Well, it’s the last week of April- obvious by the layer of snow, cold days with cold nights, and green tips of grass peeping out from the cracked Wyoming earth.
Here are some highlights:

1. Franny Anne was born. I love her.

2. Josh’s shop floor is officially cured. We have a concrete floor that will hold his equipment steady and still.

3. We are moving into the barn. Literally. We’re going to be living in a steel barn. Josh promises to install a wood stove and a toilet before the end of this week, and a fridge and a stove top by the end of next week.

4. Emma Gates has successfully NOT killed either Josh or myself- picture below is Emma and her calf (a heifer) Ypsi Gates.

5. Diego and I explored a new part of town, a beautiful crevasse up the Rawlins Uplift where we viewed not only the breadth of the town, but all parts north and south including the ranch. We sat on rocks, chased rabbits, and watched a buzzing world below. Typically, I don’t love being licked by my dog. I’m not sure why I look so content here…

6. We picked up a mortgage application from the bank with hopes that the yurt will be built by the end of July. Not that I don’t love barns and all, but I’m kind of looking forward to the yurt.

We haven’t quite reached what I would describe as a world of Spring here, but there truly are little tufts of random green grass coming up. I can’t wait for the cows to get there nozzles into it.

There is one heifer still needing to calve. She looks a bit bewildered at the little ones bucking and bawling around her, not quite sure what it means to be standing around without her own. Soon, very soon she too will have a teeny furry critter to play with the other five. It’s funny to watch the babies stand around, trying to snack on the alfalfa hay. The look a bit like I would munching on grass, like a goofy guy not sure how to say what’s actually brewing in the mind, straw hanging from the corner of the lips like a partially spoken statement.

Off to build a space in the barn to lay our heads….

I figure that if you were really interested in hearing about what it’s like to see for the first time tiny hooves, with the bottoms splayed white, coming out of the ass-end of a cow, you would be out here braving the wind and seeing it yourself. It is, after all, not all that interesting. There can’t possibly be that many reasons you’d want to hunch around, your knees creaking, brushing your hand up against dog shit, breathing as silently as humanly possible, all to stare through a grey and dilapidated fence. Your hushed caution comes from straight up fear that the nervous cow will just buck up and refuse to give birth because she knows that you are creepily stalking her during this sort of normal yet odd show. How would that feel, knowing that you are responsible for the hooves that perpetually peep past her tailbone, all because she’d rather not give birth with an audience? But again, if you really wanted to see these things, you’d find a way to live amongst it yourself, right?

As it turns out, cows aren’t so hot on the idea of company during childbirth. In fact, despite the fact that they are herd animals, when the time comes that a cow’s body tells her the baby is going to be arriving shortly, she quietly and stealthily excuses herself to head towards the hills. If that plan is thwarted, the cow becomes anxious and distracted and, as it turns out, pretty much lethal. That momma cow knows that she wants to have the baby in privacy, on a clean patch of ground, protected from both wind and predators. You quickly learn that in that cow’s sight, you are no longer the blessed alfalfa and apple angel, you are a predatory and stalking creature deserving a speedy death- the sooner you can be gotten rid of, the sooner that squirmy little squealer can come out of her abdomen.

So it just seems natural to let them do their thing.

The first pair to awaken to our Meadow Ranch, Wyoming (pathetic) interpretation of spring was discovered after the heifer was missing in the morning count. A cow missing in the “spring” means you might as well put on a helmet and shield before you go investigating the meadows. If you stumble upon her and her calf, you might be in for a scurry of a muddy run back to shelter. Or it might be just fine. All could be calm and the mother might just bellow at you a bit to keep your distance. That seems to be the case when you mostly stay out of the way of the whole birthing process and give the mother her space. Go figure. Our first pair was a sight to see, cuddling together against the sage brush, snow brushed on the long hair of the mother but the baby dry as a desert day. That was the first calf I have ever really had a chance to notice. And geez almighty was he a black beauty.

The next two, well, we are still bruised and battered. If only the two ladies knew our intentions were for the best- that we only stood between them and the isolated hills in case they were to need assistance during their first calving experience. Not their idea of a good idea. And they haven’t been the same since.

