Wintertime Diversity

Part One

It’s that time of the year again when we occasionally see snow on the ground.  Although it looks like this year we may skip the snow entirely.  Makes me think that if I were a bit younger and more agile, I’d be tempted to pull out a battered and beaten-up tow board (yeh, you read right, tow board, not snow board, as that is how it started out) if for no other reason than to look at it for the memories it would conjure up.

 I would need some extra agility, though, to wrest it from some dark, forsaken corner, bending either around or over what seems to be an extra bulge in my midsection that is a recent addition.  I told the lady at the pharmacy the other day, when she commented that she liked my shirt, that it was getting harder to find ones that fit.  “Apparently,” I said, “I had broad shoulders in my day, but they seemed to have slid down a bit and it’s really hard to find a shirt that accommodates shoulders in one’s midsection.”  She looked me up and down and then burst out laughing.   I expect the bulge to go away any day now, as it came on quite rapidly which signifies, to me anyway, a most likely temporary existence.

I should probably charge a small fee for the next discourse, should you venture on to read it.  The fee would cover any harm saved to your person from some of the risks we took, could we say, in R & D.  (Research and Development) But I’ll waive the fee, as reading thus far has probably exacted coinage enough in general forbearance.

Winters in southwest Kansas can be tiring.  You may be wearied with endless snowfalls, or you may be wearied with stiff, raw north winds without any snow, howling away for weeks on end.  Then again, you may swing between late summer temps and outright winter weather several times each day, forcing you to carry your entire wardrobe in the back of your truck.  All of this can verge on driving one to distraction. 

So one day, my friend Ron and I hatched a plan to drive away some of the madness.

We would go snowboarding. 

Bear in mind, that the nearest hill with even the most remote snowboarding tendencies was a good thirty miles away, and the total glide distance might be sixty feet or so, if you managed to snake it back and forth on the way down. 

But our plan didn’t include hills.  It planned on harvesting the vast flat expanse of open wheat fields.  Ron would furnish a four-wheeler, we would find some rope, and all we lacked then was the tow board.  Neither of us were in the mood to spend a lot of money, so we set about building one.  Afterall, it may be, we reasoned, that we will happen upon a fantastic new design that will take the world by storm. 

Our first effort was simple.  A 1 x 10 board approximately four feet long with flashing nailed to the bottom, front cut at a forty-five to the center and 1 x 1 strips nailed on perpendicular to the tow board proper. 

We set out to learn the art.

Within 30 minutes, we had to make modifications.  The perpendicular strips were too severe of an attitude to maintain while under full load conditions and we tended to slip off the board after about ten feet of being pulled along. 

Our modification put the front strip at roughly a thirty-degree angle to the board.  This worked much better as far as being able to stick to the board. 

Now, as we encountered longer runs, say forty feet or so, we discovered another modification was necessary.  What concerned us was what happened when we tried to steer the thing using foot signals and pressure.  When we directed our tow board to go into a right turn, it would abscond into the opposite direction.  For a while we compensated by simply reversing our turn signals, but no great amount of speed could be built in such trial runs. 

Envision the torso concentrating on a right turn and the lower body diametrically opposed in direction.

While this attitude of position can be maintained with great talent and dexterity, which each of us possessed, it was less than relaxing, and when attention to detail waned, the falls taken were spectacular. 

Because of the oppositional forces at work, one left the tow board in much the same stance as he had been, only now because there was no board to claim friction to, the hands clawed madly at the air on one side, the body proper had assumed a horizontal attitude, and the feet kicked violently on the other side, trying for a purchase on something substantial. 

The kicker here, was that we had enough gyrations to set a top-notch gyroscope in motion but said gyrations can be described quite accurately as lopsided ellipticals while the falling one made his way back to the blessed earth, thus canceling out any gyroscope effect. 

One last difficulty remained, and this was when contact was made with earth.  Whichever side of this mass in motion hit the earth first had the advantage, as it soon calmed itself into subservient repose.  The other side still had to wind down, and this didn’t always bode well, as the fellow on the four-wheeler was now in danger of falling off and spraining his eye teeth because of uproarious laughter.

So, we pulled our experimental project off the field and headed back to the lab for modifications.

This time, we took more flashing and fabricated ½ inch deep by approximately 1/8 thick fins to the outside edge of the board.  These fins extended from the rear of the board ¾ of the length toward the front.  It was a simple fix and we raced back to the field to try it out.  Our problem was remedied.  Except we had over remedied it.  Now the board held true in direction.  No more of this diversified turning.  We thought we had this one in the bag, until the four-wheeler man started his turn.

