At least I can say I branded this year

We loaded up some cows to take to the sale barn up in St. Onge (my etymology:St. Onge->Sainte Ange->Holy Angel) today. 6 cows, three calves: no problem, right? They are in our creek bottom, and the creek is very high, almost impassibly so. And of course they got pushed in the wrong direction and ended up on the opposite side of the creek. I managed to eek my 4-wheeler across our washed-out crossing, but getting them back across was challenging. The grass was wet, the cows were feeling good in the cool weather, and the chase was on. I thought we finally had them so they'd go down to the crossing, but my father was talking on his cell phone and they went the opposite way I wanted them to. Ridiculous. I was so pissed at him, I left and went back to the house. I wasn't sure if I was going back. I played a little piano downstairs, and then decided that that was about fair; if he could take a cell phone break in the middle of moving cows, then I could take a piano break. I came back refreshed and substantially less angry. The cows were still uncooperative, primarily because they were being led by the cow-bitch number 202 again. I'll be glad when she's gone, but we're keeping her till the fall, apparently. Since she has twins, we need to keep her with the herd so the calves have a chance to grow up on milk stolen from the rest of the herd.

We loaded some of our cows and some of the neighbors' on our trailer and my father took off. This afternoon, that neighbor, Chris McFarland, needed to brand three of his calves, the youngest and latest of the season. My mother and I went to help. We poured and preg-guarded two of the cows: the pour-on is for parasites and the preg-guard is vaccine to protect against common bovine pregnancy diseases and disorders. Pretty painless. They bawl and complain when you stick them with the needle, but that sort of pain is easily justified in the scheme of things.

We started up the propane torch to heat the irons and filled the vaccine guns. The three calves each got three shots, a fly-preventing ear tag, and a brand. In South Dakota, branding is the only state-regulated way of identifying cattle. Each owner registers a brand, the cost of which varies based in part on its simplicity and its location on the animal. Some locations keep more of the hide intact and rest over less-desirable cuts of meat--these increase sale value; others require several different 'pieces' to complete and thus slows down the branding process. I have had friends complain that such practices are inhumane or a form of cruel and unusual punishment. In a sense, they are right; these practices are inhumane, certainly inappropriate for human application. They are also correct that it is painful. I can only justify it by making reference to my basic presuppositions: animals are rightfully and ethically owned, sold, and traded; and owners have a right to protect their property. No perfectly effective alternative to branding has yet arisen that protects both these principles.

There was a movement toward an RFID system for cattle, swine, and poultry a couple years ago; it encountered strong opposition on two grounds: the increased bookkeeping and equipment costs and its inability to completely deter theft. RFID tags would be somehow inserted into the body of the animal, probably the ear, and so it is not even very difficult for someone after some free cattle to load them out of a field, take them home, and cut the RFIDs out of their ears.

In recounting how we castrate bull calves to someone I met recently, she said she didn't want to hear about it. I simply said that I simply wanted to explain to her the world we live in, the real world. Idealistically, she retorted that no world in which animals must be brutalized was the real world. Well, idealistically, sure. In an ideal world, there would be no theft, we would need no identifying marks on our property, and cows would only breed when we want them to with the cows we want them to. For another sense of the word "real," though, her world is very much not real. Maybe we should work harder to make those two worlds the same. That criticism I can understand. But it does no good to ignore the current truth of the situation; that is not how we move toward a more humane world for both people and animals. Where we are is not really up for debate; it must be recounted frankly and truthfully. After that, there are only two things that can be productively debated if we want to change the way things are: where we want to end up, and the way we should get there.

Those calves we branded today will not be irrevocably damaged by what happened to them today. The vast majority we emerge as calm, well-tempered steers and cows. Cows do no brood over pain the way people do; I would argue that they lack the self-reflective capability to really experience pain the way human beings do. As best as I can tell, this has been the case in my interaction with cattle over the years, but I'm sure many disagree. Many actively anthropomorphize animals and see that as a good thing. For me, though, my tendency is the opposite. Since we own and trade animals, I tend to want to emphasize the differences between them and people. Psychologically, it helps me deal with and live out the things we have to do with them to make a living.

