When summer sets in out here among the clay buttes and tall grasses it’s like nothing else.
It’s like our world could not be further away from the one we know in the middle of January when the windswept snow drifts outside our door and the cold is so cold it actually hurts.
But in mid July the air swelters. It settles on the top of the water in our stock dams and grows creatures we haven’t seen for months. It pools up under our cowboy hats, drips down the back of our work shirts and moves with us in the slow motion effort we use to make it through the day.
The people and animals of the north were not meant for 90+ degree weather. We see it coming and run for a canopy of trees, find refuge inside the ice cold of a sparkling drink and on the other end of our lawn hoses. We watch our garden grow and wait for the sun to retreat to do the weeding or to check how the radishes are coming along.
We swat horseflies and search in our houses for the summer cutoffs we wear five times a year to sit by the fan and say “Geesh, it’s a hot one.”
Our skin turns from white to red to brown as the wild sunflowers growing in road ditches reach their petals toward the sky.
We know who we are here inside the smells, sounds and sites of a season we wait all year to indulge in. We know what it looks like and what it means.
It means foxtails sweeping and bending in the draws, horseflies biting at our necks, hard cracked earth and tall wild grass that scratches our bare legs.
It means sweaty brows and an alfalfa crop, a sky with no clouds in site and dust hanging in the air kicked up by neighbors and big trucks heading out somewhere.
Summer means rain puddles left in the sun to dry, dragonflies and pink sunsets and a sky twinkling so bright you can’t tell the difference between fireflies and stars.
And we hold this under our skin, the pieces of the hard dirt, the swish of a horse’s tail, the sweet smell of cattle and summer grass and the trails we wore down to dust, we keep this with us as we move through the season, grow tired of the heat and welcome the cool down.
And come January when the ground is white we will say to one another “Can you believe it was ever green out here?”
Then we will close our eyes and dream of a summer that held heat under our hats and sent it trickling down our backs.
We got drenched here yesterday. The morning brought us thunder against the glow of a sunrise trying to peek through the clouds and, well, it just escalated from there.
Around here we don’t get too many downpours like this. Typically we get our moisture in the spring and then watch the sky for a chance of showers to help soften the hard clay throughout the summer, so this day of gully-washing rain was a welcomed site for us.
And when I say gully-washing, I mean it. The coulees were flowing with raging river rapids, the corrals below the house turned into swimming pools, a new ravine was cut along the edge of my driveway and, well, I got myself a free pug wash. It’s days like these that make me feel like I’m in a different world altogether. The ten-year-old in me itches to run around in it, to let the rainwater soak in my hair and squish between the mud in my toes. But the logical grown-up in me decides it’s best not to get pneumonia, even though I’m fully convinced the pneumonia scare was a ploy by mothers and grandmothers everywhere in an effort to avoid soggy kids running into the house with a pile full of muddy laundry waiting to be stripped from their pruny bodies. But whether it was the threat of a sniffle or the scarier threat of more laundry that willed me to stay inside until the monsoon-like rains subsided, it doesn’t really matter. I was out in it at the first sign of let-up.
Because I love the way rain makes my world look. I love how it changes things, how it drenches the wildflowers causing their petals to recoil.
I love the sparkle of the rain drops waiting to be evaporated back into the sky on the soft surface of the leaves.
I want to lick the drips from the un-ripened berries.
I like to visit the horses, to see how they fared as they stood still against the opened sky, their butts turned against the wind, soaking the heavens into their skin. It always seems a storm makes them ravenous, starving for the lush green grass that seems to turn neon at the first drop of moisture.
But after the storm they won’t have me poking my nose in their business. They are not about to come in. They braved the storm, now they’re going to feast.
I always walk to a hilltop then. I scrape and scramble my way up the face of the clay buttes, my boots, suffering from a severe case of mud-pack, weighing an extra 10-20 pounds. I scour the bushes for flowers, check out the sky for more rain, listen for the birds coming back to life and breathe in the fresh, new air.
Funny how a good rain can cleanse us, even when we watch it from the other side of the windows or come to know it after the calm has set in.
I love this land.
I love what exists here.
The changing and unexpected beauty cannot be recreated, not matter the repetition of the seasons.
I find I’m manic about being a witness to its changes, running out to be a part of it…
to be a part of the down pour…
Because when it rains I feel there’s something up there responsible for this…
If you were to sit me down for coffee, serve me up a piece of pie and ask me what it is that appeals to me about ranch living I would tilt my head to the side, look up at your ceiling and come up with a few things.
