blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

Soaking the Dirt

By Bryce Andrews, 7-07-08

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In the morning I drove down to the hay meadow, got out of the truck and pulled on my hip boots. I dosed my hands, face and neck with insecticide and then crossed the fence slowly, making sure each rubberized leg cleared the barbs by a good six inches. I’ve learned to protect these boots—even a small hole can soak you in a hurry. 

The grass was up to the rivets on my jeans. As I took my first steps into it, I marveled at how quickly irrigated crops spring up in the long, hot days of early July. Still wet from last night’s shower, leaves and stalks flicked droplets of water on me. Each step sent two small clouds skyward, a whining gray one of mosquitoes and a yellowish one of pollen. The mosquitoes mobbed me looking for a sliver of non-toxic skin. The pollen curled lazily in my wake, tying knots in the air like smoke off a cigarette tip. 

In front of me was a level expanse of green, punctuated by the wooden handle of a shovel. Taking a bearing on the handle, I walked through the grass. I curled my fingers slightly and let seed heads swish across the backs of my hands. This brushed the mosquitoes off, and made my skin itch. 

Irrigating down here should be miserable work. The mosquitoes are, to quote the owner of a neighboring ranch, “thick enough to pack a guy off.” On a still day like this, each step added to my bloodthirsty retinue. In spite of a thorough saturation with DEET, the bugs hovered close around me. They flew into my nose, ears and mouth. They stuck in my eyelashes. Every once in a while I sprinted a few steps in an effort to lose them. Running shook more pollen into the air, whetting my acute allergy to grass. Panting, sneezing, and salivating, I walked to the shovel.

Ted, the ranch manager, taught me how to irrigate. When I first started working on the Dry Cottonwood and Ted was showing me the ropes, he would disappear around 1:00 PM every day. Before rattling away in his battered gray Toyota pickup he would say: “I’ve got to head over to my place and move some water.” The first time I heard that expression I took it for a euphemism. As the dust settled, I wondered why he couldn’t just go behind a tree and save himself the trip. 

I studied the ground around the shovel. Water was pooling in the nearest tap, but not flowing through. The soil beyond the bank was damp but not soaked. I would set my next dam here.

An irrigation dam is simple: One edge of a tarp is folded back and sewed to form a sleeve. A stout pole is threaded through and cut to extend a foot or two on either end of the plastic. The way we use these dams isn’t much more complex: Water is diverted from some upstream source—either Dry Cottonwood Creek or the Clark Fork River—and sent burbling down one of our main ditches. The main ditch enters at a pasture’s highest point and runs along the uphill fence. Every six paces or so, there is a nick in the ditch bank. They aren’t big openings, just eight inches or a foot across and a few inches deep, but the taps pass water enough to flood acres of thick green grass.

I work from upstream to down on the main ditch. I place the first dam just below where the ditch enters the field, leave it for a few hours, and then set the next dam a few taps below it. When I’ve got the tarp spread out, braced with sticks and weighted down with stones and shovelfuls of mud, I pull the uphill dam and let the water charge by. It is fronted by a muddy wave that bends the bank grass over like a gust of wind. I run ahead and stand on the front edge of the dam when the flood arrives. My shovel blade breaks the force of the water’s initial surge. Using two dams, I leapfrog down the ditch.

Spur ditches depart from the main one at intervals. In the field I worked this morning they strike off roughly perpendicular and then swerve subtly to maintain a gentle downhill gradient. Water flows shallower and slower than in the main ditch. Each spur ditch wets the land through its own set of taps. To soak the field I start by placing a dam at the low end, then work my way back toward the main ditch. I walk up the ditch from each new set, cleaning out the taps with my shovel. As I get further from the dam, less water moves across the bank. At the first tap that isn’t flowing I stick the shovel in the ground as a marker.

Orbited incessantly by mosquitoes, I pulled out the shovel and set the dam so that its pole spanned the ditch and the tarp lay on top of it, clear of the rushing water. Climbing down into the ditch, I stretched the tarp upstream. As smoothly as a person can in hip-high rubber boots, I sunk the tarp’s edge into the water and stepped onto it with both feet. My weight held it in place while water rushed in, ballooning the plastic into a taut curve. With the shovel, I dug clumps of muddy earth from the bottom of the ditch and dumped them along the front edge of the dam. 

With a few good clods heaped on the tarp, I climbed out of the ditch. The dam held strong, and I stood still watching the water rise. It spilled out through the nearest tap, muddy at first and then clear. I looked across the grass and imagined water from this new set creeping between dry stems. Most of it would reappear as rich growth. Some would return to the nearby Clark Fork River. 

I said this work should be miserable, but it isn’t. Quiet, slow and generative, it feels like a tremendous, sustained in-breath. It’s miraculous: I water a million plants with a few dams and a shovel. I get to stand alone in the midst of them, smell the dirt getting wet, and listen to water moving. 

It won’t stay quiet enough for that. Soon there will be a crowd of people and a succession of machines. The apparatus and rush of haying will arrive, and we will cut the grass.

Week 6

“On Rivers and Ranching” is a blog by a ranch hand working on the Clark Fork Coalition’s Cottonwood Creek Ranch to unite conservation and ranching practices in the middle of the nation’s largest Superfund complex—the upper Clark Fork River. Click here for more.

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