Bittersweet
It’s 6:00 am and my grandson and cattle partner Brinan Varian is already gathering our cattle. Brinan is on the go and I am just rolling out of bed. After trying to wear out my toothbrush, I take five different pills that I think help me, but I know help the Pharmaceutical industry. Now a look in the mirror and I see a bald head that is in vogue at my age and is worth a smile. Next, I slip into the same clothes I wore yesterday because if you didn’t do anything to get them dirty, good sense says wear them again and a morning shower is unnecessary as I didn’t do anything that would require a shower. Zee is still sleeping so I try to slip out unnoticed. My day usually starts when I go to my next-door neighbor Mike and Lilly Massey, my daughter and son-in-law’s house for coffee. But this morning, I need to get down to the corrals and help weigh and ship 312 head of 950-pound feeder steers that I have sold. It’s almost 7:00 am our usual time for cattle, cowboys, and cowgirls to arrive from a holding field that’s close to the scales. This time things are a little different because as I arrive I’m just in time to see the last load of steers weighed and Mike says “They gained 303 pounds for the season.” I answer “It’s not often that the rains come just right and the cattle market is good at the same time.”
My grandson Brinan and I, closing the deal on our first day of partnership in the corrals I built in 1962.
So much for helping weigh the cattle and that’s when nostalgia grabs my attention and says, “Remember when Zee, you, and 3-year-old Katy had just moved into our new home that in no time would have two girls and two boys living in one bedroom and Zee and I in the other.”
No time for chit chat I had corrals to build because, in the initial purchase, I got 8,000 acres of land with very few improvements meaning no corrals. After only three years of being a rancher, I was already a “Junkyard Junky” which has served me well over the years. It’s amazing how many things I have bought for 10 cents on the dollar that went into building a working ranch. Two miles of 4” thick wall steel pipe was for sale when an abandoned oil pipeline that was going to send oil from the San Ardo oilfield of southern Monterey county to Avila Beach then to be loaded on oil tankers and taken to a Long Beach refinery was scrapped.
My nostalgia again grabs my attention and takes me back to the winter of 1962 and I’m digging post holes for the 4” scrap oil field pipe and setting the now 8’ long post in concrete and wherever there was a gait I went up 12’ and over all gates so no gate could sag. I learned to arc weld building those corrals and they're just as good today as when they were brand new.
I’m very proud of all my children and grandchildren who are so skilled with cattle and horses and then can plumb in a watering trough, fix an electrical problem paint a house, etc. Just all in a day's work. For me, I don’t have to prove to my banker that I’m still solvent any longer so the motivation to get out of bed in the morning is now only out of habit. But, and it's a big one, last year I bought a new Can-Am side-by-side that lets me drive anywhere on the ranch. It has all the bells and whistles that in my youth would be sissy stuff, but today I love my heating and cooling and electric windows and windshield with wipers. It’s turned me into an observer of if there is enough water for the cattle that Brinan just moved to a new pasture. And is Mother Nature happy with what’s going on? I’ve become not a real bird watcher, but I notice all the birds I see and question how the other critters that call the V6 home are doing. I still like writing about things that I think are worth writing about. So I leave now with a pretty satisfied sense of accomplishment and again a dash of nostalgia for all the parts of my past that happened. I’ll look forward to tomorrow, saying “Come what may, it might be worth writing about.”
See Ya,
Jack