Paddlefishing. Who said Rednecks aren’t fancy?

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

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…

and how I caught the boat on my first….

a log on my second…

the river bank on my third…

a buzz on my forth…

and fifty-seven sticks in between.

Paddlefishing.

It’s not a sport…

It’s a lifestyle.

A good day to be a horse

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I like it when the clouds do this.

It makes me feel like I am not so small after all, like I could reach up and pluck one out of the sky, put it on an ice cream cone and go walking through the pastures, taking licks and bites of the sweet fluff as I make my way to the hilltops.

Under clouds like this the horses get sleepy and relaxed, their ears twitching the flies away, four feet taking turns resting while the breeze blows through their manes and the sky provides intermittent sunlight and shade.

It’s a good day to be a horse and I’d like to imagine they are happy to see me as I come marching their way. They nuzzle my hand for a snack, check my pockets and sniff my hair as I bend down to take their picture.

I also imagine they think I’m strange, but they’re used to it. The woman in the plaid shirt always pointing and clicking and leaning across their backs.

But they humor me.

Between biting the tops off of new wildflowers and munching on the new green grass they lift their heads up and lean in close to pose.

To check out the camera.

And fight over the spotlight.

I like this time spent with horses. The time where I catch them in their element, but I don’t need to catch them. We don’t have work to do. I don’t have an agenda or a plan to bring them in and saddle them up. I just want to see what they’re up to scattered across the rolling landscape in their favorite grazing spot east of the corrals.

I like the way they look up there against the green and gold grass, the blue and white sky. They add something special to the painting I sometimes picture when I look out my kitchen window or through the windshield of the pickup as I come into the drive.

Is it wistfulness?

Peace?

Sentiment?

or just beauty…

I try to decide the words to describe what the sight of a horse has always done to my spirit as I scratch under the buckskin’s chin and he leans in a little closer.

But when I rub my hands down the sorrel’s back, brush the flies from under the mare’s belly and breathe in the familiar smell of dust and sunshine and grass and sky that our herd of horses keep under their skin I decide…

I may not be the best cowgirl and these might not be the best horses. We might not win buckles or keep the burs out of our manes. We might limp a bit or sport an attitude.

We may over-indulge, roll in the mud, stomp at the dogs and find holes in the fences so we can escape to the fields…so we might get away for a bit.

But we always come home.

Our home is the same.

And if I could I could be a horse I would wish for wild black hair and sound feet, a slick coat and pastures of sweet clover under blue skies filled with clouds.

If I were a horse I would want to run with these guys.

Words and music and getting it down

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

When I was ten years old Pops gave me a hard covered journal that he pulled out of the basement of his parent’s house. He retrieved it from a bookshelf and handed it to his middle daughter, the one who would scribble poems about dogs and horses and big prairie skies on notebook paper. He flipped through the blank pages of the journal, inspecting it for forgotten words, and then handed it to me. And told me to write.

I imagine the book was something my Pops picked up at a gift shop or got for Christmas from a family member, an object that could have been tossed or used for grocery lists, but instead sat stored away in that basement for years waiting for me.

I have a memory of when he handed that book over to me, one I’m not certain I didn’t make up in a dream or something. It’s a memory that is full of inspiration and imagination and possibilities. It was as if my father had handed me potential–blank pages that smelled of must and mothballs waiting for someone to write something brilliant and touching and moving.

Waiting for me to be brilliant.

I had those pages filled before my twelfth birthday with poems about the creek behind my house, rodeos, horses, wildflowers and not wanting to grow up. My handwriting was neat and loopy, slanting diagonally across the unlined pages, sentences about the colors in rainbows and wishes trailing right out of my adolescent head and down the center of the pages.

I didn’t know it at the time but that book is where my music career started. Those words I wrote turned to melodies when I picked up a guitar for the first time, practicing other people’s music, but spending most of my time creating my own. I would play with my words, ramble with the lines and phrasing for nobody’s ears but my own. And because I was the only one listening, I could say what I meant or make no sense at all.

It didn’t matter.

It was for me.

As I got older my dad convinced me to perform that music in public. And so I strummed my green guitar alongside him, a dorky, gangly girl in a Garth Brooks inspired western shirt baring her soul.

Besides my little sister who was sleeping with her door half-open across the hallway from my bedroom, my dad’s ears were always the first to hear my music.

