Monthly Archives: July 2011

TO CONTINUE WHERE I LEFT OFF YESTERDAY…..

Arm resting on my open window, I started my careful cow-pie-avoiding weave.  In desultory fashion, heads wagging and tails switching, the cows moved out of my way.  The calves, like all young ones, took the diversion of my car’s presence as an excuse to wiggle, buck, leap and spring hither and yon.  All was moving along well until I found myself fender to nose with a large black cow. Her thick pink raspy tongue licked her nose.  We were close enough that I could count the long black eyelashes above gentle eyes, which surveyed me with an expression of tender sadness and perplexity.  “Why disturb my reverie by making me move?” she seemed to ask.  “Until you came along I had all day to decide whether to go or left or go right,” I imagined her thinking, if indeed she were capable of such a thought.  “Do you really expect me to make such a crucial decision now, just because you need to get to the other side?   Of me…”

She was right of course.  I couldn’t honk at her to move.  After all, I was transitory.  She lived here.  (more…)

There’s a two-lane blacktop that runs by our ranch headquarters, a throwback to what I imagine Route 66 might have been like fifty years ago. For most of the day it’s empty except for an occasional cattle, hay or logging truck roaring past on its heavily-laden way to the auction barns and lumber mills of the Front Range of Colorado.    The big rigs are passed by sprightly Subarus sporting the requisite mohawk of a bicycle or two sticking up from their roof.  A caravan of RVs may lumber along, towing boats or other vehicles behind, interrupted now and then by the burping chop of a Harley Davidson club.

This highway might seem unique, but it’s not. There’s another even emptier one about 13 miles west of us.  Like two long arms passionately  hugging the rambling sagebrush hills in between, the two highways meet and cross over in our county’s main, and only, town: Walden.  They form two sides of a snaking, skinny triangle, the base of which  is a sparsely used dirt road that just happens to start right across from our hay shed.
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