blog: ON RIVERS AND RANCHING

Two Points of View

By Bryce Andrews, 7-21-08

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7

On a ranch, something usually goes wrong. A cow goes lame, a gate is left open, the creek dries up, the engine rattles faintly—shit happens. The real work is noticing in time, which requires a person to focus deeply and constantly on things that seem mundane. I’ve always appreciated this aspect of the job because it shrinks the world to a manageable size. It has taught me to read land and animals as intently as I would a book.

I. Temporary Fence:

Earlier in the day I crossed Section 35 with a bundle of orange fiberglass stakes. Every fourteen steps I paused, drew one out, slid a metal sleeve over its half-inch diameter end, and pounded it into the dry ground with a hammer. I sunk each stake until the top was level with the pockets on my jeans. This usually took ten swings of the hammer.

After that, I walked across the pasture trailing a single wire like spider’s silk. I held the spool in my left hand and it clicked in time with my steps. At the top of a hill I stopped and turned to look at what I’d built. It wasn’t the standard snag-your-jeans-and-draw-blood barbed wire—this fence was minimalist, flexible and temporary.

Behind me the wire was clipped to the thin fiberglass posts, and it hung in graceful arcs. Made from interwoven filaments of white plastic and conductive metal, the polywire was no thicker than baling twine and light enough to sway in the breeze. Ahead the line of driven stakes bent south with the curve of a ridge. Two hundred yards away the orange posts were hard to see. A hundred yards beyond that they were lost against a backdrop of Bluebunch and Lupine.

When I reached the other side of the pasture I looped the wire though an insulator and pulled hard. The wire snapped straight between the posts, raising a fence where there was none. I looked down the line as it angled from post to post and finally was lost to distance.  My eyes were drawn across the grass and the broad expanse of the Deer Lodge Valley to the far horizon. I stared up at the jagged gray line of the Pintler Mountains, and Mount Powell like an arrow pointing at the sky.

II. The Road:

We take the truck as far as it will go, crawling uphill over rocks that look like axle breakers. In the worst places, Kendra climbs out to spot. She guides me with gestures and I trust her enough to drive blind. After a nerve-wracking mile, this old logging road is thoroughly blocked with downed timber, so we hoist our packs and start walking.

An hour’s hike takes us through the forest, and then we pop out into bright sunshine at the foot of a steep, grassy slope.

I remember this park. It always caught my eye when I looked up from work on the ranch. It seemed big from across the valley, and it doesn’t disappoint up close. We labor up the slope, stopping every few minutes to breathe and swat mosquitoes. When we reach the top, we sit facing the valley on chunks of pure white rock and drink water.

III. From Above:

Although we’re far below the top of Mount Powell, we have climbed high enough to change the look of the Deer Lodge valley. It seems flat from here, like a map spread on a table. The river is a dark winding line, and the irrigated fields around it resolve into simple green shapes. I can see Dry Cottonwood Creek and the bench just north of it where our cows are grazing. The uplands are uniformly tan, interrupted only by the barely visible lines of gravel roads. I can’t see any of our fences from here, but know where they are from walking them.

Ranch work presents me with a steady stream of little challenges: Herding our heifers through a gate, setting an irrigation dam just so, leading a sick cow to water, splicing wire, felling trees, tacking a horse, setting out salt. To do these things well and safely, I have to concentrate completely on them.

On a ranch, something usually goes wrong. A cow goes lame, a gate is left open, the creek dries up, the engine rattles faintly—shit happens. The real work is noticing in time, which requires a person to focus deeply and constantly on things that seem mundane. I’ve always appreciated this aspect of the job because it shrinks the world to a manageable size. It has taught me to read land and animals as intently as I would a book.

To be up here looking down on the valley, the river and the benches that flank Dry Cottonwood Creek reveal something else entirely. I am high enough to see whole systems instead of details: Slopes birth creeks that feed the river. Roads split, multiply and angle back like Etch-a-Sketch doodles. Traffic races on the interstate. Grass and trees jockey for position on the doorstep of the mountains.

We sit together on white stones, looking and thinking. I remember the fence I built this week, how I worked down the line and stopped to clip the wire to each post. The clips are small, no bigger than thumb and made of a thin but stiff wire that goes three times around the fiberglass post and finishes on either end with an open loop. My hand went up and then down in a practiced motion, trapping the wire between these two oppositely bent loops.

I looked up every once and a while, but mostly I stared intently at the clips, the wire and the posts. Sometimes I slid them a few inches up or down the posts to keep the wire at a uniform height. I smelled dirt and listened to the buzz and thud of grasshoppers getting out of the way. After a while, a dent developed on the skin of my thumb from squeezing against the clips. It stayed for hours after I stopped working.

To see if the impression is still there I lift my hand from the white rock and hold it in front of my face. My stuck-out thumb obscures Section 35, the ranch, and the rest of the Dry Cottonwood drainage.

Week 8

“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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