I’m thinking about this today because I am in the middle of recording a new album. It’s an album of music I’ve been writing since I moved back to the place I grew up…back to the place where that ten-year-old tomboy scraped her knees and caught frogs and wrote it all down. I’ve done this studio thing before and I’ll tell you, it isn’t easy to introduce music that you’ve written on lazy Sundays, in the middle of the night or pulled over sitting in your car on the side of the road to a room full of musicians you respect and admire. Performing songs for the first time that only the walls and dogs have heard have been some of the most intimidating and emotional experiences in my life.

Because I believe in it. I know what I’m trying to say.

Or at least I think I do.

And when I make the decision to share it, to record it, to perform it, to get in the studio at long last, I second guess that decision about seventy to eighty times before I make the trip down the interstate with my Pops and our guitars.

See in a project like this you could work through logistics all day long. You could share ideas and swap stories and talk about music you like, your vision and who’s on board until the sun goes down.

But it comes down to one thing in the end.

The songs.

And the songs are mine. Soul-baringly mine. So eventually I’ve got to play them. It’s kinda the whole point.

So I start by plucking my guitar, closing my eyes tight and leaning in against the microphone, wondering if it’s possible to hold my breath and sing at the same time. The first note rings out and then the first verse and it’s just me exposed waiting for my father to pick up his guitar and add a rhythm, my dear and talented friend to lean over his dobro and fill in with a haunting lick, the bass to kick in a long lonesome note…the drums to find the heart beat.

And soon my song becomes their song and the room is filled with it. The guys I’ve trusted with the notes have given it a pulse and the music I wrote on my living room floor lends itself to a harmonica part, a guitar breath…a long pause.

And sometimes it happens that I’m in that studio, two days into laying down tracks about the landscape, my home, my love and maybe even a quirky song about a dog, and things are going well. I think I’ve almost made it through the hard part, if only I could skip through the song that scares me the most.

Because it’s the one that is so personal I am certain no one is going to understand. It’s the one that makes me cry big sobs before I reach the end.

The one that they are telling me to try. Just try it out.

It’s ok.

And so I take a deep breath and work to come down off a bouncy song I wrote about being happy and living in the moment.

I suppose living in the moment counts for hard stuff too, so I take my own advice…

play the notes on my guitar…and sing…

“I dreamed you on the prairie,
on mountain tops and oceans wide…”

I hear my voice waiver through my headphones but I’m ok. I decide I might get through it…until I hit the second breath and the sweet sound of my friend’s guitar part fills in the quiet spaces the exact way I have heard it in my head…if only I could play that way…

“I loved you before I met you…”

My voice cracks and it’s over before it started…but my band keeps playing, coming in with a low bass part and a quiet whisper of a drum.

So I keep singing and sniffling because the music’s just too beautiful to give in to an emotion I’ve pushed down so long that it became fed up.

I decide that if it’s time for this I might as well capture it. Isn’t this what music is about?

So the guitar lead pulls me into the chorus and I whimper the words behind the glass of my isolation booth. I wonder if the guys can see the tears streaming down my face behind the shield of the microphone…

The sound coming out of their instruments makes me feel less alone though, which touches me so deeply that more tears roll and no words come out.

But the guys keep playing, taking me through the bridge of my song as I sing it like I’m collapsing in on myself.

I close my eyes and breathe in the rhythm they have found for me as I gather myself for the ending note, the note that I squeak out but they let hang subtly and quietly in the air of the studio.

I wipe my eyes and apologize as I put down my guitar to step out of the room only to find the two men who have been the background to my music my entire life: my father and the sweet talented dobro man, with eyes red and teary too.

Supporting me.

Feeling for me.

Playing my music like it is their own.

So I’ll tell you this today as I sit in the middle of this music project and reflect on the weekend I spent lost in the music. When I moved back to the ranch as a grown woman with plans to make plans I wasn’t prepared to run into my ten-year-old self again. I wasn’t prepared to fall in love like her, to get the same flush in my cheeks, to embrace loneliness, celebrate life and morn losses the way I used to when I was so young and vulnerable and completely honest.

I didn’t expect that she would grab my hand, take me on walks, sit with me on hilltops and quietly push me to fill up some blank pages again…and then sing those songs out loud to the prairie sky.