But wait, really, if you were at all interested in these things, you’d be out in the Wyoming wind, wading through the spring mud. You don’t need someone to tell you what it’s like to see a cow first learn of her baby… to watch her lick and caress and beg with her voice for that baby to rise and suck. And to see them the next day, together, the mama a bit slow and happy and seemingly satisfied to be curled in with her little one. I don’t think I ever even remotely fathomed what this experience would be like, or how deeply in love I would fall with this intimate connection to animals.

The calf born just this evening makes five total out of six. The last baby doesn’t look to be wanting to come anytime soon. We know that of the first four, three are bull calves and one is a heifer calf. Strangely, the heifer calf is from our wild Emma Gates with the unruly horns (you know, the one that had us climbing the fences to escape from her lovely motherly instincts?). The baby is named Franny Gates, after my mother and hers. Girl calves are named in a heritage breeding scenario like ours, and boy calves are simply numbered. They’ll live a shorter yet substantial life out here with us for about two years. Then they will become part of our cyclical life cycle. They are here with us to die- and quite honestly, they wouldn’t be alive right now if they didn’t have a food purpose. Maybe we all need to realize that that is a cycle that will keep happening long after we are dust again. And none of us would be here if we weren’t meant to only pass through this world, not to stay.

Garrison Keillor with The Writer’s Almanac appropriately sent this to his email subscribers today, a Shakespeare poem. Quite lovely and appropriate I’d say:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

And of Vladimir Nobokov:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Well, five months in, and we’re here, stationed at the ranch in beautiful and intriguing rural Wyoming. But at this point we have as many moments where we think to ourselves, “Where the hell are we?” as we do those moments where we look around and think there isn’t a more perfect place on earth. When my dog and I hike up and out into our never ending backyard, interrupting the quiet wanderings of antlered beasts, I look out at the openness, us perched out upon those rims and think, “Damn, this is a most magnificent arctic tundra.” There is something about facing the blowing and crooked 50mph bitter air, to fall into the arms of a protected rocky rim, comforted by the idea that this just might not be your day to die after all. But with that beauty, you have the bit of beastliness.

This western place is so interesting in that it knocks you down by its fierceness, it drops you through the snows to your knees, sucking your feet into its depths, and then it spits you out as it opens its broad chest of a sky to a view of such magnificent beauty that you teach yourself once again what it means to breathe. Life can pile up into little hills of unorganized chaos, minor landfills storing the disturbances of your world, and those walks sort of create a renewed perspective, shoving all that chaos into one solitary understanding: all that you need is really right here at your fingertips. Maybe.

After the walks, after I’ve returned from my stupor of glorious “space” into a cavernous abyss of possibilities, of what-if’s, I force myself to mentally return to these quiet hikes. I imagine the wind whipping on either side of me and pushing my pup slanted and sideways, reminding myself that the world is only as big as I need it to be. To be honest, the best part of the escape outside is that each and every time the world appears different. It’s never the same. There’s always a new critter, a new brush, a change in the horizon.

We’ve been working on accepting the fact that just because we’ve agreed to attempt to embrace the oddness of what makes this town and this little ranch tick, it doesn’t mean we are solely set to become either of these places or things. Our world has truly not shrunk, as much as it might seem.

Much has happened in the five months here, including many moments of life and death, all seemingly appropriate for some reassuring reason. This place, as we’ve said before, radiates the cycle of life on this earth, antelope and elk bones littering the ground throughout, toys left over from Josh’s early years eerily stuck in old pipelines and holes, green grasses withering and blowing stark, our oldest steer being absorbed into the earth and the bodies of scavengers. We’ve lost friends and family to illness. We’ve reintroduced ourselves to the aged grandparents living in this part of the country. We are trying to become what this place has to offer, absorbing into ourselves the history of those grasses, the needs of those scavengers, the stories and memories of what used to be.

And in all this is the physical work, the physical fighting with the wind and the openness. Josh is sore from work on the steel barn, a structure his dad and great-uncle built years ago. He is putting in a sewer line and running water, and planning the heat source, insulation, and cement floor to come. He’s dreaming and designing the walls and each and every piece of metal bending and kissing equipment. He dreams of a place to change his shoes, from snow boots to steel toes, from hiking boots to riding boots. And when that happens, I think a few pieces of that puzzle might come together. But ultimately, that all depends on if there really is water to be had for living, if life should allow us to continue on in this framework. Should it, so be it. Should it not, I don’t think I would think it to be in vain. This ranch is storied upon five generations. There’s a lot to be lived out upon that fact, and upon the notions we’ll choose to believe based on those past lives.

