it to Caldwell.
I hitched a ride to the nearest auto parts store, bought a water pump and a repair manual for a 1989 Dodge Ram and invested two and half days and all of hide on all of my knuckles doing what would have taken my husband one afternoon. By golly, though, I made it to Caldwell.
The next time he left it was the mainline to our community
water system that broke. I showered at the gym and hauled drinking and toilet water
for three days while they waited for a backhoe to come and dig up the line. A
backhoe just like the one my husband--had he only been around--could have
immediately borrowed from his boss, saving me from missing a single flush.
Curses, again.
Curses, again.
Then there was the evening I was home alone and heard weird,
moaning noises coming from the sagebrush on the other side of our horse pasture
and found a woman sitting there in the dirt, high as a kite, singing to the
birdies. I don't believe even my husband would have been much help with her. I
went ahead and called The Man.
I can't help but wonder: is there
also a Missing Woman Curse? Do things fall apart when I'm gone? I believe they
must. In fact, from the looks of the house, it appears the minute I leave the broom and the toilet brush both malfunction.
Curse them.
*
Sunday, September 16, 2012
When Ranchers Farm
There are two kinds of people who grow grain in Montana:
farmers, and ranchers who farm a little on the side. Farmers tally their
cropland in the thousands of acres. Ranchers have a piece here and a piece
there, wherever the grass wasn't too good to plow under and the ground wasn't
planted to hay to hold the cows over for winter.
A rancher and a farmer don't look a whole different. They’re
both probably wearing a gimmee cap from a local business and grease stains on
their jeans. The easiest way to tell the difference is to follow them to the
fertilizer store. If everyone drops what they're doing and trots over
to see what they need, they're a real farmer. If they're ignored except for a
hand slap when they reach for the coffee pot, they're probably a rancher.
Farmer's truck. |
A farmer's combines are huge, still shiny, with air
conditioning, stereo sound and a video monitor so they don't get a crick in
their neck keeping an eye on the moving parts behind them. They offload into a
grain cart big enough to hold half a granary's worth in one load. A rancher putts around the field in a combine the farmer traded in fifteen years ago, dumping into a truck that rolled off the assembly line back when Archie Bunker was the most shocking thing on television.
Rancher's truck. |
It's purely a matter of economics. Less acreage means less money to invest in equipment, so the rancher skims by on the bare minimum. His truck has both power steering and brakes, though not necessarily at the same time. Air conditioning? That's just crazy talk.
The farmer spends the winter lovingly tending his equipment, cleaning and tuning so it's in tip top shape and raring to go in the spring. Every hose
on his air seeder has been checked, the fittings secure, the electric motor
humming.
The rancher spends the winter lovingly tending his cows: hauling hay, busting open frozen water holes, and as winter turns to spring, calving. In the rare moments of down time he'd go ahead and tune up his
farm equipment but the feed tractor is taking up most of the space in his shop.
His seeder is in excellent shape, though, all of the fittings brand new thanks to the crazy Longhorn cow that
got out last fall, sprinted across the yard and tried to jump it to
make her escape, ripping out every single one of the two dozen air hoses and all the wiring on the motor in the process.
The farmer has a tractor equipped with a computerized GPS guidance system
that uses satellite triangulation to ensure his rows are perfectly straight and
every pellet of seed and fertilizer are ideally placed for maximum yield.
The rancher's tractor is guided by his wife or whichever of
his teenaged children is least proficient at making themselves scarce. The kids have a tendency to wander a
bit while driving, thus his grain rows have more of an ocean wave effect. With no electronic alarms to warn them, it's a given the tractor operator will fail to notice they've run out of seed
and will leave a big bare strip right alongside the road where the neighbors can
drive by and think, "Geez, ol' Bob's not much of a farmer."
Of course he's not. He's a rancher. But I bet the farmer's
daughter doesn't know how to repair a granary door with a used Kleenex, duct
tape and a busted fence post.