The board kept on straight and true, while the rider was towed off it and to one side.  The fall was far less spectacular.  In that we failed.  He just more or less hit the ground at an angle, on his side, and remained in that position for some feet, skidding along to his final stop. There didn’t seem to be any need to prolong this phase of R & D.  

We were homing in on our final product and this time our adjustments in the lab proved to be the right ones.  We trimmed back the fins to only a quarter of the length of the board.  It worked brilliantly.  In today’s slang, ‘We were cooking with gas.’

By rocking back just a tick on the board and using the back leg to apply downward pressure and using the front leg to push sideways in the direction you wished to turn, we could make this work. 

Except now we had another issue that I wish to discourse upon.  The snow had melted a fair bit, and there were large brown, muddy spots barren of any snow.  Let me share with you, based on our time of R & D, that there are two ways to respond to these hazards.  One way, once the muddy spot has been encountered at a high rate of speed, is that you continue your purchase on the tow rope and immediately morph into very lengthy steps. 

These steps will need to span 20-30 feet in order to maintain speed and also keep your hands on the rope.  The snow board, as it can now be properly called, stops in its tracks upon arrival into the mud.  The problem with working it this way, is when the four-wheeler driver listens to that little imp whispering to him, and continues driving, acting oblivious to the need to slacken his pace, maybe even speeding up a bit, and meanwhile peeking back at the ever-widening steps taking place behind him and the facial gestures that seem to match the math of the steps.

The second way is to let go of the rope immediately when the mud is encountered.  This is the quickest way to end the ordeal.  But there is an extra hazard with this approach.  You will face plant every time.  That may be survivable, but western Kansas mud is the next thing you will need to deal with.  It’s one thing to deal with it on your clothes and shoes, but it’s quite another to work the stuff out of your nose.  If you could attach a crank to the side of the nose somehow, you would have just invented the worlds smallest sausage, uh, mud stuffer, provided you could find casings that small.

I’ll Take the Spicey

I am a lover of spicey foods and chocolate sauce.  The one wounds, the other heals.  In fact, I’ve recommended my wife’s chocolate sauce, properly heated so you can just begin to smell the vanilla flavoring in it, as a medicinal remedy for your typical sore throat.  I say a spoonful of that stuff does wonders, both for your throat and your general outlook on life.

I suspicion I could get rich quick by marketing that chocolate sauce as cough syrup; the downside would be that folks would start abusing the stuff and it would soon be labeled an illegal drug, and then none of us could have it. 

Let’s keep it the way it is now.

I haven’t always had spicey food.  My mom is a good cook, without doubt.  But the home she was raised in, and it was the same with my dad, had post-depression era cooking influence.  Thus, they cooked simply, and with what they had on hand.  I ate a lot of hamburger growing up, and today it is still a favorite food of mine.

And then, one fine butcher day, I discovered how other folks made their sausage. 

You could say I’ve been actively engaged, or perhaps even married to, anything spicey since then. 

There’s a limit though.  Don’t give me a menu that says the entrée is spicey and to use great caution, etc., etc., and then have me eat that same dish and all the while search in vain for the thing they call spice.

No.

If it says spicey, I want it spicey.  Simple as that.  I’m old enough now, and after three times that I can vividly recall a total meltdown and going up in sweat and smoke, I’ll be careful.

I know you think I’m really pouring it on don’t you.  You probably think I’m one of those ankle biter dogs that makes a lot of noise and doesn’t have the guts to really bite, except tiny little nips in frantic forays of panic driven drivel.

And I know for a fact that I can’t handle it as hot as Bryce can. 

But I have to say that I was totally smoked, I’m mean stoked, this last week at the local Wendy’s.  They had two new sandwiches on their menu.  Both were chicken.  One was a barbeque type that really got me visually with the scrummy looking onion rings.  My wife got it.

The other was a jalapeno popper sandwich that featured a nice amount of some really good-looking creamy jalapeno cream cheese.  So, I went with it, figuring if it didn’t meet my spice criteria I could finish up with the last of my good wife’s sandwich.

Then, when I was ordering, the guy asked if I wanted homestyle, grilled or spicey. 

“I’ll take the spicey.” 

Let’s say I got my moneys worth that day.  Both in flavor and in spice.  Because not only was the chicken spicey, I counted close to 8 jalapeno’s lurking in its smokey interior.

And it happened to be the third time that I can vividly remember of a total meltdown and going up in sweat and smoke.