But she did. And I open her book today and find poetry and stories that are innocent and awful and embarrassing. But I’ll tell you if I had to save something in a fire it would be that book. It has sat on my nightstand next to my lamp for nearly twenty years, a reminder of the girl who chose to fill it up with the stories about her world and everything that was inside of her.

And the only way I can think to thank her is to keep doing what she has done…

Curious about the new music coming from the red dirt roads?
Listen to me talk about life in oil country as I play my new song “Boomtown” live from my momma’s kitchen

Jessie Veeder’s Boomtown

Follow the progress of my new album at www.jessieveedermusic.com

Recording at Makoche Recording Company in downtown, Bismarck, ND

To live with passion.

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Last night husband came home to the little ranch house in the buttes to find a woman hunched over, knees to her chest, pointing and clicking and squinting behind a giant computer screen.

He thought he heard her mumbling, so he said hello back, in case she might be attempting to greet him.

She wasn’t. She was talking to herself as she marveled at how she had somehow secured approval from herself and her dearly beloved to purchase this new machine with a screen the size of a television.

She was even more impressed she could fit it in the 3×3 cubby behind the recliner she likes to refer to as an office. But there was no time to really marvel, she had a big project and this spaceship of a computer was meant to help her accomplish this.

So there she sat with her coffee cup at 7 am learning how to scroll on a fancy mouse. At noon she opened the window when she noticed the temperature was climbing, inside & out.

She switched from coffee to Diet Coke at 1:00.

She got up to pee at 2:00.

She ate a cracker at 3:00.

But the hours between 3 and whenever her husband’s pickup pulled into the drive seemed to have slipped her mind as she got lost in photo edits, emails, music and words.

It wasn’t until her husband stepped through the door and said her name that she looked down to realize she had yet to change out of the tank top and shorts she slept in the night before.

And she couldn’t remember if she brushed her teeth, but could only assume that she skipped that essential step, as well as the hair brushing and shower and, uh, was that peanut butter on her shirt? Did she even have peanut butter today?

Does my hair really look like this?

It’s been close to two years since I moved back to the ranch with no job and a vague plan that included figuring out what it was I wanted to do here for the rest of my life. After the initial panic and a few weeks of manic cleaning and organization, I decided it would best serve me to strive to have the experiences I had as a child growing up in this wild place. I would climb the buttes, explore the coulees, ride horses, sing at the top of my lungs, spend time with my family and love with my arms wide open.

The way life was meant to be lived…

But between the mud sliding, dog chasing, berry picking, sledding, cooking, and a full on attempt at avoiding the laundry at all costs, life has found me two years later at a point where I need to say no to some things. Because it’s practical. And someone needs to make supper.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing. It means that I’m busy. It means that I am engaged. Sitting at the computer and losing myself in the hours actually means that I am working, and I do not take that for granted, especially these days.

But yesterday after I snapped out of my frenzy to catch a deadline that I realized no one had made for me except me, I found I was a bit disappointed in myself.

It was nearly 85 degrees on a perfectly absurd April day and I did not take a moment to really feel it on my skin. When husband got home he was giddy from a day driving with the windows open, the warm breeze pushing on his work shirt. He rushed in hoping to find a wife eager to get out in it, but instead he found her babbling to herself.

And possibly drooling.

He took one look at my outfit and the space around me cluttered with half-filled cups, napkins, papers and pencils and he high-tailed it out the door.

I think I might have heard him utter, “you’re a mess…” but I chose to believe that was a figment of my imagination.

Although it was a true statement.

I was a mess. I am a mess.

Always have been.

But those of you who have been following this little journey understand that this is not the place you go for house organization advice, but where you might land if you want to feel better about your sweeping schedule. I am not equipped to give tips on sifting flour, changing a car tire or how to make a man fall in love with you (come to think of it, following my lead with irregular grooming habits and a tendency to wander off into the hills and you might find yourself with the opposite results.) No, I can’t give you tips on parenting or how to impress at a party, unless of course your idea of breaking the ice is leading with a story about how you once got your head stuck in a ladder or how your dog peed in your husband’s boot. But if it is, and it worked, call me. I want to be in your group of friends.

Anyway, if I learned anything in the last few years about myself it’s that I’m not a real expert in anything. In the past several months I have been asked to speak at conferences, talk to students, sing and tell my story at various events. And each time I prepare for these appearances I am forced to evaluate what it is I am doing here out in the hills in the middle of my family’s history, in the middle of oil country.