Ellsworthian Dreams of Annihilation

When we were moving cows the other day, I was sitting on a neighbor's porch with the hired man and we saw a B-2 Stealth bomber make a graceful turn directly over the house we occupied. I remember saying, "That's not a sight people see every day, at least not to live to talk about." Though I am much more familiar with the predecessor of the B-2, the logically named B-1, such sights are not surprising in our area. My family's ranch is about 4 miles off the end of the runway of Ellsworth Air Force Base, the base that houses a fleet of the planes that did 90% of the bombing in Iraq. On stormy days like today, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between distant thunder and the afterburners of these "thunderbirds" as they lift off. They're running touch-and-go exercises right now, in fact. Whenever I see or hear them, I can't help but think of what these planes are designed to do, the death they entail.

Western South Dakota has long lived with the threat of military annihilation near at hand. During the Cold War, NIMBY principles established north-west South Dakota as the logical place to store over 150 functioning nuclear warheads. Though the warheads are now gone, the silos, like my dreams of their vast destructive power, remain. Not infrequently, I have dreams of nuclear destruction: Rapid City and the base in a mushroom cloud, we the bystanders left to watch and survive in the post-nuclear world. Equally vivid are dreams of a B-1 crashing in one of our fields. In these, this leviathan of the sky suddenly finds that the air will not support it, and it hurdles, slowly, reluctantly, but inevitably, toward the ground.

I would not describe such dreams as nightmares; though I am usually extremely nervous, it is never about fear of my own destruction. More accurately, I would describe my reaction as excitement: in the nuclear dreams, the excitement of a fresh start, knowing that whatever comes next is entirely new and untested, that I get to be there to see it unfold, and, above all, the knowledge that here, in this place, I have the resources to survive in such a world; in the crashing dreams, the excitement of having an event of worldwide significance take place here, in our very own backyard, to be the first human being to approach the wreckage, to look for survivors, but primarily, to know that finally, the eyes of the world will be pointed to this place and that for once, this place matters in the eyes of the world.

How much of these weird dreams are my own idiosyncratic personality is, in the end, irrelevant. I could not have them without this place, in these circumstances; at least to some extent, it is the place that has shaped the person that I am and not the other way around. And I am not the only thing that is different because of the military presence. Our dogs are terrified of thunder, but indifferent to B-1s. Our cows are amazingly docile even when a B-1 comes in for a landing no more than 1,000 feet up, louder than any Harley or NASCAR race.

The planes have changed all of us, affecting even my subconscious and sleeping thoughts. My dreams of their destruction are dreams of hope, hope in a return to a simple world where everything is once again important.

Pizza and the Internet

Growing up near Rapid City, it was uncommon for me to feel disconnected from the privileges of city life. Most of my friends were city kids. I went to movies in town. I even went to the only Catholic school in western South Dakota--for us a twenty minute drive that, for most other rural folk, would have been unthinkable. Some disadvantages that I can think of were merely economic; though farm and ranch people sit on incredible amounts of wealth, liquid assets and cash are usually pretty thin.

Others were strictly geographic. As a child, I would go to friends' birthday parties and the like, and it was always a thrill for me to have the pizza guy show up at the door after nothing but a phone call. When I would have friends on the farm, if there was pizza, it involved a lengthy trip to the joint--there is no such thing as rural pizza delivery. I've long speculated that this is the reason my parents always bought from the Schwan man. Ice cold goods delivered straight to your door! Though perhaps not appealing to the town family, it was a bi-weekly ritual that continues to this day. It's just too bad their Silver Mint Bars no longer come wrapped in silver-colored wrappers.

It is probably trivial to complain about pizza delivery. As far as disadvantages go, it's pretty pathetic. But the other disadvantage that I remember from my youth is one that stands in a chain of rural disadvantages: the wired disadvantages, the disadvantages of being off the grid. At the turn of the century, cities and towns quickly became electrified as local power plants operating on D.C. started to pop up. Lines connecting small towns cropped up and into these nearby farms could occasionally tap. But most rural people were well behind the curve, though. Rural electrification didn't really take off until 1933, when the New Deal appropriated substantial funds to bring electricity to the countryside. Much the same was the case with the telephone, though the infrastructure for electricity perhaps made that transition easier. Speaking historically, these were significant disadvantages. Electricity didn't come to my ranch until the late '40s. That's 40 summers of frequent trips to town for groceries or at least ice. 40 years of batter powered radios or no radio at all. 40 years of trips to town (or of delivery boys out of it) for the news quickly delivered by newspaper in town.

