Monthly Archives: April 2022

Spring calving in April storms

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The sun is shining this morning after another really tough weekend of weather. A storm rolled in on Friday that started with rain, turned to ice and then into over a foot of more snow blowing sideways in up to 65 MPH winds throughout Saturday and into Sunday afternoon. This one was just as hard or harder on our herd because, number one, wet and freezing weather is tough tough tough on livestock, especially newborn calves. Number two, we are full-on calving now, and number three, we lost power on Saturday around 3:30 pm and didn’t get it back until around 6:30 pm on Sunday.

On Saturday afternoon, right before we lost power, the guys pulled four soaked, shaking and newborn calves in from the storm to save them and our entryway turned into a bovine nursery, complete with all four little girls helping to dry them, warm them and get them to eat if we could.

My sister sat with the newest calf on her lap, scrubbing him with towels, drying him, and asking him to hang in there. We tried the last ditch resort of tubing electrolytes, but he didn’t make it another 20 minutes. The girls were heartbroken and so we sat on the steps a while, working it out with them as they wiped tears and I worried that he might not be the only one in our entryway with such a fate.

My sister and I hang on to memories like this one of being kids during calving season. The excitement of bringing the calves inside always held with it a bit of anxiety knowing that they were there with us because something wasn’t going right. So that’s the lesson I tried to give the girls, that nature can be cruel, and we’re there to be caretakers, doing the best we can. But sometimes it doesn’t work. And so we move on to the next thing we can do. I don’t think they’re too young to learn about life and death and how to care for helpless things. It’s not too early to learn how fragile it can all be and what a big job it is to be responsible for these animals.

I don’t want to be dramatic, but my sister and I cried a bit too about that calf. We were hoping for a victory, we’ve seen calves come back from similar situations, but it was a tough day to be born. So we focused our attention on tiny #4, the one the girls named Strawberry, who wouldn’t stand up or take a drink. The next morning, after a fair amount of patience, I finally got her to drink an entire bottle. This morning she was bawling for it and I got my victory there. Funny how you can be so proud of a calf. The guys loaded all three of those calves into the backseat of the pickup to graduate them to the barn and that right there is why everything we own out here is covered in some amount of poop.

Today the guys are counting the calves and pairing them with the cows who get mixed up during stressful times like this. When we woke up on Sunday morning all of us were a little unsure of what we’d find down in the trees, but these cattle are tough, and so are their babies and as soon as the sun started to peek out from behind the clouds, there were calves running and bucking and perking right up. I can’t believe it. Nature is cruel, but instinct and being bred for heartiness plays a part in the equation and those two things didn’t disappoint us in our herd. Neither did the natural protection of the trees and all of the family around us helping take care.

Anyway, there’s so much to reflect on, and so many lessons my husband and I have learned about how we could be better prepared for next time, and so we put that in our pockets and in our plans and keep digging out. Under these snowbanks is green green grass and we’re lucky to have them honestly. Some ranchers further west would certainly pay a price for this kind of moisture.

Below is last week’s column on how we dug out from the last blizzard, unaware what was still lurking in those clouds!!

Spring calving and April blizzards

The epic April blizzard during Easter weekend dumped at least 20 inches of snow on the hills and valleys of the ranch. The moisture was much-needed, but this storm was one for the record books, bringing with it whipping winds, blinding snow and drifts up to10 feet tall in some places.

We hadn’t “officially” begun to calve, but we had three early babies on the ground when the snow started falling in sideways sheets, inch upon inch creeping up as a dramatic drift outside our living room door. We measured our daughters against it, and soon they couldn’t compete, marveling at how the snow almost topped our doorway, blocking out the view and any chance to get to the grill for a spring cookout.

So many families across the state were doing the same thing, pressing their faces against the window and wondering if it was ever going to stop, likely worrying about something out there.

Here we were worrying about our livestock and hoping the momma cows would hold on to their babies just a few more days, the way we planned. My dad and husband took to a routine of going out together, one in each tractor, to move whatever snow was possible around in the protection of the trees, to check on the animals and to bring hay for feed and bedding during the storm.

There were times the men couldn’t see a foot in front of the tractor and it was dangerous even with the good equipment, but they had equipment and so they were thankful. It would have felt impossible for my dad all those years ago when he was on his own with the 1970s 1086 International. These days we have three families living at the ranch, which makes tackling the brunt of these things a little more bearable in lessening the load and, maybe equally important, keeping company.