The first would be the quiet and the beautiful secluded spaces I can visit at will.
The second would be the animals.
I would probably go back and forth then, trying to really distinguish which aspect is truly my favorite before coming to the conclusion they go hand in hand really. I mean, you need the wide open space to keep animals healthy and fit and roaming. The rolling hills full of grasses and trees and the winding creek bed are perfect for cattle and horses (and goats and sheep and llamas, you know, if you were into that sort of thing). And I truly believe if a dog were allowed the choice of prime real-estate to make his home he would pick your farm or ranch over the city sidewalks. Yes, even that little fluff ball you keep in your purse would agree. I mean, given the choice wouldn’t you prefer to poop in private?
But for all that ranch living is to the animals: an endless adventure for their noses, a smorgasbord of the best grazing, a giant park with countless trees to pee on, a dynamic hunting grounds, it’s also something entirely different…
Dangerous.
Dangerous and full of lessons about life and death.
And as a young ranch kid growing up out here I like to think that we learned about the circle of life a bit earlier than most. Ranching mom and dads, in my experience, don’t tend to sugarcoat things like this for their young ones. Our lessons about where babies come from were caught while helping Pops check cows and being brave enough to ask what the deal was with the cow, ummm, well, giving that bull a piggyback ride…
We learned about birth by sitting on a hill-top in the early spring to watch a cow deliver a calf in the warmest, most protected place she could find. We absorbed what instinct meant as we witnessed her lick her baby clean as it awkwardly struggled to get to its feet, wobbling on knocked knees for a few hours until it got the hang of his hooves standing on the surface of the big, wide world.
That calf needed to stand to live. It needed to move with his momma as she ate, so he could eat. He needed to tap into what it meant to be a calf and who he needed to stick by in order to survive out here where there are spring ice storms, slick mud, unexpected temperature drops and coyotes.
And so yes, I learned about death out there in the pastures as well. I learned that it isn’t always fair, that sometimes the weak don’t have the luxury of protection, sometimes mommas don’t possess that instinct, and sometimes nature is more powerful than the will to stay alive.
Oh, I learned these lessons and I accepted them, but my heart broke just the same each time the tough ones made their way into my life. I remember saying silent little prayers to myself when Pops would have to bring a calf in from the cold, feed it and warm it in the basement only to delay the inevitable. And I remember my heart breaking when my favorite horse grew so old and weak that one day I woke up to find she didn’t make the trek to the barnyard.
I remember the untimely death of the puppy I rescued and the countless barn cats that didn’t have the chance to make it to old age.
As a little girl I wondered if these things got easier as you got older. I wondered if your heart got harder or you got braver as you grew taller.
Then I would watch my Pops work into the night to help a young cow deliver her first baby safely. I was a mouse in the corner as he tube-fed a calf clinging to life. I was a witness to the despair when he found his best horse bleeding and broken out in the pasture. I saw how his eyes dropped, how he shook his head and paused for a moment before sucking in breath, exhaling and moving on.
And I understood.
I understood that life is beautiful. That it’s a series of heartbeats and breaths, pumping blood, willpower and spirit.
I understood that all of those things will eventually quiet. That all of us will return to the earth, circumstance or time helping push us there.
And it doesn’t get easier to let go of those creatures under your care, no matter how small.
And no matter how tall you get.
Rest in Peace Mister the Cat. You were one of the good ones.
I am certain there will be a red barn and plenty of mice in heaven…
I woke up this morning with a little krink in my neck, my back stiff and sore, my arms reminding me of muscles that hadn’t been used in a while. The sun was shining through my bedroom window, backlighting the lush green leaves that have come to our world to stay for a while. The cool breeze through the screen prompted me to pull the sheets up to my neck and scootch in closer to Husband.
It’s Monday morning and it seems like the workweek has come in with sparkle and style. I appreciate it.
But the weekend? Well, judging by the dirt hanging out under my fingernails and the size of the laundry pile it seems it was one of the good ones.
No, we didn’t have anything extravagant on our schedules, no vacation on the beach, no road trip to the mountains, no concert or festival, just a couple days spent inside a simple life that we’re working to create here. I wouldn’t even have much to mention about it really, except for somewhere between chasing the cows that got out into the fields with husband, planting Pops’ tomatoes, catfishing on the river with Little Sister and sitting on the porch with a vodka tonic and my mother as the sun began to set at the end of Sunday, I found myself wishing there was more time in my life for chores…and I think I might have realized why ranchers don’t take many vacations….