My mother recently said that these sorts of disadvantages are simply part of the territory; if you choose to live out here, this is what you get. Okay, sure. But two qualifications: no one, strictly speaking, gets to choose where they're born and raised; and urban residents need to consider the debt owed to rural people in general. I'll have more to say on the second one throughout the summer, I think. I'll let sleeping dogs lie for now.

Rural broadband is tricky, though. When President Obama mentioned it in his inaugural address, my first reaction was that he didn't know what he was talking about. The cost of such a vast project was unthinkable; we'd looked into it, and it ran several thousand dollars for an ethernet line to our home. Multiply that by several million and we have a huge, expensive project that, frankly, most people don't care about. I've heard whispers of it since then, but know little of its present likelihood. Given the federal economic situation, or at least the rhetoric around it, it seems unlikely to go forward any time soon. It would require something the scale of the New Deal all over again--and, for the time being, the time for new deals has passed.

Rural peoples are good at masking these disadvantages, though. Even if some technology could be beneficial, its practical unattainability makes it instead "superfluous"; "We're probably better off without it." Though we just got internet at home this last summer when my dad ran for county commissioner, we do have it now. It may not be broadband, but I'm not going to split hairs here. Things are changing; this is good.

But geographic disadvantages are deeper than we can see, sometimes. "Out of sight, out of mind" all too often characterizes implicit urban attitudes toward agriculture; all too many people don't care where food comes from, or how it is raised. As problematic as the "organic" movement can be, it does at least have the consequence of shedding some public attention on agriculture. This too is good, but in itself the organic movement is not and cannot be a solution to this geographic form of discrimination, if I can call it that. I guess that's in part what this blog is for, though: bringing the rural into the consciousness of the urban.

Life and Death on the Ranch

‎I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

-Melville, Moby Dick

I've encountered a good deal of death on the ranch, many instances of which make for disturbing stories and unsettling memories. A smattering of significant deaths: accidental decapitation of kitten; cow that accidentially bled out in the corral; the rotten horse in stagnant water; the dog got kicked in the head by a bull. It's never pleasant to encounter and rarely do people around me want to hear about it later. Anyone who knows me knows that that would never stop me, but more often than not, I don't tell these gruesome stories to gross people out. Talking about death is, for me, therapeutic. I helps me to put each specific death in context and reminds me of my own mortality. Most ranchers, I think, would understand this sentiment. As rough and tough as ranchers are, stories of life and death--both human and animal--are always near the surface. They are part of our cultural memory, and never something taboo. Unlike "city people," we cannot pretend to avoid death. And those of us who deal with it healthily, talk about it.

In addition to its status as part of our cultural vocabulary, talking about death serves another purpose: meaning-making. For the common or senseless or casual animal death, telling other people about it makes it seem less common, senseless, and casual.

Take the other day, for instance. My mother was walking up our (1/2 mile) driveway to get the mail, and the dogs were walking with her. They sniffed out a stray prairie dog, one that we call a "scout," looking for someplace to start up a new colony. One dog chased it until it fatigued, and the other picked it up in its mouth and ran with it back to the house. My mother later found it there. The dog hadn't finished it off, she had merely broken its spine so that it dragged its hind feet on the ground, lifeless. She told me it was out there, and I grabbed a gun, a .17 with a scope set for 50 meters or so. I sighted in, but made sure to aim well below to account for the proximity of the beast. The first shot almost certainly missed--I tried again. It didn't occur to me during this time that the humane, though more difficult, thing to do was to put the gun right up to its head; no missing, no time waiting to bleed out. It looked at me, seeming to plead for death. I obliged it, though it didn't die immediately. I was out of rounds, though, so just in case I had missed the second time, I went in the house and grabbed by .22 and fired a couple more times, though it was no longer moving at that point. My mother came and disposed of the remains. She later felt bad that she had done nothing to stop the dogs, but at the same time reminded herself and me that the animal is a pest and needed to be killed to prevent his friends from following.