And I can’t come up with anything to say except that I don’t know everything about anything and I don’t know the answer to most questions, but I know that to live a life with passion is the only way I know how to do it.

I am passionate.

Annoyingly passionate.

Like squeeze the puke out of a kitten because you love it so much passionate.

I was born this way.

Because my family’s this way.

And I blame them for the fact that I didn’t move my ass from that chair all day long yesterday because I was so engrossed in my work.

But I also blame them for the fact that my sister rolls her eyes when I point out every wildflower sprouting from the earth on a ride together or on a drive to town.

And the fact that I don’t get too worked up about her annoyance at my behavior, because she lives the same way…

Because we were raised with a father who couldn’t wait for the first warm spring day to climb to the top of a hill and find a sunny, dry spot and lay down. A man who would stop in the middle a cattle drive so he could get off his horse and retrieve a turkey feather for his daughter who collects them, or pick some wild raspberries because they are on his top ten list of favorite things in the universe.

We were loved by a mother who rarely takes a day off work, but when she does, throws the best damn party, makes the best appetizers, laughs the most and stays on the dance floor the longest.

With my parents there was never a question about who they were because I always knew what they loved.

So I’ve been compelled lately to reevaluate my situation, to make a ten-year plan, to focus my work and interests that swim out there randomly from a desire to study photography to an obsession with bright fingernail polish and all of the fluffy animals and wildflowers and music in between.

I can’t narrow it down and I just can’t give any of it up to create more space for the laundry or at least brushing my teeth.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling of being under some sort of pressure to accomplish something beyond squeezing kittens, canning vegetables, singing out loud and then telling someone about it.

And when I go to bed at night sometimes that little voice speaks to me quietly and asks me “What are you doing girl? Prepare for tomorrow. Tomorrow is coming. What are you going to do?”

I don’t know anything except to whisper back to her “Tomorrow is not certain.”

And it’s that thought that keeps me awake, that keeps me working, keeps me climbing those buttes, writing songs, making french toast for my husband on Sunday mornings and wishing for more hours in the day.

It’s that quite voice that pushes me to live for today, whatever that day has on the agenda.

And so I suppose I can’t be so hard on myself if that day requires sitting for hours in front of the computer screen, as long as what I am doing is backed in passion, I suppose I can find comfort in the fact that I am being true to myself.

Flannel shirts and wild plum blossoms

Posted on April 23, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

When I grow up I want to be the kind of woman who lets her hair grow long and wild and silver. When I’m grown I hope I remember to keep my flannel shirts draped over chairs, hanging in the entryway and sitting on the seat of the pickup where they are ready and waiting for me to pull them on and take off somewhere, the scent of horse hair on the well-worn sleeve.

When I grow up I want to remember every spring with the smell of the first buds blooming on the wild plum trees what this season means to me. When I grow up I pray I don’t forget to follow that smell down into the draws where the air falls cooler the closer you get to the creek, where the wind is calm.

When I grow up I hope I don’t find I have become offended by a bit of mud tracked from my boots onto the kitchen floor. I hope I keep the windows open on the best summer evenings with no regard for the air conditioning or the dust…because a woman can only be so concerned with messes that can be cleaned another day, especially when she needs to get the crocuses in some water.

When I am older and my memory is filled to the brim, I hope that the smell of damp hay will still remind me of feeding cows with my father on the first warm day of spring when the sun had warmed the snow enough to cause small rivers to run on our once frozen trail. I hope it reminds me how alive I felt wading in that stream while my dad rolled out the bale and I tested the limits of the rubber on my boots.

And when my hair turns silver I hope I remember that my favorite colors are the colors of the seasons changing from brown to white to green to gold and back again. I pray I never curse the rain, that I don’t forget the rain is my favorite color of them all.

Yes, when I am an old woman and my knees don’t bend the way they need to bend to get me on the back of a horse, I hope I am still able to bury my face in her mane, to run my hands across her back and lean on her body while I remember the way my spirits lifted as she carried me and my worries away to the hilltops.

I hope I recall how the first ride of spring made my legs stiff, my back creak and my backside sore, even as a young woman with muscles and tall boots.