Because when the sun is shining on my back and the cool breeze moves through the sweaty tendrils of hair that have escaped from my ponytail, it’s hard to be too upset that the cows got out. In fact, sitting on top of a good horse watching so the cows and their babies don’t miss the gate as Husband moves back and forth behind them, gently pushing the pairs along, I find I’m glad for the work.
And glad that I got to push my horse to a full-out run as I raced to stop the lead cow from finding her way to the brush. Grateful I had that chance to cowgirl up, feel that wind in my hair and power of the horse beneath me.
Proud the two of us turned the herd around on our own and happy to be working alongside a man who loves this work as much as I do.
Summer weekends like this remind me of what it was like to grow up out here, a ranch kid with three months off and no driver’s license. Sure, I had the occasional coveted trip to town to swim in the public pool, but for the most part we were out here riding in the fencing pickup with Pops, chasing cows on sunny mornings trying to beat the mid-day scorching heat, mowing the lawn and eating summer sausage sandwiches for lunch. The work with Pops was never stressful or hurried, just constant and quiet and he was glad for the company…it didn’t matter if the ten-year-old and fifteen-year-old in the seat next to him were too uncoordinated to run the wire stretcher.
I remember the heat, the sweat, the horseflies and wood ticks we would find as we rode through the thorny brush on our way to find a stray cow. I remember the country station coming through the static and speakers of the old fencing pickup as Pops climbed out to fix a wire and I leaned my head on the sill of the window and watched the grasshoppers fling themselves to the sky. I remember taking my little sister to climb up the clay buttes while we waited for Pops to emerge from the mud underneath the stock-tank he was fixing.
I remember taking a break from the sun under the shade of the tree line and the way the cool grass felt under the pockets of my jeans.
I remember the smell of the wet dirt as Little Sister and I dug in the ground below our house on the hunt for worms…because the work was going to have to wait…Pops was going to take us catfishing.
When I think of early summer I think of these things. And this weekend it seemed I had an instinct to recreate and live life the way summers here were meant to be lived. So after the cows were rounded up on Saturday, the flowers were in their pots and Husband had enough tinkering with the plumbing on the new house, I called up my Little Sister who has just moved back to town and told her to bring her cooler.
We were going catfishing at the river.
The process is always the same: pack a bag full of sunflower seeds, bug spray, long sleeve shirts and something chocolate. Fill a cooler full of beer. Hunt unsuccessfully for all remaining pieces of the fishing supplies you haven’t seen together in one place for months. Patch together a mis-mash of fishing line, hooks, reels and poles and say it’s good enough. Search high and low for the missing camp chairs. Put on your short shorts and get in the pickup, roll down the windows and head south toward the Little Missouri where the water runs low and slow through the slick clay banks of the badlands.
Each year we debate about the location of our favorite fishing spot, wonder if we’ve missed the turn and discuss how the moisture from the previous winter has changed the trail. And we are reminded once we arrive of why we come here, the seclusion and quiet of the untouched banks makes us feel free and wild and capable of catching our own supper.
We kick off our shoes as they grow heavy with the mud of the banks. Little Sister and I cast lines that have been prepared for us.
We talk.
And then we’re quiet, our attention turned toward the calm flow of the river and the beaver who is working on tearing branches from a willow branch on the other side.
Then my line tips. We hold our breath. Someone says ‘reel’ and everyone stands up as husband runs toward the banks to ensure a safe arrival of this strange looking fish emerging from the muddy water of the river.
We laugh and celebrate. We brag. We take a picture and re-worm our hooks.
And wait.
Open another beer.
Change locations.
Sit on a rock.
Watch the clouds roll in.
Spit seeds on the banks.
Declare 8:00 pm to be the witching hour.
Wait for another tip to bend.
Leap up when Husband starts reeling. I jump and holler in excitement but do nothing to help ensure the fish makes it safely to shore. Husband moves toward the deep mud at the bank as the fish flops and struggles and the fisherman leaps to grab it…
But it’s too late…it’s escaped to the mucky water, a worm in its belly leaving two fishermen stranded in mud up past their knees.
I say I can’t believe it got away.
Little Sister laughs hysterically as she watches me snap photos of my dearly beloved sinking deeper and deeper by the second into the slick mud of the riverbank while he tries to hand me his pole so he can escape.
The sun sinks toward the horizon and the thunderheads move in, reflecting blue and gray on the surface of the murky river water. We declare it time to reel up.
We let my catfish go, deciding it’s not enough fish worth the work of cleaning it. And besides, I have steaks waiting for us at home.