The storm was particularly bad on that Wednesday evening and didn’t let up much for us on Thursday when my dad’s impeccable timing found him out checking the herd just as a momma was pushing a calf into the world. Had he been a little earlier or a little later, he might have missed the chance to load all 80-some pounds of baby bovine into the cab of the tractor and bring him inside for a chance to dry off, warm up and get a better start at life.

I made a spot in our entryway for the calf to spend the night and the girls gave him the welcome he deserved, helping me scrub him down with dry towels and taking it a few steps further (of course) by changing into their cowgirl outfits, wrapping him up in a quilt, laying down next to him and naming him Kevin.

And this is why every rancher, in my opinion, needs a daughter, even though it’s hard to explain to them that the goal is not for that calf to stay in the house with us forever.

No, it’s always the goal to get him back to his momma, and that’s what we did the next morning after filling him full of milk-replacer and getting him up to take a few laps around the mudroom among our boots, coveralls, backpacks, vet supplies, sunglasses and, of course, a doll or two. So perfectly out of place, that baby.

The next day, the sky cleared and the sun shone and across the state the doors flew open on houses where the kids were cooped up and they got busy building snow forts and snowmen under a confusing sun that seemed too warm for only 20 degrees and stayed up too long for winter. The bigger ranch kids helped dig out and keep watch and feed and ride along… what time was it anyway? What day?

We made our way to dig my little sister’s family out of the 8-foot drift over her house and the one surrounding her new chicken coop and we lingered around the kitchen island, drinking coffee and saying things like, “Isn’t this just crazy?”

And then it was Easter and it was snowing again, so I made caramel rolls and ham and roast and beans and we took our time making a bunny cake and skipped the fancy dresses, keeping close to home as more snow fell and more momma cows threatened to give birth.

We’re in the full swing of it now, baby calves born into a white, slushy spring, and we will have our hands full in the next few weeks keeping them out of those melty snowbanks. I just talked to my husband and it sounds like we have another baby bovine house guest warming up and drying off. He’s hopeful he can save him.

Today, the sun is shining and the wind is blowing the hilltops clear for the deer and the turkeys, the horses and the cattle. When it’s warmed up enough to melt the drifts, we’ll climb up there and poke around for wildflowers and green grass, but it looks like it might storm again at the end of the week so we’ll take it day by day, grateful for the moisture, but worried anyway.

And this is ranching in North Dakota. This is spring…

A spring blizzard at the height of calving…

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I wrote this column last week as a big April snow storm was brewing and preparing to dump almost 20 inches of snow on the hills and valleys of the ranch. Today was the first trip I took to town since Tuesday. The moisture was much needed, but this storm was one for the record books bringing with it whipping winds, blinding snow and drifts up to10 feet tall in some places. We had just begun to calve, with three on the ground and one that we know of born in the blizzard. The guys took both tractors out to check and bring hay for feed and bedding during the storm, a task that wouldn’t have been possible without the adequate equipment. This little calf was lucky dad caught him being born as there was nothing the momma could do to dry him off. So I made a spot in our entryway for the calf to spend the night and the girls scrubbed him down with dry towels, wrapped him up and named him Kevin. Luckily we were able to bring him back to his mom the next morning and all looks well.

Easter Sunday was quiet and we entertained the family living here on the ranch with caramel rolls and ham and roast and beans and a bunny cake, keeping close to home as more snow fell and more momma cows threatened to give birth.

We’re in the full swing of calving as of last night. Three more born in the trees on the hay, surrounded by cliffs of snow. What a difference that extra time made for us, as some of our neighbors had a completely different storm experience, working tirelessly to save calf after calf dropped in a storm like we haven’t seen for years.

And today the sun is shining and we made it to school, although we were a little late of course. It looks like it might storm again at the end of the week and this is ranching in North Dakota. This is spring…

A spring storm during the height of calving season
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As I type this column, the snow is whipping sideways outside of the windows and across the Plains. It’s mid-April and we’ve just started calving, three calves on the ground and the rest safe and sound in their mommas’ bellies as we feed extra hay in a low and protected spot on the ranch, waiting, watching and wondering how it will all shake out, this wild weather they’re predicting for us.

By the time you read this, we will know how we all fared. We need the moisture desperately, but this is not the ideal time to be born.

A drought is ended by a calf-killing blizzard. It sounds rough, harsh, but this is the part of agriculture, of ranching, of cowboying that isn’t glamorous. They don’t put the cowboy in a Scotch cap and Carhartts digging a half-frozen newborn calf out of a snowbank on the postcards they sell you in the gift shop in Montana. It doesn’t make a beautiful oil painting, but so often out here there’s more to the drama than the lovely sunset.