Yes, boots! When I am an old woman I hope I will wear my red wedding boots every once in a while and recall how I stood alone in them out in the cow pasture at 22-years-old waiting for the horse-drawn wagon to come over the hill and take me to the oak tree where my friends and family gathered and the man I loved was waiting to marry me.

My red boots will remind me, so in all of the shuffle and lost things that become our lives, I hope I remember to save them.

And as I watch the lines form on my husband’s face, little wrinkles around his eyes from work and worry and laughter, I hope I remember to say something funny, to tease him a bit, so I might be reminded again how he got the most important ones…the ones that run the deepest.

Yes, when I am old and my hair is silver and long and wild, I hope I feel it was all worth it.

But more than anything I hope that those things that made me– the dirt under my fingernails; mud on my boots; a good man’s laughter; the strong back of a horse; the rain that falls on the north buttes and the scent of summer rolled up in a hay bale at the end of a long winter–I hope they remain here on this place so that another spirit living along this pink road might one day find herself in flannel shirts and wild plum blossoms.

Inside Old Houses

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

We live on gravel roads that stretch like ribbons along pasture land dotted with black cattle and a patchwork quilt of grasses and crops. As we kick up dust beneath our pickup tires heading out to a chore or to meet up with a neighbor, we take for granted how these roads were built. Why there are here in the first place.

These days we are in a rush aren’t we? Aren’t we headed somewhere on a deadline? So we drive faster than we should on these roads beat up from years of wear by our rubber tires, and now, by the new-found rush of a booming industry.

I remember a time when these roads were quiet. It was where my cousins and I could skip like characters from “The Wizard of Oz” down the middle of the pink road without a care in the world. The only vehicle that was certain to meet us was carrying our great uncle driving with his windows down, checking fences and out for coffee with the neighbors; or my mother looking to borrow some sugar. If we were lucky it would be the Schwann’s Man hauling the promise of orange push-up pops in the back of his truck and we would put the game on time-out and sit on the front porch trying to get to the bottom of the treat before it melted and dripped down our fingers.

We didn’t know that there would ever be anything here at the end of this road besides imagination and our grandmother’s cookies. We didn’t know that anything but our boots and agriculture would kick up dust on the road.

I spent Friday afternoon with a reporter from the cities. He came to visit me on the ranch to talk about the landscape, ranch life, my music and what’s happening here in the booming oil field we have in Western North Dakota. I agreed to have the conversation and then gave him the requested directions he needed to find me.

Head east out-of-town until you hit the school.
Turn right and follow the pavement.
Cross a cattle guard, but only one. If you hit the second you’ve gone too far.
Turn left on the red scoria road until you see the small red barn.

Because we’re in the middle of all of this activity, all of this national press, the #3 oil-producing state in the nation, but we are not on the GPS.

I am not sure if it was my very rural directions or the wrong number provided for the county road, but my reporter friend didn’t quite make it to me, so he found the top of a hill (because we don’t have cell service either) and called.

I got in my pickup and found him on the pink road where I used to pretend I was Dorothy, waiting with his hazard lights on for me to show up and tell him what I do, what I think and what it means to me to live here right now.

What I do is ride horses and chase the pug and take pictures and sing and tell stories.

What I think is that every day we work to live a good and true life as we build a house on my family’s land that once was the middle of nowhere and has now suddenly become the middle of something that is so much bigger than the sound of Pops’ tractor coming over the hill.

What it means?

The truth is I haven’t put my thumb on the black or the white, because between the past and the future there are so many colors here.

So I sent him on his way with a story and a new-found love for the pug and grabbed my camera to follow that pink road to meet my neighbor, a friend who is absolutely intrigued by the idea of what this place was in another time. We had plans to take our country roads and explore the little pieces left behind by the generations that came before us. My friend knows where every buried treasure lies. Her eyes are open to it, our history and tumbling down memories that scatter across our landscape in the form of old houses and churches and schools.

My friend moved to this area from Montana with her husband almost two years ago, but you would never know she is new to the place. Ask her about the stone house across from her approach or the old Sandstone school and she will tell you a story about it. She will tell you who built the house and what he did for a living, who taught in the school and where you can find photos of the students. My roots are planted here and I’m sure I have heard bits and pieces of these stories as I grew up, but hearing her tell about the families who homesteaded near her new home, watching her put the pieces together as she peers inside the windows of old houses, seeing her wonder and excitement as she unearths an old book from an abandoned house or admires the green paint on an antique table, makes me wonder too.