**Addendum: I wrote this article two weeks ago, for my regular newspaper column. Yesterday my husband attempted to haul a load of barley to the grain elevator in the 'new' truck. It started to pull to the right as he topped a hill on Meriwether Road (named after Mr. Lewis, who toured this area less extensively than he'd planned thanks to the Blackfeet). As he rolled down the other side, his momentum given a helpful boost by two and a half tons of grain, the right front tire went completely flat.
Times like this brakes sure would come in handy. As would a spare tire.
***Addendum to addendum: My husband and father would like to point out that it's not like they haven't tried to fix the brakes. They've even resorted to paying other people to try to fix the brakes. The things are remarkably immune to all attempts at repair. And yes, he did manage to get to the bottom of the hill in an upright position.
*
Monday, September 10, 2012
Coyote Sunset
It is a little known fact that coyotes can smell a video camera at five hundred paces. We've got scads of them and every evening they howl like crazy--until I try to record them. Part of the problem is they only sing for a minute or two then go dead silent, sometimes for the rest of the night. I finally outsmarted them, though, set up the camera well before sunset then walked away and left it running. Forty minutes of recording to get this thirty second serenade. So here you go, my local choir in full voice. (You will need to crank your volume to high. I also recommend removing all dogs from the room prior to hitting play.)
Saturday, September 01, 2012
The Trick to It
We don't own a lot of new stuff. Farm equipment, vehicles,
campers--pretty much everything has some miles on it by the time it comes into
our possession, and with the miles come a few quirks. Or as we like to call it,
personality.
Our pickup has oodles of personality. It was born in the era
when the ignition and the doors each had a designated key. For reasons known
only to Ford Motor Company, the door key is the one with the black plastic
casing--exactly the opposite of every other car we've owned. Even better, the
door key does fit into the ignition. Thanks to my brother we know it will even
start the pickup if you crank on it hard enough. After an hour of crawling
around checking fuses and wires, he called to ask us the trick to getting the
gages and lights to work.
Well, first you use the right key…
Then you mash the clutch clear to the floor. Or maybe stomp
is a better term. As in so hard the floorboard bows out little. Only then will
the ignition engage. Usually.
And there's the backup fuel tank. It has a tube that's
supposed to vent air to make room for the fuel as it runs in. Except sometimes
the vent tube gets vapor-locked and five gallons into the eighteen gallon tank
it suddenly belches diesel, usually all over the poor slob trying to fill it
up. Then it refuses to take another drop. Which means instead of thirty plus
gallons, you're heading out across the wasteland of eastern Montana with half
that much, praying Ingomar has installed twenty four hour CardTrol pumps since
the last time you passed through.
Worse, you assume because your husband fueled up the truck
at the ranch you actually have enough in the second tank to get across that
stretch from Browning to Hungry Horse in January when everything between is buttoned
up tight for the winter. Depending on the mood the pickup is in that day, you
could be right. Or not. The trick is to check both tanks every time you climb
behind the wheel.
There's more, but I think I've made my point. Of everything
we own, though, the most quirky is the only one we got brand new--our child. When
he was four, he spent a couple of days with my sister. On the second night she
called at midnight, frantic. He was in excruciating pain, wailing that he had a
headache. Should she take him to the emergency room? Oh my God, he might have meningitis. Or an aneurysm. What
if he was having an aneurysm?
I told her to put him on the phone. "Where does your
head hurt?" I asked.
"In my belly," he sobbed.
"Do you need to poop?" I asked.
"Maybe," he moaned.
I got my sister back on the phone and told her to take him
to the bathroom. Half an hour later she called to report his mysterious illness
had been, er, eliminated. She was relieved, but baffled. "How was I
supposed to know a headache meant his stomach hurt?"
I told her not to feel bad. Like my poor old pickup, kid ownership should come with a manual. There is definitely a trick to it.
*
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