Without rain, we have no grass. Without grass, we sell the whole herd. Without the herd, the story changes. Dramatically. That doesn’t make a good inspirational quote.

But it’s reality. This spring storm during the height of calving is the definition of gratefulness and fear walking hand in hand with us as we take another loop around the pasture in the feed pickup, unroll another bale, make sure we have the entryway and barn and milk replacer and extra fuel and tractor ready to help fend off the worst of it the best we can.

It’s the story my dad holds like a lump in his throat, the hot summer of scours that took nearly 90% of their calf crop. His father was fresh from a battle with cancer, feeble and shell-shocked, and my parents, they were hanging on to a dream that was literally dying right before their eyes.

In a particularly desperate moment, one where my dad, as a young man, helped his father work on another unresponsive calf, he offered that it might be time to give up. And his dad looked him in the face right then and said plain and stern, unflinching against the despair, “You CAN’T. You CAN’T just give up.”

My dad tells it, still humbled after all these years, and that lump appears in my throat, too. Maybe we were born with it there, waiting to remind us of the weight of the responsibility that grazes on our summer pastures, bunches up together in fence corners against the wind, rides her pony out in the round pen and runs wide open down the scoria road. Maybe we were all born with it there to remind us how fragile it is really, how small we can become in the scheme of it.

My parents, not yet in the middle of their 30s, packed up the little they had in that old trailer house and their two young daughters and left the ranch that summer, not knowing if or how they might ever return, how they might ever make it work. I was just about to turn 2 years old.

That lump, it’s in every rancher and farmer’s throat, or it’s a tightening in her chest, or the thing that wakes him in the early hours of the morning before the birds and the sun. The bad winter. The drought years. The hailstorm that wiped them out. The scours. The day he had to sell it all. The calf-killing storm.

But agriculturalists, we don’t hold the patent on hard times. And the weather, no matter how extreme, it’s never unexpected. We’re never surprised, we know how to batten down the hatches. And we know the stakes.

We keep them tucked up under our hats or in the pocket of our shirt, the one under the jacket and the wool vest and the winter coat, the one closest to the hearts that we carry out into the blinding, whipping wind, knowing when we get through this, the white will make the grass grow greener and that will be something to put on a postcard. That is your inspirational quote.

Under the early morning sun…

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Mornings come early for my family during the work and school week — that’s the thing about living so far from the edges of town.

At 6 a.m., the house is dark and quiet and as sleepy as we are, when just hours before it was buzzing and humming and squealing with the negotiation and untimely roughhouse play that dads always bring to the bedtime routine. I remember it from my childhood, too, my dad teaching us to properly make a fist, our spindly arms swinging at him, trying to tackle him to the ground, to show him our muscles while he did things like put one big hand on my forehead, the other on my little sister’s, and we clenched our jaws then laughed and giggled and swung our arms into the air between us.

And there were a hundred other games we made up on the brown shag carpet of the living room, tumbling and jumping, growling and squealing like wild little bear cubs ripe to learn our lessons, doing anything we could to avoid the teeth-brushing portion of the night that led to bedtime. My mom would look over from cleaning up the supper dishes or sweeping the floor to suggest that we “Be careful now. Careful! Someone’s going to get hurt.”

Because someone usually got hurt, even though we tried our best not to admit it.

I hear her voice come out of my mouth now as I watch my own children launch their bodies from the couch and onto their dad’s back while he bucks and kicks and tries to dump them off. They use my throw pillows as weapons, they team up to distract him and execute an attack, they holler and whoop and laugh hysterically, golden hair strung out of their ponytails, cheeks flushed as they dangle from each of his arms, arms that seem made for this sort of thing, cut into shape from years of swinging hammers and hauling Sheetrock, sanding oak smooth and digging in fence posts. They ask him to show them his muscles and he puffs up his chest, rolling up his sleeves for his audience. They do the same, just like we used to do, my sister and I. Then they launch another attack to put those muscles to use.

“Careful now. Careful now girls. It’s almost bedtime. Five more minutes…”

I say this and so you might not believe that my husband is the more cautious of the two of us when it comes to our young children and their play. Knowing the guy since childhood, I guess I understand it. I never pushed my body’s limits the way he pushed the limits of his, driving his three-wheeler too fast over prairie trails, finding the highest cliff from which to jump into the lake, wrestling and playing football, peddling his bike off ramps that just got higher; broken ribs, broken shoulder blade, broken collarbone. A fish hook under his fingernail.