It makes me wonder what memories were held in the hearts of those prairie people who have long ago returned to the earth. What would they think if they saw us driving down this road in our fancy cars to get to houses for two that quadruple the size of where they raised 12 children?

How far away I feel from that life some days…

And then I talk with my friend I am reminded that our goals were the same.

To make a living, to raise our families. To have a good life.

Just as the family that inhabited that old house with the broken windows and remnants of a life I will never lead, we are existing in a changing landscape where trees grow and fall, baby calves are born and sold, ground is tilled for crops and minds are inventing ways to make the living easier.

Inside those old houses they ate, they prayed, they laughed and worried, just as we do in our own homes with too many television screens and not enough vegetables.

So what does this mean?

The washed out fences and boarded up school-house doors remind us, like the newly paved roads and constant wind that blows across our prairie, tangling our hair and knocking on our windows, that this place, this land, is not ours solely and rightfully and individually. One day we will abandon these houses in decision or death and there will be a new generations searching these roads for our story.

So we should tell it now, honest and true and leave to them what they will need.

If I weren’t these things…

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I sit on the love seat in the back room of my parent’s house. It’s 9:30 on a Wednesday evening. I’ve finished my slice of pizza. My mother brought it home from town. I’ve had my glass of wine and we’ve had our visit about the weather and the traffic and the pizza and the fact that my little sister is back home tonight on her pursuit for a job here.

My little sister might be moving back home.

I close my eyes at the thought as her shoulder touches my shoulder. This love seat is small, so my other shoulder is not free either. It’s smashed up against my husband’s leg as he leans back, sprawled out on the arm of this overstuffed piece of furniture.

The three of us, we are a sandwich, and I am the lettuce, the cheese, the pickle, mayo and turkey. They are the bread and we are everything you need for a good bite.

We close our eyes and listen to Pops blow the air from his lungs through the harmonica he wears around his neck. We hear a lonesome sound, one that is familiar and sad and haunting and beautiful and home. We lean in closer…to one another. To him.

We taste his words…

I live back in the woods you see
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me...

We don’t say it, but it seems those words might have been written for this man sitting in front of us, his hair more silver than it was yesterday, his fingers callused, his voice ringing with those pieces of gravel that dug their way in from years of playing songs like this in bar rooms.

I’ve got a shotgun a rifle
and a four wheel drive…

It’s quiet tonight. The dogs are asleep and the trucks have taken a different route or maybe they finally called it quits for the day.

I know the stars are out.

And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive…

In the kitchen the warm scent of brownies my mother is frosting fresh from the oven drifts back to us smooshed together, the sandwich, on the love seat. I can’t see her from my position as the lettuce, the cheese, the pickle and mayo and turkey, but I know my mother is sipping wine and running her long fingers along the pages of a new magazine.

We grow good ole tomatoes and homemade wine…

Everything I ever knew for certain is filling my lungs and my ears, touching my shoulders and swaying along to all of the things I am on the inside.

And a country boy can survive

I am his lungs and heart and pieces of his gravely voice.

I am her fingers and worries and holidays.

I am his goodnights and kisses. His battles and wishes.

I am her blood, her memories…her shoulder.

Country folks can survive…

We breathe in the air of this house, the air Pops uses to push through the next verse, and I think that if I were not these things, I might not exist at all…

*Lyrics from “A Country Boy Can Survive” by Hank Williams Jr.

Victoria’s Secret models don’t get wood ticks…

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Feel it? You do don’t you? That tingling crawling up your bare leg, on the inside of your pants, towards parts of your body you’d rather not mention. You’ve got a creepy feeling, and now that feeling has spread to the back of your neck where you’re sure something is there poking up toward your hair-line. Go ahead, slap it. Scratch it. I’ll wait.

Ok, now it’s moved to your arm where you feel like the hairs are standing on end. There’s something there you’re sure, and it ain’t a mosquito. What is it? Where is it? You crank your elbow around and retch your neck toward your back to reach it.

Nothing.

But something! It has to be something! There it is moving up your leg again.