I’m gonna get me a ‘nother one.

*****

That love (of spicey and chocolate sauce) also made me instinctively choose who my wife would be. 

Not because she likes those two flavors.  It’s quite the opposite for her. 

But I’ve come to know her personality a bit better through the years.  And what I find today is about two equal parts of spicey and chocolate sauce.

The one wounds, the other heals.

And, in a good wife that’s exactly what you need. 

Because none of us are so good and sweet all the time that we don’t need a little something that burns in the truth once in a while. 

*****

Oh, and if you want that chocolate sauce recipe, message me.  Or my wife.

But I don’t want you to make cough syrup out of it.  That is my original idea, and if anybody’s going to get rich, it should be me.

Fire and Loose Tow Ropes

Part one

It sounds and feels like the most natural thing in the world to call my favorite pair of sunglasses my Dearly Beloveds.

But to fix a name to our old feed truck is a lot harder to do.  It needs a name.  It has the character to stand back against the wall and defend its name.  I suppose part of the problem is, that for me, names need to be right, and sometimes it takes a while for a name to settle in as right.  Boola is right for my dog.  No ands, ifs or buts.  Of course, Bryce and the rest of the family will disagree on that point, but then they haven’t a feel for names quite like I do.

I imagine the closest I might come to a name for the old girl would be Katie. That would come from a childhood memory of a story read to me about a valiant snowplow who cleared the roads.

This may turn into a two-part dilemma yet if I’m not careful.  My friend Savanna says I write way too long on my stuff.  I’m sure she will groan when she reads this piece.  But, seeing she has had a bit of interaction with the old girl herself, maybe she will forgive me this time.

I was driving along the road one day, pondering things and life in general, and my thoughts drifted over to our cattle (or lack thereof) operation.  Our pens were primitive, and our feeding system even more so.  What, I wondered, was the best direction to pursue regarding it?

On a whim, I pulled my phone out and swerving enough to make my wife chirp, had she been with me, typed in Craigslist in the search bar.  I had never been on Craigslist before and didn’t know what to expect.  Next, I typed in ‘feed truck’ in the search bar.  Immediately a listing popped up for a 1979 Ford truck with a Harsh feed box and electric scale on it near Ulysses.  It was approximately 50 miles from me and would sell for $4,500.

Since I had yet to even ride in a feed truck, much less understand how they ran or any other what ifs about them, I called my friend Travis and gave him a bit of a run down.  I asked him his opinion.  He said if I wasn’t going to buy it, he would buy it basically sight unseen to have around for a loaner whenever his main feed truck needed repair.   He said it was a very good deal and shouldn’t be passed up.

Somewhere in our conversation Travis offered to ride out there and take a look at it with me.  The pictures all looked favorable enough, but with it being so old we wanted to check it out a bit better.  I think Travis sensed how very little I knew about it all and felt it would be best to go along to save me from myself. 

It’s good to have friends like that.

We arrived and looked the old girl over.  The man who had it for sale was gone, but his 11-year-old son was an excellent representative in place of his Dad.  They had done an impeccable job of cleaning her up.  I felt bad for the old girl immediately, because I knew it was probably as clean as she had ever been and ever would be. 

Travis looked things over and mentioned several definite advantages to her, and we decided to take her for a test drive.  She fired right up, sans mufflers, sans brakes, sans title, sans gauges.  Sans means without, or minus, in case you wondered.  We toodled right along up to 25 m.p.h. and that’s when she let a bit of her personality show.  She didn’t want to go any faster, and that was that.  She threw a small hissy fit and muttered a few dirty words.  I can’t print them here out of respect to her since she had a change of heart later.  In fact, you wouldn’t recognize her today from what she used to be back then, she’s so changed and all.  And, Travis told me 25 m.p.h. was plenty fast enough for a feed truck around the pens and that he would still buy her as she was. 

We rolled back up to the yard, and what feeble brakes we had faded out almost entirely.  We shut her down, and then she showed us another side of her nature.  Water was spitting out from a crack in her radiator.   

Not to be outdone, as we wanted to take her home with us, sulky personality and all, Travis asked the lad on hand if they had any superglue and Styrofoam cups.  He ran off to get us some.  He told me if you break the Styrofoam into small pieces and mix it with superglue, it forms a very durable, binding paste quite similar to J. B. Weld. 