I suppose I can relate, having spent plenty of my youth in a cast, but my circumstances always felt more like bad luck and clumsiness to me. I always thought his scars screamed wild boyhood. I think back on it and the only difference I see now is that the hurt made me more afraid. It just made him want to try again.

I watch our daughters run wide open down the scoria road in their cowboy boots and I can almost feel the rocks scrape and dig into my bare knees. He sees them climb a thing they’re not ready to climb and he moves to help make them stronger. He shows them how to tighten their grip. How to clench a fist. How to bend their knees at the drop. I yell, “Careful!” He shows them how.

I pull my 6-year-old out of our bed, untangling her long, skinny legs from her little sister’s. They both found their way to us in the middle of the night and curled their bodies up in the space between us to ward off bad dreams. It’s my job now to wake us all up. It’s so early, but it’s time.

It’s his job to make them breakfast. It’s my job to fix their hair. It’s his job to make sure their teeth are brushed. It’s my job to drive them to school. It’s his job to pack the snacks, and on and on, step by muddy puddle jump — we make a mess and clean it up and find our way together under this sun, no matter how early it rises…

Spring cleaning gives time to reflect

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My sister’s husband is working on building a chicken coop today and so my niece, Ada, spent our ride to town telling me how many chickens she’s going to get.

Sounds like hundreds. And I’m thrilled for them. Because it means that I don’t have to get chickens ever in my life. It’s kinda like the boat thing, you know, the only thing better than having a boat is having a best friend with a boat. That’s what I think about chickens. Eggs for days and no poop to scoop. I’ll save us all the cartons.

Building something like a chicken coop is a typical spring task at the ranch. The sun warms the ground and we’re ready to head outside to thaw out all of those ideas we conjured up while eating carbs and pulling our beanies down over our ears. But it also means cleaning. Oh, the cleaning. I’m always amazed by the amount of mud, random screws, mismatched gloves, beanies, boots, neckerchiefs, and, because my husband’s a carpenter, random electrical wires, plumbing parts, tools and hardware store receipts that accumulate in our entryway over the winter. I spent all morning Sunday trying to arrange it all so I could mop. And by the time I got to the mopping part, the kids had come in and out of that door 37 times, dragging more mud and dolls and winter clothes and random twigs with them.

My daughters were busy driving their kids to Hawaii in the little hand-me-down electric car that always gets stuck in the scoria halfway up the driveway. And the disagreement about who’s turn it is to push and whose turn it is to drive derails the game for a spell, although it does make it a bit more realistic. Adulting comes with all sorts of obstacles and predicaments. Like making the choice between spring cleaning and pouring a Sunday margarita….

Most of the time, I chose both. I’ve always been good at multitasking.

Anyway, the mess here is endless, between the ranch and the garage and the house and the yard, I’m fully committed to the idea that I’ll never catch up. And I know I’m not alone in it overwhelming me sometimes. If I dedicated every minute of my waking life to trying to control it, I still don’t believe I’d fully dig us out. Because, we just go on living, don’t we? Do the dishes and your husband comes in to make a sandwich. Clear the kitchen table of Play Dough to turn around to the kids making Barbie Doll phones out of tin foil and puffy paint. Get to the bottom of the laundry hamper and you’re still wearing clothes, aren’t you? Fix the fence and watch a bull jump right through it. Living’s messy. It requires lots of chores…

Last weekend my husband was also committed to clearing some clutter, so we were, as we usually are on the weekends, busy bopping around the place to see what tasks we can get checked off the list. This leaves the kids within earshot, but to their own devices, with a few tattle tale moments, skinned knees or request to help push the blue car out of the ditch sprinkled in. I stood in the driveway procrastinating sorting 1,000 gloves and watched as my daughters pretended to be mothers riding their bikes and changing diapers and, as I said, making plans to head to Hawaii.

And then I had a flashback of when they were smaller, just a few short years ago, at age 1 and 3, then 2 and 4, when my children required so much more out of me in the entertainment department—to peek-a-boo, to pour the paint, to rattle the rattle or build the blocks.

Now look at them, they’re in the sweet spot of sisterhood and childhood and play, immersed together in a world of their own creation. Rosie stopped her bike/car and her eyes caught mine, “Mooommmmaaa, you can go now! You don’t need to watch…”

And so this is the phase we’re in. Maybe I’ll get a duck or something and add it to my sister’s coop. It seems, with my kids in Hawaii, I might need something new to fuss over this summer, because I’m already sick of cleaning…