Grandma’s talking often these days about the stratification of the rocks and hills surrounding us, speaking to thousands of years past, to times when this was a land of water, oyster beds remaining fossilized at our feet. A book she’s reading describes this place as a failed mountain range. Strikes me coincidental, this place we have embraced maintaining stratification and layers of family, droughts, fierce cold, deaths and lives all in this one plot of blowing, sagebrush and rattlesnake infested land. And sometimes it feels like we are trying to operate a failed mountain range. But if we’re committed, what can we lose? All of the work seems to lead towards a common and functioning good for food, animals, and ground. Seems like a pretty good deal to me, overall: dirt, sweat, cracking skin, and tired thoughts that continually teach and challenge, opening up a world of healthier surroundings.

You have to remind yourself that you are here with a mission for a reason. And you must find ways to re-inspire. And you must make art: as sculpture, pictures, words, dirt drawings, or flashes of beauty as form. Anyway, all that just to say that we did a little exercise tonight in remembering the naivete that we knew we would lose! We were always honest with ourselves about that, and perhaps a little too honest. The fall has been a little less far, but I feel like we are a tad out of gear because of it. But oh well. We are where we are, doing the best we can and it’s not too shabby at that. Our list, that hopefully will take shape into a concise mission that a bank will want to fund (even if it does take us months to try)!!

MISSION (seemingly impossible)

▪ lightly tred, heal the lands scars, and conserve the integrity of the land
▪ protect the work of those that cared for this land in its modern history
▪ don’t live so isolated
▪ see clearer, more openly, with hope in what we can actually do
▪ live a life that we believe in
▪ work as a laborer as humans have done in the past
▪ integrate within the cycles, working together with animals in a synergetic relationship
▪ produce that which we use, survive because of, and eat
▪ build a space to exist that is comforting and spatially aware (not self-centered)
▪ choose to live as healthy a life as possible: food, water use, animal protection, stress reduction, reality of that which is important, emphasis on community and learning and teaching and accepting and countering
▪ use less plastic
▪ share with others a whole foods system based on living with and on the land, outside of a commodity market without losing the integrity of our time, family, and interests (we can’t just give the shit away)
▪ fight with experience and kindness the industrial food system
▪ become a resource
▪ spend our time on that which we love or at least find it to be worth the effort
▪ balance. keep art in the picture. make a system of producing food… Art. The communication of that which is life’s reason, is time spent daily, spelled out letter by letter through art. In whatever form we feel completes our wavy and crazy heads.
▪ this is why we live with gramma. in a pink room with shag carpet.
▪ and the stars are pretty great.
▪ and the 9 bovines out there are pretty darn happy.
▪ i just don’t want to have to kill coyotes. or prairie dogs. or rattlesnakes. but who keeps the balance? learning the balance of the land…. a feat worth pursuing. a reality worth keeping our eyes wide open to, a travesty that we choose to not pretend away.
▪ partnerships with animals is another study worth pursuing
▪ thanking the land on a daily basis for existing. Just as it is.
▪ better knowing our native peoples who lived before the extermination of buffalo.
▪ accepting that which is not understood in nature and trusting that it just might know best.

Before we came to Wyoming, in the midst of saying goodbye to what we had learned to know so well, we came up with this original mission statement (to be edited soon due to a heavy emphasis on one topic):

“To live in a world without acknowledging that which makes us human- food, water, and shelter- is to choose to scar the earth and selfishly live until we die. We live once, and in this living we impact all life, be it bug, plant, micro or macro. Our interaction with food links us to an earth that has embraced our beings, creating us as humans until maternally absorbing us back into the earth once our hearts no longer beat.

The food we eat spiritually grounds us as humans into the cyclical earth rotation. We embrace this concept by choosing to simplify our lives with a focus on food, antithetically opposing the profit-driven and consumption-fueled cultural mindset of conventional factory farming. In the life and death of animals, we choose a project that will consume us as consumers nurturing both art and food, seeing eating as art and knowledge; to be stewards and not excavating capitalists of the land. Changing the definition of profit, we will not be foreign to these cycles. We will know what we put into our bodies, into the bodies of animals in our care, and the food that feeds the earth we borrow. In this, art and food will remind us of what it is to be human.”