I was amazed at his ingenuity and in no time at all we had the paste mixed up and applied to the top part of the radiator.  I was a bit dubious as to whether it would work.  We let it dry and harden and then fired the old girl back up.  His paste was the real deal, but the ole girl just arched her osteoporotic back, moved over to another weak spot in radiator and hissed angrily at us from there.  It was obvious the ole girl was feeling threatened by the prospect of new ownership. The man selling it called about that time and I explained what we were up against.  He generously offered to get the radiator fixed for us and we could come back in two weeks to pick the girl up.  We agreed and I told him I was interested in buying a gooseneck stock trailer that was for sale on his yard.  He seemed stoked by that. 

Sometimes, we play a game around here called Scotland Yard.  In this game there is a bad guy, called Mr X who wears a black cap and who plots his way around the board while trying his best not to get caught.  He operates in secret, but all the while he sits in the hot seat with the rest of us trying to figure him out.

I felt like Mr X driving that old girl home. 

I didn’t have much, if any brakes.  I had to predict well ahead what the road might do and what traffic might cross.  I didn’t have a title or tag, so I took as many back roads and field roads as possible.  I didn’t have any gauges, and didn’t know the old girl very well yet; I also knew she was still sulking at new ownership and didn’t know what tantrum she might choose to display and where.  

I soon found she liked coaxing and coddling.  She seemed to be sort of an attention addict.  Coax her, coddle her just right and she responded by letting me drive her more than 25 m.p.h.  But overdo it, and she immediately gave up and headed for the shoulder of the road.  And she gave me the cold shoulder for some minutes afterward whilst I learned my valuable lessons regarding her.  We soon came to a fairly good understanding, and she started to trust me more and more, so that by the time we were half-way home I had her hand, and she had me on my knees with humble gratitude, and also temporarily deaf.

I still say it’s a wonder we made it home without a breakdown.  Although I overshot our drive because I forgot I didn’t have brakes and had to back up. 

We definitely had a love/hate relationship during those first few months together.

The boys and I went over every detail of her, changing bearings and modifying as we thought best.  When we felt brave enough, we ordered a load of corn and started mixing it with roughage to begin our foray into the calf starting, small feedlot business. 

There were days when she went back to her old habits, and we nigh well lost our patience with her, but it wasn’t long, and she joined us and started pulling with us every step of the way. 

When she did that, it was as though she was young all over again, and today, I think she is the most liked piece of machinery by everyone in the family.

Okay Savanna, you win.  This will be part one.

Working a Cold Iron

Back in the day, a long time before I was born and an even longer time yet before I started messing with cattle, branding was done differently.

I’ve read of how an entire summer was devoted to the weaning and branding process.  Cowboys and the mess wagon would start ranging out from the home ranch, across thousands of acres that comprised the ‘free range’ area where their ranch boss’s cattle roamed together with cattle from other ranches.  As the days passed, the drag net of cowboys that had fanned out in a wide circle slowly came in tighter and tighter until one big rodeo was about to take place with the gathered group of calves and their mama’s.

Some ranches were lucky enough to have corrals to run the stock into.  Others used a live corral of constantly circling cowboys. 

The cows, with calves by their side, were identified by ranch brand and were sorted off accordingly.  A fire was lit, and a short iron rod with the brand welded to the end of it was placed, brand first, into the fire. 

Next, those calves that had been sorted off where team roped.  One fellow tossed a loop over the head, the other tossed one that snared one or both hind legs. 

The calf was stretched out just a bit between the two horses to keep accidents and deaths from happening.  And accidents and death did happen, out there on the range; it wasn’t uncommon to come back to the home ranch at the end of a summer with those stoved up and lame, never to ride the same again.  And, if things went terribly wrong, and your horse and the bull calf you had dallied onto got into a storm, then when the first ranch supper was had at the end of the summer roundup you’d be missing, and there would be a small stone and a fresh mound of dirt out on the range to mark your new whereabouts.

Once the iron was hot enough, a third fellow retrieved it from the fire and applied its searing heat to the side of the calf that was roped.  And once branded, the calf was turned back out to winter with the rest or brought to the home ranch and started on one of the famous cattle drives of the west or, in later years, driven into town and loaded on a stock car for the nearest big yard and auction.

There are some guys around here that still do the branding process much like it was done 200-300 years ago. 

They do it for old times sake, obviously. 

I applaud them.  

For two reasons. 

The first being that they have mastered an art that I couldn’t begin to master.  If they happened to see me out riding, just riding and nothing else, it would cause them a great amount of pain. (from laughing so hard) With my arms all akimbo, my knees flapping like low slung wings, and my head cracking back and forth, particularly out of time with the steed under me, causes pain to anyone looking on, as much or more as to me and my horse.

