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OM AH HUM
ON THE RANGE
Richard Denner Photography: Howard Rigley
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Om ky yi yippi, can a beatnik be a cowboy? and how. "Cattlecountry, Love It Or Leave It!" 800 acres with a section under irrigation. 300 head of cows with calves rotating over four fields. Cheri and Theo and I pack our household and head for the prairie. We are accomodated in a two-story Tudor style stucco house with a view of Mount Rainier's sunrise side. The boss just bought 10 head of Hereford cows with a duke's mix of calves. The squeeze shute is disfunctional, so we rope and wrestle the calves for branding. Diamond Hanging J Floating I. I pick out a green-broke part quarterhorse, part thoroughbred mare, who twists like a snake in hot water. She picks up cow savy pronto. The land is irrigated from canals built during the 1930's Land Reclaimation Project. Water flows out of Lake Keechelus in the Cascades Mountains near Snoqualamie Pass. The head ditch circles the Kittitas Valley and supplies small, single family ranches. A hundred head of cows, a crop of timothy hay or silage corn, fancy horses, beet farms and vineyards. This is the old Ingersol Ranch at the far end of 4th Parallel Road in Badger Pocket.
It is laid out with four forty-acre fenced fields under irrigation and 600 acres east of the ditch - rangeland, greasewood, rattlesnakes, coyotes, chuckers and badgers. Never hem in a badger. I remember, during the Watergate Era, Nixon said, "I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." This is as clear as it gets. Setting water here is a different matter. The water district allocates a certain amount to each ranch based on senority, need, and the supply in the reservoir. A ditch rider drives the road to check that the flow is set at the right mark. Woe to him who rustles a little water, he'll find a padlock on his watergate. So I push my water. I keep the cowpies out of the corrigation. I spread it out. Run it up hill if I can. Get the ground soaked without letting it run into the neighbor's field. There's an art to this. My neighbor, Glen, gives me pointers. We walk the pastures, and he points out difficult features in the lay of the land. There's always fine tuning can be done, but mainly it's a matter of covering the ground, getting the ground wet, and moving the water to the next parcel. And the cattle eat the grass, and by the time they are finished in one field, hopefully the next field is ready for them.
After the herd has been rounded up and brought in from the outback, they are deliced, tagged, dehorned, given shots, a shave and a shine. Then they are ready for the green pastures. The Taittiriya Upanishad sustains me: "I am that food which eats the eater of food." Count the stock. And again. Still one heffer missing. Down by the west fence line, four legs stick out of a catch ditch. Eyes rolled back, nose bleeding, my presence adding to her fear. I dismount, tie my horse to a cottonwood branch and check out the situation. More than I'd want to rope and tie, I wrestle her to her feet. Moaning, she makes for the feed. She'll be alright, if she can walk and eat. Later, I tell Glen, and he guesses I was some kind of lucky. I see a hide on his fence. Says he's lost one. No sooner born, it coughed up its guts. So, he goes down to the "graveyard" and buys a new calf, one whose mother has a blown udder. Dress the new calf in the dead calf's coat. Cow takes it for her own--calf graft. "This morning," he says, "I smelt something dead in the barn. That skin rotting from the calf's heat."
SNAPSHOTS A sorrel gelding dreams, hind hoof cocked under an apple tree. Bright apples against the leaves. Unmoving and unmeaning, the scene's the same from field to field. Cows with necks to barbed wire reach for roadside weeds. A John Deere tractor lugs up the track. Met by an appaloosa with a girl in chaps, the ploughboy raises a finger to his cap. Eyes clouded, she smiles inwardly and trots past. A herd of Herefords steam and stamp. Chew their cuds and crap in place. Magpies pick the warm grain. The poem Diamond Hanging J Floating I Blues was first published in dPress chapbook, Scorpion, Berkeley, 1975, and later anthologized in Pacific Northwest Spiritual Poetry, 1998, Tsunami. Richard Denner is a Cowboy
Beatnik Poet. He can be contacted by e-mail at:
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