Oh, oh dear. You’re stripping off your pants? No worries. I understand. I’ll look away while you inspect your pale white stems, leaning over to rub them down, scratching, calling to your husband, your momma, your sister, your preacher to come and look! Come and check! I think I have a tick!

A tick?!

Yup.

You found it didn’t you.

Invasive little bastards (sorry preacher).

They’re here. It’s official.

He looks innocent, but crawling under that fur and those floppy ears is a nightmare...

Yup. It’s tick season and I’ve rung it in in typical ranch style fashion, celebrating by discovering my first little friend while on a shopping spree to Victoria Secret. I had showered, combed my hair, put on some makeup and made the long trip to the big town for undies. I was feeling good. I was feeling a little less like a grubby ranch girl and nearly presentable, dare I say damn sexy while I thumbed through the racks of impractical underwear. I was wincing at the thought of a permanent lace wedgie when I reached up to scratch my head only to discover one of the many reasons I will never be a Victoria Secret model.

And it's too bad, I mean, I showed so much promise in my early years...

Because I can’t imagine Heidi Klum has ever discovered a wood tick stuck in her hairline while frolicking amongst the ridiculous push-up bras and butt-crack revealing undergarments and smelly lotions and powders and weird music only to wonder just how long the damn thing had been there.

Nope. Victoria Secret models shave their legs…

Victoria Secret models have other people comb their hair for them…

Victoria Secret models live in places with white sand and big sunglasses and gentle winds that blow their hair in just the right direction.

Victoria Secret models don’t have to check for ticks.

But dammit, it’s April in Western North Dakota and I have been reminded, once again, I am no model. And unless I want to show up to a meeting with one of the world’s most loathed blood sucking insects taking up permanent residence on my body, I have to check for them everywhere and on a regular schedule.

Because out here surrounded by grasses and trees and fallen logs and dogs that never stay home, they are indeed everywhere.

Yesterday I found a really large family of them having a Thanksgiving style meal inside the pug’s left ear.

Disgusting.

I wrestled my pudgy black mutt to the ground while I applied Frontline to his back and wondered if they make something like that for wild humans who live in wild places.

Seriously people, after finding a wood tick in my bed last night I have decided I’m not above wearing a tick collar. I mean, I am sure I wouldn’t be the first human to go to these lengths to avoid the plague of the pests. Maybe I could make some sort of fashion statement.

Ugh, it’s intense people, the hatred I’ve had for them ever since I was a kid who would come home from the trees at night only to strip down to my underwear while my momma pulled up to sixty or more wood ticks from my skinny, pale body.

When I was that age, nothing could keep me from those woods. But the ticks? They tried their damnedest.

And we still hate each other.

Well, I hate them.

They love me.

They love the place behind my ear, the spot where my waistband rests at my back, my arm pits, my thick head of hair and even my damn belly button for the love of Martha.

Scratch…scratch…scratch…

You feel itchy don’t you. You’re running your hands through your hair, huh? Calling your husband? It’s that spot on your leg again?

Go ahead, take off your jeans. Inspect for the insect.

I’m doing the same.

The boy on the hill…

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Most Sundays we get together with mom and pops for dinner. After a week of work and crazy schedules followed by a weekend of chores and projects or travel, one of us decides that someone should cook a decent meal, pour some wine in a glass and make us all sit down.

I admit, with the house and my weird schedule, it has been momma making the meals lately.

But it’s one of the things I think we both look forward to, and now that the sun stays out a little longer and there’s no snow in sight, I pull on my shoes, whistle for the dogs and follow the winding creek to my parent’s house over three big hills, nestled in the oak groves. Husband, usually busy putting in the last nail for the day, meets me over there in his pickup and soon we’re settled the kind of easy talk that comes only with the people you’re closest to.

We complement my mother’s cooking, tease her about her bottomless wine supply, talk about work and weather and my stupid dogs. Usually I whip out a story that requires use of an accent and pops laughs and squeezes his eyes tight as he throws his head back. It’s my favorite look on him for so many reasons…

But my favorite is when we start talking memories. It usually always comes to this, a story about my father’s childhood in the very spot we’re building a house. A revelation about how my mom was forced to run track by her cheerleading coach, so she did it…in ballet slippers. Husband’s confessions about the punishment dealt out after fighting with his brother that included holding hands with him on the couch for as long as his father saw fit.