The second is, it honors those who have carved this country out with brute strength, sweat and fortitude.

And I think honor, or respect to the traditions and men who made them, is a fast-fading thing these days.

*****

For the most part, today’s branding operations take place in a squeeze chute.  One by one the calves are moved into the chute, head locked in the head stanchion, and the branding iron, heated either with an electric element or, as in our case, a propane torch, is applied to the side of the calf in the same way it has been done for hundreds of years.

Now it so happened one day that we had a larger than normal group to mass treat with meds, eartags and brand.  As we were getting towards the end of the group, I noticed the propane torch (weed burner in our case) was burning a less than optimum flame. 

And it was on the next calf that Austin started branding that I heard myself saying the words that have been common to cattlemen for years.  And in our genre, we use that phrase to describe both the branding process and other aspects of life.

“You’re working a cold iron,” I told Austin.

He was pushing the branding iron against the side of the calf.  It was smoldering away there, the calf was bawling, and when he pulled it away to look at the brand, there wasn’t much of a brand.  He reapplied it, hoping to get what little heat was left in the iron to work and get the brand to take.

But it didn’t take.

The only recourse was to step back, reheat the iron, and then, carefully, not cruelly, apply it. 

The brand always takes with a hot iron.

*****

And it’s no different in life. 

I may not say those exact words, either to my boys or myself, but you can be sure I’m thinking them when I see us haggling away at a project with subpar results.

I remember times when I have been frustrated with the job at hand, or the behavior of those I am responsible for, and the general outcome of such.

It’s often that a guy works a cold iron far longer than necessary.  And the results in life are the same as they are in the chute.  Neither side is okay, and all you end up with is an unsettled mucked up mess.  You are frustrated and upset, and the other side is cagey and defensive.

Such a situation does an injustice to both sides.

The answer is the same in life as it is by the chute.   Step back, rethink, and then apply the iron carefully and decisively.

The brand will take and both sides will be the better for it.

Don’t work a cold iron.

Toad

I named him Toad when he was a wee babe. 

Except the womenfolk threw a hissy fit. 

The amusing thing was, they couldn’t come up with a good alternative.

Now we need to be clear on this.  I don’t care for cats.  Never have.  They are too wussy.

But Toad and I have connected, at least somewhat.  For sure at claw and teeth levels.

This fellow named Toad, though, has several things about him that make him a bit more definable, and dare I say, affable.

He showers with me occasionally.  Not so much anymore, but he used to a fair bit.  Most of the time he’ll sit at the back of the shower, batting away at the streams of water and just as much trying to shake them off.  Sometimes he’ll really get into it and will be comically sitting in a puddle of water under the faucet, batting at drops of water coming off the faucet while the shower runs full stream overhead.  Comically, as in delayed comically.  Because I know he doesn’t know he is sitting in a puddle of water, since I have adjusted the temperature of the water to just the right amount of lukewarm, so he won’t realize until he is totally soaked.  And suddenly, he realizes.  He comes flying right by me and out the back of the shower, blasting water everywhere.  Talk about a strung out stringy looking cat.  His name should have stayed Toad. 

He bites. That’s his love language for sure.  I’ll take a lot more abuse from a cat if he bites.  If all they do is purr and sit on your lap, no way.  You ought to see how the womenfolk flitz from room to room when they know he is mad.  I can tell by their panicky looks toward their ankles that he has been denied his food by them and is on the prowl to make up for it.  (The womenfolk have put him on a diet.  I told him it was okay to bite their ankles in this instance.)  Just yesterday, I heard a chirp and then a somewhat agonized yelp from the sweet daughter.  Upon inquiry, it seems she saw the dude stalking her ankles, tried to circumvent the situation, and lost.  Score!  One more thing about his biting; he has redefined unsuspecting.  You try to pet him (rare occasion) and you hear a mild, faraway purr thrumming to life.  You stroke him once more, and, BAM!  They usually aren’t such bad bites, although I’ve had a welt or two last a couple of hours after he sank his fangs in.  Just the other day, I thought I had him outwitted.  I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and thought, “This will have him fit to be choked.  When he goes to bite me, he’ll get a mouthful of sleeve.  Let’s see what his expression is then.”  You know that little bump of bone on the outside of your wrist?  Yeah, well.  There was no sleeve there.  And he laughed at my expression.