Muddy and tired and full of mosquito bites and bug spray, we head for the trail that leads us to the highway and then the pink gravel road that meets up with the ranch house. Husband fires up the grill. I pour something over ice.
We open the windows and we are us. Dirty and hungry and smelling of horse hair and sweat and fish.
It’s summer at the ranch and the tomatoes need to be planted. There is a house to finish, plumbing and wiring to be done, and corrals to be patched. The cows found an open spot in the fence and are heading down the road. We will know this tomorrow and we will saddle up to bring them home after coffee and bacon in the morning.
The sun will be shining, the breeze will be cool, the cows will be willing to move…
We’ve had a couple beautiful days at the ranch lately. Things are starting to blossom up around here, making way for the butterflies and bees and bugs. The birds have found their way home and so have the pair of geese that live in the dam outside our new house. I’ve been spending my evenings strolling through the coulees to see if I can break the record I set of 25 wood ticks crawling on my body at once.
It seems I’ve always known just where to find them.
But the wood ticks are pretty much the only black blotch on what is my favorite season. Wood ticks and the burdock weed, but I figure I can take a few heebie jeebies and invasive plants in exchange for wild purple violets,
horses with slick spring coats,
rhubarb and blue skies.
The thing about spring around here is that it moves fairly quickly, so you’ve got to catch it before the bluebells wither up in the heat of the day and those familiar birds fly south.
Against the backdrop of late spring everything seems to come alive, and with the windows open in the house I am invigorated and inspired. Because we wait for this warm sunshine all year and northern prairie people everywhere don’t take one “Goldie Locks” day for granted. No, we busy ourselves with lists of things to do before winter rolls around.
And in the summer around here that can mean chores and projects of course, but more than anything it means living out in it.
Because man could not build a better space for us to exist in. No roof can compare to the comfort and drama of the rolling clouds that threaten a few warm rain showers and promise a blue sky that always comes back to us. Families seem at ease here in the hills alive and buzzing with the sounds of life and change and growing things.
The wildflowers are a welcome home present that appear overnight, the grass our living, breathing carpet.
In the creek the minnows appear like magic and along the banks sprout blossoms promising fruit.
A prairie spring is a world that cannot be replicated. It is a world that is so far from the drastic howling winds of winter and the brown and sleeping earth, that you would swear you were living on a different planet just two months ago.
In those months I felt like a down coat and wool socks, steaming hot chocolate and melty white marshmallows.
A dumpling in warm soup.
Heavy blankets.
But today I feel like a garden. Like a picnic, a cold drink, a bratwurst on a lawn chair.
A warm breeze.
Bare feet.
The sun soaked queen of the barnyard.
I want to stand on the hills with the horses, facing the wind to keep the flies away, the only concern for the day.
I want to run close to the ground with the pug, smelling the things he smells, allowing my heart to pump hard, my tongue to hang out, my delusions of grace and agility to run rampant.
I want to jump in the dam with the lab when the heat gets too warm on my skin.
I want to taste what the bees taste.
I want to sit in the clouds and cast cool shadows all of it.
Oh, the river. So calm, so peaceful. So beautiful and serene. Take a look at this scene and you would never guess that during the first week of May the shore is filled with hundreds of rednecks, grilling bratwurst, pitching tents, sporting camouflage, making small talk and casting their fishing poles and hooks into the current on a hope that emerging from the surface will be one of the North America’s largest freshwater fish.
Husband was one of those lucky rednecks.
He pulled this from the river on Friday afternoon.
It’s a paddlefish. 74 lbs of a prehistoric, dinosaur-esque creature with fins and no scales, tiny eyeballs and a long flat nose from which it gets its name.
Husband’s smiling because he’s managed to snag one with a giant rod, reel and hook at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers where, ironically, the state’s biggest and brightest rednecks work to harvest a creature that supplies some of the best and most coveted caviar in the nation.
Who says hicks aren’t fancy.
I can say this because I’m one of them. And I am behind my camera-phone barely able to hold the thing up while my dearly beloved basks in his victory. Because I have been casting and whipping my giant fishing rod into the channel of the river for nearly three hours and I haven’t caught anything but a couple of logs, lots of sticks and my father-in-law’s boat.
Yup.
Caught that thing on the first cast.
But I was happy for husband. And so were the 20+ people down stream from him when he hollered “FISH ON!” and worked to keep the creature on the line. The other fisher men, women and kids who shared our sandbar came running toward where they saw the fish roll to the surface to assist with its capture. Two kids appeared with a gaff (a long stick with a hook on the end used to pull the giant river-dwelling creature to shore), a girl came over with her camera and muck boots, a couple older men chimed in with advice, our friend waded through the strong current to try to locate the thing and I screamed and started running toward it with my video camera fully engaged.
