Sunday, September 30, 2012

Hard on Equipment

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 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.  

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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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. 

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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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