He hisses.  All in fun, to be sure.  Sometimes I need to hold him tight, on the odd occasion he has been misbehaving.  He complains and mutters perverse and dire things at me.  And then, suddenly out of the blue, he hisses at me as if I’m the one to blame.  But when I let him go, he never runs off like a mad cat would.  He stays close by.  You can tell he really appreciated the bonding time, even if he didn’t know how to properly show it.

Oh, and one more thing.  He likes pasta noodles.  Cooked, of course, and fed by hand to him one at a time.  

It seemed, backing up a little, that the ladies held a mutiny on his name.  And that was back when he was quite young and easily intimidated.  So, during that time, they came up with the name of Cricket.  I quickly dissented, but it was three against one, if you count the cat in on their side.  And he seemed, as I said earlier, rather intimidated by them.  He thought what he did next was a strategic move on his part.  It was.  It got him named something other than Cricket.  But it took a fair bit of forbearance on my part. 

He started stalking my earbuds.  I couldn’t believe it at first, but then again, cats have never been known to possess huge amounts of common sense.  I came out to the living room early one morning to find my favorite set (I use the kind with wires to hook up to my computer) vandalized.  One bud had a cord, one had nothing at all.  Several shriveled up, chewed on pieces lay nearby.  I bought a $6 pair from Walmart the next time I was there.  I hated them.  One side was loud and the other quiet.  And any time the cord rubbed against my shirt it amplified that scratchy sound to my ears. (I have scratchy shirts)

But I made sure to store them up on the bookcase where the cat was forbidden to jump. 

Until I forgot to store them there.  I wasn’t as surprised to see this set scrapped.  The cat had been looking at them with lustful burning eyes for a few days already.

It dawned on me after that set scratched out that I might be able to get a bargain on Ebay.  I did.  Two pairs for two dollars.  And they worked like the first set.  I was very pleased. 

This time, though, I had them where they should be, and somehow that dude got them and had them mangled before I caught him at it.

I was informed, shortly thereafter, that I needed to pick up some medication for the cat at the local vet office.

Which I did.  And while I was there, the lady asked me what the cat’s name was so they could enter him into their system.

“His name is Earbud,” I said.

And, thus he is registered, much to his own chagrin. 

Just the other day, my daughter was opening the mail, saw a bill from the vet, and after a moment’s glance threw it down with a sniff of disgust.  (I was going to say snort, but that wouldn’t be the thing to write about a nice girl like her.)

I looked at it, and in plain bold lettering it said, Name—Earbud—Dewormer.

The ladies still call him Cricket, although he and I know the truth of the matter. 

I registered him as Earbud to keep him humble, but he knows, and I know, his real name is Toad.

Ride for the Brand

I first heard that term from my friend Stanlee, as we were walking to his new horse barn.   Supper was out there that evening.  His ranch is located on the bottom side of Texas, right near the Mexico border.  It was a beautiful evening, the way I recall.  They are situated near enough to the Gulf of Mexico that they almost always get a few clouds in their sunsets.  They have their own unique beauty to them, even if they aren’t western Kansas sunsets.

We had been talking, Stanlee and I, about a few things pertaining to life and our families as we ambled towards the horse barn.  The way I recall, my boys and his boys were out riding some horses in the dry riverbed nearby and were just then showing up in the yard.  Of course, yard would need to be defined by Texas standards.  The house was fenced in on all sides, and cattle guards made for free range calves right up to the fence by the house.  In the nearby pasture-turned-holding-pen ranged over 1,500 head of various size and breed of cattle, all supplemented with a steady diet of leftover cakes and rolls from the nearest Starbucks. 

Inside the fenced in area was a nice green lawn, sprawling porch, and backyard firepit.  A few newly planted trees stood still in the warm evening air.  A couple of family dogs lounged in the shade of the house.  With a few timid calves nosing through the fence at us, it made for a very peaceful setting in which to live and share time with friends.

One of Stanlee’s friends rolled up to join us for supper. 

Stanlee told me that just a few days previous, they had a bunch of new calves to work and brand.  He had called this particular friend up to see if he could come help.  He had.  He had dropped what he was working with and came over right away.  And even though the job had taken right up to midnight to finish, and even though his friend had a day job to face early the next morning, he had stayed until it was done.

“He rides for the brand,” said Stanlee.

I’ve pondered that statement in the years since that evening. 

The friend that Stanlee referred to didn’t have much “dude” attitude, if any at all, to him. 

He didn’t wear clothes that gave that look either.

In fact, if I had been asked to pick him out in a crowd, I wouldn’t have been able to.