There’s something about being a room with people who you know the best in this world, people who know you in the same way, and still being able to learn something about them. And it doesn’t matter if we’ve heard the same story a few times, there is always something to add, a question to ask that reveals more character, more memory, sheds a different light on this person.

Last night pops shared a story about his childhood that I’m sure I’ve heard before, possibly dozens of times. But it doesn’t matter, I could hear it a thousand times and be transported.

I want to exist in this story, in this ten minute vignette of my father at four years old that somehow sums up everything he became here on this landscape as a child, growing into a man with white hair and a wife who he transplanted from city sidewalks and dance studios to a house at the end of a dirt road in the coulee with party-line phones and a bull snake in the shed.

I love the way he tells it, sitting at the end of the table, plate pushed forward, arms folded, coffee brewing for dessert. He looks to the ceiling as if up there he might catch a glimpse of that little boy, four-years-old with curly black hair riding bareback on a paint pony alongside his father. It’s fall or summer, he can’t remember. But I imagine the leaves were just starting to turn as the pair trotted out of the barnyard, the little boy on his father’s trail moving east toward the reservation where the cattle graze in the summer.

He’s not sure why his father took him along for an almost seven-mile-one-way cross-country trip. At four-years-old, he thinks now that it might have been a little extreme for such a youngster. But ask him then and it was all he wanted to do. Leave him behind? He would have tried to follow anyway.

The pastures out east, even today with an increase in activity, are some of the most isolated and untouched places out here. The rolling buttes rise and fall for miles between fences into creek bottoms with black mud and cattails, creeks that are difficult to cross with a horse, even in the late summer. The oak groves, bordered by thorny bull berry brush and thistle, begin to blend into one another and look the same. I’ve seen them play tricks on even the most familiar cowboy, getting him mixed up on what draw he’s in or where he is when he emerges from ducking and cutting through the narrow cattle trails along the banks.

So there he was, a little boy, clinging tight to that pony as it jumped over the creek and raced up the side hills to keep up with the big horse. And it was at the top of one of those rocky hills that his father told him to stay and wait.

“Don’t move,” his father said as he made plans to check the creek bottoms, to find cows that have been milling in there to stay cool and get away from the flies. “I will come back and get you.”

So on top of that hill sat my father on his pony. He shakes his head now and laughs as he tells it and we take a sip of our coffee, shift in our seats and imagine him as a little boy, wind flopping his hat and moving fluffy clouds that made shadows on the buttes.

He can’t remember if he was scared or nervous now. He searches for a recollection of that feeling in his coffee cup and then rests his chin on his fist. All he can remember is that he was told not to move and so he didn’t. He didn’t move as he scanned the hills and squinted into the oak trees for any sign that his father might be on his way back to him.

And while he was peering into the horizon, holding his breath and the reigns of his pony, someone did come over that hill. But it wasn’t his father in his saddle and cowboy hat, but a Native American girl with long black hair and legs dangling on each side of her bare backed horse under the late summer sky.

“Can you imagine what she thought,” my father chuckles at the memory of this girl, who he recalls was a teenager, but was probably only about ten or eleven years old, so young herself. “Here she found this little boy on a pony all by himself out there on the hill.”

He goes on then to tell us the part of the story we remember from last time it was told here at this kitchen table. He recalls how she asked him if he was ok and if he was lost. He told her that he wasn’t supposed to leave this spot. That his dad was coming back for him.

My father doesn’t remember many of the details of conversation, what she looked like, what they said, but he remembers she stayed with him, she stayed with that little boy with curly hair and a hat flopping in the prairie wind, on that hilltop, more than likely holding her breath and scanning the horizon for any sign of a cowboy coming back.

Now he pulls at his napkin and says though he doesn’t remember how long she sat with him, but when you’re four years old ten minutes can seem like hours. And I can relate, remembering my own time spent on hilltops waiting for this father of mine to come back for me. It could have been hours. It could have been minutes. But she stayed until that little boy had an escort through the valleys and over the creeks, back west to the barnyard and to his momma and big sister waiting with canned meat and biscuits and for a report of the day’s events.

And so he told it to his mother, the story about the girl. And for years to come around their dinner table this would be one of their family’s stories, one of the memories they would share over Sunday meals about a little boy who was my father who had found a girlfriend out east in the hilltop.

And as my father protested, they would throw back their heads and close their eyes and laugh…