Jul. 31, 2005 - 21:23 MDT

HOME ON THE RANGE

Six days a week I get delivered to the door the Rocky Mountain News, but due to a quirk of the JOA (Joint Operating Agreement) on Sunday every subscriber gets all ten pounds of broadsheet format newspaper called The Denver Post. Pretty hard for us folk who are used to the easy to handle, easy to read tabloid style paper.

But I wade knee deep through said publication and usually hit pay dirt in the Perspective section. First I look to see if Ed Quillen of Salida, Colorado has one in. And he does today, but discusses water problems and money thereto, or should I say therefrom in connection to the jockeying around.

The Denver Post usually has a guest columnist on Sunday too and today it is: Greg Gordon a resident of Cascade, Montana; contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. Almost a tear jerker it is, at least for this kid. In full:

Lure of the ranch strong

"In the New West, the image of the ranch still has a powerful attraction."

"I recently attended a benefit for an organic farm in Missoula, Montana, a town known for its leftist politics, environmental activism and outdoors culture, Missoula can be described as part Portland, part Telluride, a "New West" city by any measure"

"So I found it strange that both the performers that evening kept referring to their connections to the ranchlands of eastern Montana, far across the continental and cultural divides. Poet Phililp Burgess, for example, grew up in the northeast corner of the state and talked about how his grandmother had homesteaded on her own, married, and then lost her ranch because of her husband's financial bumbling."

"Folk Singer Martha Scanlan opened with, "Don't Bury Me On The Lone Prairie." Although she's from Minnesota, spent her adult life in Missoula and now lives in Tennessee, her ancestors settled near Livingston, Montana. Images of the open range permeated her songs."

"Afterward I went out for a beer with my friend Mary, a fifth-generation Montanan, who had finally given up trying to carve a life on the family ranch and had moved to Missoula with her husband and son." "Life on the ranch was grim, she said. Although her sister and her family lived there, friends and community were lacking. The winters were long and cold. Unless you really liked cows and horses, meaningful work was hard to come by. Coalbed-methane development loomed oppressively over everyone's life."

"As a conservationist, I fully recognize the adverse impacts of overgrazing, and I've even worked at closing some of t he more inappropriate grazing allotments in the West. Yet, like Philip, Martha and Mary, I have a deep longing for "the ranch," that mythological place that inspires poetry, song and some sort of search for meaning. The wide open spaces of the West might seem a chiche, but as they are being transformed into subdivisions or grids for gas drilling, perhaps we need to pause for a moment and consider the importance of "the ranch" on who we think we are."

"By now, nearly everyone has experienced the loss of a favorite childhood place, perhaps a vacant lot, a nearby stream or a patch of woods, since transformed into ranchettes or shopping malls. The Wal-Martization of our childhood landscape is nearly complete. But Westerners still maintain a collective ideal of the past,. of a time when life was pioneering and we survived on our wits and hard work."

"It is also true that life on the ranch has always been romanticized in fiction and film. Who wants to get up at dawn when it's 30 below and feed cows ? Who would spend a day and a half in spitting snow riding up every draw and hollow looking for a stray calf ? Who wants to experience the gut wrenching pain of cows bawling for their young as calves are shipped to market ? The answer is: Most ranchers."

"I once overheard someone ask Mary's father what he would do if he won the lottery, "Well, I'd just keep ranching until it was all gone," he replied."

"Whatever we think about how some ranchers work their land -- and some work it as hard as they work themselves, by which I mean, too hard -- our identity is still informed by the West's mythology. The easy way would be to deny any connection , to sever the relics of a cowboy past and embrace a cyber future where landscape is synonymous with views, perhaps paid for by bits and pieces of conservation easements. But now, more than ever, our society needs people who work the land, who are shaped by drought and the changing seasons and empty sky. We need to know that the landscape is still home, even if we can't live there."

"That need fills the coffeehouses of Missoula with people who have lost the ranch, both literally and figuratively, and their longing is palpable. For many of the same reasons we need wilderness, we need the ranch to keep us sane, to establilsh a sense of place and continuity in a world seemingly bent on self-destruction."

"It's good to know that every morning, despite bombings, wars, the spread of nuclear weapons and bankruptcy scandals, someone pulls on a pair of boots, rubs a sprig of sage between his or her fingers and squints at the sky, wondering if it will rain."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I am a pup of parents who came from -- Dad from New Jersey, Mom from the South and can't claim to be a relative of any real Westerner.

But I was born and grew up in the West. I remember when Dad would take us way out in the country and the hills, for the most part there were no fences and folks would pull off and picnic where the spirit led, and people would picnic and clean up after themselves. In town of course there were fences, for many good and sufficient reasons. But way out, fences were not really needed to mark the boundary of one's property possessions, except if cattle were being run there. But in many parts of the West there is still open range -- no fences at all. If you should hit an animal, you have bought it. A person is expected to avoid driving so fast that they can't avoid striking cattle.

When I was younger I did desire to have a ranch, a cattle ranch and a place to raise horses. I had spent enough time on a ranch with a kid friend of mine that I knew that using a hay knife was damn hard work and that animals needed more care than most city folk realized. The menfolk of the ranch were open and honest and related the difficulties of calving, and all the ills associated with cattle.

But, oh how I wanted to be wholly surrounded by miles and miles of acres and acres -- all mine to be used by me to be as productive as I could be.

Mr. Gordon referred to ranchettes, which made me chuckle a bit. I remember some of the men who worked in Dad's office who bought property west of town, built themselves little houses and barns and became chicken farmers, or possessors of several cows, maybe planting some sort of crops. They all called their places The Ranch or perhaps the Lazy S bar B Ranch or some such. Before I married those folks had given up and moved back to town realizing that they couldn't work a job and be ranchers too, even on a small scale.

I remember how we had to go to get to Boulder or Morrison, how far it was between Denver and Littleton, how much empty space there was between Denver and Golden -- now we have freeways and the towns seem seamless, welded together. Not much viewing except for higher places now and then where one can catch sight of the mountains.

Yes, I had parents from the outlands, but I grew up here where for a short time the "wide open spaces" were wide open. I long for it to be that way now. But it can never be again. Our population has grown so rapidly, houses, apartments and condos are going up at an insane rate. Lowry Field once an airbase is almost fully developed with housing now, housing for rich people or for people who can hock their souls to loan companies so they can buy. Stapleton Field, vacated and the aero-business gone to Denver International Airport way out in the area that once was farmland, is almost full of new housing too.

Almost a hymn to me is HOME ON THE RANGE . . . . . . . . . . .

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