I’ve come to figure, in the years since, that the fellow who Rides for the Brand ain’t your uppity, showy type of guy.

He’s the kind of fellow you can give a job to, and you know you can walk away without ever having to think about it again.

Because you know the fellow who Rides for the Brand will work at what you gave him to do with quiet resolve, even though the whole world is spinning on around him, and he’ll work at it until it gets done, and done right.

There have been way too many times I have supposed the job I was doing could be done in a lesser way than it should have been.

There have been times when I came up with, what seemed to me anyway, viable alternatives that made me leave early for something easier and more fun.

I’ve known myself to up and quit before the task was even started.

But that ain’t Riding for the Brand, and I know my friend wouldn’t want to hire someone of that caliber.

It takes a fellow with a steady hand, good nerve, and a tough personal standard of seeing the thing through to make that grade.

Ride for the Brand.

Weed Eater

The pressure washer at the John Deere facility where I worked was unique in a couple of ways.  For one, it had a hose that must have been at least 100 feet long.  Someone definitely was thinking when they added that length of hose to it.  The equipment we worked on was large and sometimes needed to be washed down. It was often necessary to use that extra length to get the job done.

The second addon was the nozzle.  Most of today’s pressure washers have several interchangeable nozzles that vary in size.  With a quick snap of the collar, you can have them changed in no time.  But this washer was before those times and only had one nozzle.  But . . . you could slide the nozzle back on the shaft and change it from high pressure to a low pressure, far reaching, high volume, stream of water.  It easily shot a half inch stream of water 60 feet out.

One day my friend Gregg, who worked in the same vicinity as I, was assigned a weed eater to work on.  This one didn’t run right, and he commenced to check it out in the shop.  We, who were working nearby, quickly got tired of the incessant whine that could bore right into you from any angle.  Finally, someone hollered at Gregg and told him to adjust it outside.  There was a reason he wasn’t adjusting it outside in the first place.  It was cold out there.  But he acquiesced and moved to just outside the shop entrance door. 

For some reason this weed eater carb must have been harder than most to adjust.  So, while that incessant whine was not in the shop anymore, it soon started to grate on our nerves with its rhythmic up and down engine speed.  And, again, for some unknown reason, Gregg seemed to think the best r.p.m. to adjust it was maxed out to the limit. 

I started hearing some grumbling going on again and peeked out the door window.  Now at this point, it is necessary to put a word of defense in for Gregg.  He was doing the best he could, and I seriously doubt anyone of the rest of us could have done any better. 

What I saw, as I peeked out the window, gave instant inspiration for cessation of those engine rev’s. 

Do you know what happens to a guy’s britches when he squats down?  The front part, where you snap or button them together gets really tight, and the back part, which usually fits fairly snug against your back, now gapes open in a bit of a v shape.  Since Gregg was wearing a pull over, and since it wasn’t tucked in, the cavity that leered up at me was simply too much to ignore.

I sneaked around to the other side of the building, where I knew a water fountain was, ran the tap a bit to ensure the coldest water possible, and filled a paper cup. 

I quickly made my way back around, hoping the water wouldn’t warm up too much from my hand.

I waited until we had another full throttle session going on, one of his hands on the throttle, the other on the screwdriver adjusting the carb, and slipped the door open. 

And the water disappeared into that crevice faster than my money does at the end of the month. 

Gone.  Not a trace to be seen.

There was an instant throttle response.  So quick, in fact, that the motor died altogether.  I expected a bit of laughter or some sort of whiplash. 

But nothing. 

My friend uncoiled from his crouched position, and I quickly pasted on a fake Calvin and Hobb’s grin.  The grin drained off my face as the dilated pupils of my friend’s eyes make direct contact with mine.  The way I remember, no words or threats were shared in that moment of friendship, and I, having accomplished what I set out to do, went back to work in the now peaceful and quiet shop.

*****

Several months later, I was hunched up under the gull wing door of the combine I was working on.  These doors swing out and slightly up, making a wide space to work in near the bottom of the door, but a decidedly small space near the top.  And I was near the top, working on a wiring harness that required, like I said, a scrunched-up posture. 

Suddenly, and without any warning whatsoever, I was completely deluged.  At first, it didn’t make any sense.  My mind raced to the possibility of some leak on the combine, but it didn’t smell like any combine fluid, so I dismissed that quickly.  And the deluge didn’t stop.  And it seemed, from deep underwater as it were, I heard some maniacal laughter going on somewhere near the door of our shop.  I was so scrunched up that I couldn’t disengage very quickly, and besides, any quick movement would have resulted in crashing my head against something nearby.  And the deluge still didn’t stop, even after I had extricated myself and was standing on my own two feet. 