The story itself is nothing. It's sad, meaningless, unstoppable in its progression from start to finish. As soon as it was discovered, the dog was going to die. But the recounting of the story, it's real relation to other human beings, gives that pathetic, broken, now-rotting creature a chance to live in memory. It means nothing to the prairie dog itself, but it does mean something to me.

The same could be said of any other of the other stories I could recount (don't worry, I won't, at least not now). Humans are meaning-making creatures, we thrive on our ability to make sense of the world around us. This claim need not be either an agnostic claim or a theistic one, but it can be either. Ranchers are storytellers, and in so doing, they experience and interpret the life and death around them, creating meaningful events where such meanings are not easily apparent.

Here is where the Melville quote at the beginning comes in. For ranchers, death is a meaningful event. They recognize and acknowledge its tragedy while shaping it in the context of their lives as a whole. Their attitude can seem nonchalant, even careless. In this way, the rancher can seem to be the "Fejee" of Melville's story. But the truth of the matter is deeper. The truth is that through such casual recollection of the end of various lives, ranchers acknowledge the power of death and yet assert their own power to control it by presenting a meaning for what is of itself wholly meaningless. Do "city people" thus acknowledge death? Do they recognize that their next (non-vegetarian) meal meant the end of another creature's existence? O civilized gourmand! Do you not know that your ribeye was earned at the cost of many stripes? That years of unthinking mowing were summed up at the point of an air-gun? That a heart bled and finally stopped forever on account of your insatiable appetite?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no "greeny weeny." But as wrong as the absolute equation of human and animal life is, the absolute subordination of animal life to any and every human use of it is perhaps worse. Augustine says that the world is to be used, not abused--and it most certainly can be abused. Each animal that passes through the doors of the slaughterhouse meets its end in meaningless pain, but that meaninglessness is changed into its opposite only if we dare to recall the story of those deceased creatures of God. It cannot rightfully pass into our stomach without first passing through our thoughts and--yes--even our prayers. If we respect that life by remembering its death, then perhaps we can hope to share in the light judgment that awaits Melville's Fejee at the end of time.

The Move

Cattle, too, are migratory animals. Like the bison of these plains, they flourish best when they move from place to place, following the grass as best they can. Of course, today those decisions are only marginally up to the herd; they go to whatever mile-by-mile section of land we find for them. Once they are moved to a new place, the herd instinctively spreads out, entering grazing patterns only advanced mathematicians can plot or make sense of. But I'm ahead of myself.

Right now, it's just after calving season, so the cows are still paired with their calves. When it comes to the move, this means making sure they stay paired up. Usually, this means no more than making sure no calves slip through the fence as we drive them down the road. This last week, though, that task was rendered all the more difficult by the fact that we were splitting the herd in two; because we rent most of the land we operate on, we often have to haul cattle in trailers from one far-flung pasture to the next. The pairs that were staying nearby had to remain with their calves; the ones that were being driven by truck had to stay with theirs.

These days, we drive our cattle on 4-wheelers. They can be dangerous, my mother often reminds me, but so can the horses which they replaced. In fact, it was a nearly-fatal equine accident involving my mother that brought about the shift to 4-wheelers in the first place. If I get the courage up one of these days, I might tell that story. Four-wheelers, in any case, require less work than horses. You don't have to saddle up a 4-wheeler and you don't have to feed it hay and oats, though both 4-wheelers and horses develop quirks in the way you have to ride them. The ride to the pasture is most certainly faster than it would be on horseback!

I am somewhat tempted to make the form and content of this post coincide, representing the monotony of the drive through the excruciating recollection of plodding bovine minutiae. I will resist this temptation to the best of my ability. We split the herd in two, 45 or 46 in one group and the rest in the other. It was my job to count "the rest" while the others sorted out a mistake we'd made. Counting cattle is not easy, especially when the herd is discombobulated during a move. Cows come to the slow but inevitable conclusion that their calf isn't at their side and make a dash to discover where it might have gone. When they aren't bawling after their young, they shift locations in their imperceptible yet unstoppable grazing expansion. I took up my post in the middle of the herd and spent at least a half-hour turning in slow circles, hand outstretched, trying to get a good count. 80...80...79(damn!)...80...82(what?)...78(what the hell!). No math major, masters program, or ph.d. seminar has taught me a good way count the herd.