I think it might behoove most people to occasionally write a mission statement based on goals. It’s good to be able to see it evolve and then learn to say you’re still okay, even if you are unstable.

One of the things that Raymond taught Gramma her first winter at the ranch is that there’s no time to cry over the dead ones. I guess when Josh told her yesterday that we’d lost one of the steers, her tears rolled freely down her face. And of course with the tears of a more than 80 year old ranching woman, Josh was feeling the weight of his day and crying too.

We lost a steer. Josh went to do the methodical check on the cows where you sit on the four wheeler with a dingo gripping on behind and you count. You count twice. Yep, there’s ten. And you either sit there and pet the bull and talk to the cows for a bit, or you zip off to move a couple of black cows that somehow snuck in through a downed fence. But yesterday he counted. He counted again. And then again. Each time there were only nine. He moved closer in and saw all the cows bowing their heads, not eating, but surrounding the still and bloated body of our only not-horned critter.

We called him cross-steer. We lost our cross-steer, the charolais/angus/highland mix, the animal that was always veering off course when we tried to move the group. “That damn steer!” we would holler as he moved towards brush and bumps and holes- I just knew I would sprain my ankle as I tried to suggest he move back towards our path. He was the rambunctious one, always taking to the hound dog when she got that sparkle in her eye. She loved to be ornery and pick on that guy, and I think he loved to pick on her.

He’s gone now. I love each and every one of those animals and we feel a deep responsibility for their well-being. He was to be the first on the list to slaughter. We brought him from Nebraska with the intention of comparing his nature to straight highlands, and also the quality of his meat. It’s a weird prospect, this animal as meat. I know that. It’s not quite real to me and I know it will evolve in it’s meaning, rolling out like a legendary scroll as it answers so many questions left unknown right now. We all take a journey with death. I see our role as ranchers one that dances with death. Yet I’m pretty uncomfortable with the notion that we all die, and that some of us coordinate the dates of death for our food.

Maybe this sounds like I’m ready to go back to the ways of vegetarianism. I’m not. We can talk about that on an individual basis later, preferably with a coffee in hand, sitting on the high rim above the ranch, watching the sun set behind its wall of daily regrets.

Last night in our heavy sleep, eyes coaxed down ever so quickly by a day full of sadness, we heard the chatter and singing and communication of coyotes. The call of a coyote is always ominous, always intriguing, and always eery. Last night as I tried to pretend their voices were only in a nightmare, I gripped onto Josh’s chest and hoped he wasn’t awake. To know what those coyotes were supping on for their nighttime, moonlit dinner brought back the heaviness of all that we have undertaken. It’s not easy knowing where your food comes from. It’s not easy knowing that life isn’t all heat pumped through your vents, cheese pre-sliced for you, and clothes made to fit around every town corner. I mean, I guess it can be, but I don’t really want it to be. I want every day to be a realization that we do the best we can, we live until we learn what it really all means, and we stick together.

Cross-steer is no longer with the herd, and I think they all know it. I think they saw him die, and they were paying their respect when Josh found them. We’re keeping a very close watch on the rest of the herd- as close as we can. They seem to be walking further than they had before and are right now a couple miles deep into the pasture. Maybe it’s just exploration, maybe it’s some other animal understanding that I can’t even begin to understand.

There are theories as to how he died. We sent a vet out who said the tissues had been dead for too long for her to find any results in tests. She also said the pasture looked great, no killer weeds that she could see. And she said his rumen was full and healthy with good grass. It appeared that he had not paced around, but instead plain old laid down and died. Our hypothesis is lightning. We think we heard the original call of coyotes before dark on Wednesday as the first rain in months came down, the sky darkened with charcoal-like clouds. We’ll continue on, paying homage to the steer who journeyed through this western landscape with us, and perhaps journey through our thoughts on food even quicker than anticipated.

I’m so grateful for Josh. I can’t even imagine what yesterday was like, stumbling upon death, then caring for the rest of the herd and juggling the cut and dryness of a vet’s knife. He had to move that steer from that pasture, and to know the smells that Josh encountered and the stiffness of a body that before was so full of life- ah. Thanks for being willing, Josh. You’re a good one.