I made a mad dash for the source of this mighty confluence, and quickly staunched its flow.  But the damage had been done.  My jeans were a sopping mess, and it was only the start of the afternoon.  By the end of work, I was a chaffed and raw individual.  Thanks of course, to the extra-long hose that Gregg had to string out clear into another shop, and the soaker/flush option on the nozzle. 

I could complain that the discipline meted out to me was enormously out of proportion, but, when it is all said and done, it probably was a fair retribution for the ignominy born by my friend for something not his fault.

Code of the West

I know him by where he sits in the sale barn.  If the auctioneer’s booth were at 12 o’clock, then as sure as the wind in Kansas, he sits at 3 o’clock, 3 rows up from the bottom, across the ring, down a little, and a bit cattycorner to where I sit.

You get to know folks in the sale barn by where they sit and by their number.  Sometimes you get to know their name. 

I also know him by his brown Stetson hat, vest and long sleeve shirts.  I know him for his bow-legged walk.  And I like to watch his quick, sure scribe, with his left hand, on his buy card.  Neither does it take but a few seconds for all of us there to recognize his brand when his calves start filling the ring smack full with a spanking good pot load of black 8 weight steers.  He knows what he’s doing, and he ought to.  He’s been at it since he was 21, and I’d peg him in his mid-70’s today.  I judge him to be every bit the man today he was then, minus a thing or two he told me about. 

“My dad taught me two things real well,” he said.  “How to work hard and how to cuss.  I’m tryin’ to rid myself of both of em’, but so far, I’ve only been having any reasonable success with one of em’.  I do pretty good, but ev’r now and then I slip a little.”

But so far, what I have described about him doesn’t fall into the Code of the West category.

It was his gesture in the Animal Health store that solidified him in that section of men in my mind.  And it also told me his name was Raymond, not that it mattered so very much.

There were 5 of us standing in line there to get our meds for the calves we had bought or were fixing to buy.  One young buck was filling out paperwork so he stepped off to the side and motioned Raymond forward.  Mickey, the gal behind the counter, asked Raymond what he needed.  He looked back at me and said, “All you gettin’ is a handful of tags, go ahead.” 

I told him I had a fair bit more to get and had plenty of time; that I’d wait for him. 

We talked shop for a while as his order was being filled; he told me some of the meds and implants he normally used, and I told him what I liked to use.

But it was when he looked back at me and told me to go first that I could tell he knew the Code.

That Code is still alive in parts around here.

It’s what had my friends, Lyndon and Ryan, tell me, “Just put a little fuel in it and we’ll be even,” after I had used their truck and cattle pot for a day to haul our stuff to town.  I argued that I had put miles on and got the pot dirty.  “No,” they said, “We need to haul some of our calves soon.  We’ll wash it down then.”

It’s what made my friend Travis call me while I was still at the sale, (he had left and was picking up a few things in town) and offer to come back to the sale if I had more calves than I could bring home in my trailer.

That Code had my neighbor Clyde, tell me, “Just leave your heifers in with our group,” when we couldn’t get the last two that had been on the run caught, and also had him load those heifers up in his own trailer and bring them over to my place.

It’s what made a complete stranger step up to the load out dock I was driving up to and open the gate and hold it for me while I drove through.

It’s also what made 44, that’s his buyer number, not sure of his name, step up to me at a sale barn I was new to and say, “You mean they let you across the state line?”, and then thump me on the back with a grin.  I knew I’d be okay there with him around.

That same code had my friends, Brent, Taylor and Jason, leave what they were doing the minute they heard we had calves out, hop on four-wheelers, and ride, some of them, 9 odd miles, to my area to help out until as many as could be found were found.  They didn’t want pay when it was all said and done, either.

You don’t see the Code of the West so much anymore in the towns and cities.  Sure, they have their dandy western stores where the smooth skinned, soft handed young men and ladies all dressed up in their glad rags greet you at the door and try to imitate all that the code stands for.  I venture a guess they would turn their nose up and find some feeble excuse to leave, should I show up with my rusty, rattly old pickup and trailer that still has a fair bit of that green splash drippin’ here and there on it. 

What those dandies don’t realize, is that all the code really stands for is gettin’ dirty, doing a lot of hard work, and spending a lot of your own time on someone else’s behalf.

But among cattlemen and old-timers like Raymond, the Code of the West still lives.