That’s the way it is out there during the few short weeks when these massive and strange creatures are up for catch. Sports-people from all over the region gather at the banks of the river, pitching tents, making little cities with their campers, revving the engines of their pickups, barbecuing, drinking beer and sharing fish stories. Depending on how the fish are moving fisher-people generally have less than two weeks to snag their fish before the limit is reached and the season is closed. So they move through campsites and shoot the breeze, asking about the catch-count so far, exchanging stories about the one that got away, the one that weighed almost 100 lbs, and the one their friend’s, sister’s grandmother caught yesterday up river from them…
Yup, if you happen to be down river from someone who snagged a paddlefish, their fish story becomes your fish story. Because one man cannot reel one of these creatures in on his own. It seems it takes a village of men and women in muck boots and ball caps cheering you on, offering advice, grabbing supplies, hollering, and leaning in toward the water to see what’s on the other end of the line that’s bending the pole and making the fisher-person attached to it sweat and squirm for a good five to fifteen minute fight.
If it sounds intense to catch one of these buggers, I tell you, it is.
But it doesn’t take skill.
I know because once upon a time I caught one myself. I was somewhere in-between the first verse and chorus of a Disney song as I cast that giant hook as far as I could throw it…(ahem…three feet in front of me)…into the current. I looked over my shoulder to my audience shaking their heads at me on top of the steep banks. I laughed and threw one of my arms in the air to really hit the punch line of Pocahontas’s “Just around the river bend” and just as I started in on my grand finale my hook caught something and jerked me dangerously close to the edge of the bank and ironically close to a literal image of the song I was performing. I gripped my pole and worked to regain my footing just as my brother-in-law came bounding down the riverbank to grab the back of my shirt to prevent me from becoming just another casualty of the sport.
It was the hardest I’d ever worked at the sport of fishing–a sport that usually involves me sticking my pole in the sandy banks of the river while I kick back with sunflower seeds and a brewsky and wait for the catfish to bite.
But it was exhilarating leaning back against the weight of the fish and the current of the river, reeling the beast toward shore as the party of people hanging by the river with me scrambled to help retrieve my catch with nets and gaffs and rules and superstition.
We got the fish to shore and, at 25 lbs, it wasn’t a whopper in paddlefish land, but it was the biggest fish I’ve ever caught. And ever since I stood on the banks of the river in the rain and my camouflage coat, channeling every red-neck fiber in my body as I held that fish up for the world to see, I’ve been itching to re-live that feeling.
And so have the hundreds of other fisher-people who flock to the banks of our rivers each year.
They come with their coolers and sleeping bags to hash out the game plan, meet up with friends, and re-live past year’s catches the same way we re-live my fish story every year when I meet my in-laws and friends from college and Canada at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone River at the beginning of May.
Yes, paddlefishing is a tradition for us that includes matching t-shirts, beer darts, barbecue, laughter, bad jokes and memories of each fish caught.
And this year husband gets the bragging rights as the only man in our party of twenty who actually pulled something living from that river.
Oh, it doesn’t matter if he only casted like seven times.
It doesn’t matter that me and two of my friends stood in ice-cold water up to our crotches casting and reeling in the current of the two converging rivers as the water and paddlefish floated on by for hours.
It doesn’t matter that we wanted it so bad we held our breath and made up our own superstitious chants as we pulled back our lines, visualizing, sending positive energy into the river as our bare legs turned raw in the deep mud of the river and our arms turned to noodles with each hefty cast.
We were not bitter when husband pulled that whopper of a fish right out from under our noses. Nope. We dropped our poles and went screaming toward him with cameras and hands clasped in delight.
We took his moment with him. We oooed and awwweed over the event that was to be a part of our story too. We shared our reaction: how S had jumped out of the boat and into water up to her knees when she heard husband holler. How L threw her arms in the air and grabbed her camera. How B and my father in law were convinced husband lost it when the fish didn’t reappear…
How husband stayed calm, cool and collected as I screeched and ran and jumped up and down…
How the clouds were fluffy and the sky was blue and the sun was so warm we could wear shorts and tank tops and walk around in bare feet…
How husband caught a paddlefish on his seventh cast…
But whether it was the threat of a sniffle or the scarier threat of more laundry that willed me to stay inside until the monsoon-like rains subsided, it doesn’t really matter. I was out in it at the first sign of let-up.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 