While we were moving them, my dad got bored, and started collecting aluminum beer cans strewn alongside the road. This seemed uncharacteristic to me at first, as my father is anything but a "greeny-weeny." When I pointed this out to him, he retorted, "I'm making money." I started picking them up too, and I found one that had been left unopened--a Busch Light from over a year ago. Gross. Later on, there was a POP! and spray of white foam from amid the herd; one of them had stepped on another unopened can. I approached the location, and behold! another unopened can was right beside! They must have been really drunk.

The last two miles were uneventful, comparatively speaking. We stuck around a few minutes to make sure none of them were going to run back looking for a lost calf.

The day after or the next, we took the herd of 45 to load on trailers. There was one without a calf, number 11, and one with twins, number 202, so the number of cows and calves should have equaled out. It didn't; we had an extra calf. While they trucked the first loads, my father sent me and the hired man out to look for the missing cow. He told us to look west because the neighbor had cows there, and it must have gotten in with them--he couldn't bear to think that he'd actually made a mistake yesterday! Turns out we did; there was one cow from the moved herd looking very alone and with a very swollen utter to boot. We drove her back south and when they were reunited, that calf sucked the cow dry, to the cow's relief and the calf's eventual discomfort.

Number 202, though, she was a handful. Most cows are docile, and even most bulls aren't out to pick a fight with a human. 202, though, was what we call "ornery," a special kind of cow-bitch. I like to pride myself of being pretty brave when a cow's charging me; she might act all big and powerful, but if you hold your ground, she'll back off and turn aside. Usually, they're just testing you, seeing if you're confident. But every now and then, if you watch closely, you can see it in their eyes. They carry themselves differently. It's hard to describe, but in the 1 out of 100 cases when you see it, whatever it is, you get out of the way--she is going where she wants. And I had the misfortune of standing where 202 wanted to go that morning. I waved my stick, but she didn't stop; I yelled an apologetic, "she's going though!" as I ducked out of the way, to which it was quickly and semi (but only semi)-jokingly retorted, "well, if you let her!" I feared I had lost my touch, that these 9 months away from home had weakened me, made me forget how to sort cattle. I felt better when the same thing happened to another guy there about 10 minutes later. It wasn't just me! Whew! After the sorting was done, we gathered next to the fence with that cow-bitch and her twins on the other side as she pawed at the ground, lowered her head, and made feign to charge. From the safety of the fence, the other fellow she charged quipped, "I'd be ornery, too, if I had twins."

The Ox Yoke

This spring, my father retrieved an ox yoke from my uncle's widow. He had known about it; I did not. It's in very poor condition: the wood is crumbling, it's surprisingly light for its size, and the holes for the iron parts are almost worn through. Its importance rests in its history, as humble as it may be. The story goes that this yoke was the same used by the earliest Heidgerken family to make their homestead in South Dakota in the 1880s. I know of no way to verify this story other than the oral tradition by which it has passed to my father, now sitting on a pallet of mineral for cattle in our shop.

For me, the yoke invokes questions of travel, nativeness, and home. No Heidgerken I know has ever owned an ox, let alone tilled fields or traveled with them. But we are fascinated by this yoke, we hold on to it as a certification of our Dakotan lineage. It is our birth certificate, the physical proof that we are of this land.

But it also proves that we came from somewhere. Those Heidgerkens, of whose stories I know practically nothing, came westward with their wagons, seeking land, a start fresh, and a place to make a living. What they found was, well, Dakota. Then as today, there is plenty of land, plenty of places to make a new start, and, for a certain definition of "living," one can even make that here. Then as today, people come and people go--myself included. My yoke is a 2001 Toyota Camry, my faithful and trustworthy steed that brings me from school each spring and back again each fall. I've made that westward migration more times than my first Dakotan ancestors would ever have thought possible in one lifetime. And even though I spend most of my year--about 9 months--in another state, I still can't help but think of this place as home. This place is where I am from.

Whatever home is, whatever it means to be from someplace, this blog hopes to chart the place that this perpetual student claims in these ways. I am tied--yokeed--to this place, for better or for worse. This Dakotan yoke, sometimes heavy and sometimes light, prevents me from straying too far, so I find I must hymn its vagaries as best I can.