All Things Dairy

The Ranch Hand’s Diary:

All Things Dairy

Every day is different.

Some days the cow jumps the fence when Jesse and I go out to milk her. Actually, she pulls out of the head restraint with the milker still attached to her udders and backs up wildly against the unlatched gate and thunders away to freedom. She leaves the milker behind. Thank goodness. The suction cups lay mournfully in the grass, the clear tube hangs pointlessly between the compressor and the milking can, and the generator groans out a song without purpose. Jesse and I exchange a look that spells out Oh No in capital letters. Norma’s calf, calling after her, paces fretfully at the electric fence line wanting to get by it and to his mama. Jesse and I chase Norma around the field in an ever tightening circle until she finally jumps the electric fence to rejoin her baby. I guess the nursery rhyme stating the Cow Jumped Over the Moon wasn’t complete hogwash after all.

Jesse and I stand outside the fence panting. Oh lord, now what? We don't know if we should attempt to milk her out. Start the whole process over. Try again. Norma eyes us with wary apprehension, daring us to do it. I wonder if she’s suffering from mad cow disease or acting out in simple orneriness. Greg says that milk cows like a steady routine. And we’re all mixing it up too much for her liking. There are too many milkers and not enough milk cows.

Jesse goes to the lodge to ask for advice. Karen says to stick with what we have. We pour the milk from the milking can into the carrying container. We’ve gotten about half a gallon of milk in what can only be termed a truly Shakespearean comedy of errors. I’m sure it’ll be funny tomorrow. It’s pretty funny now. In fact, it’s getting funnier all the time.

Jesse stays behind to wash out the milking can and put the tarp over the compressor and generator. I carry the milk in. As I filter it I think, At least it wasn't a Shakespearean tragedy. No one died today.

Every day is different.

Some days, I can be found gazing intently into the face of a cooking thermometer. I watch the dial move up and slowly up sometime to 85 degrees and other times to 186 degrees. The trick is to watch the pot so that it never boils. All sayings must be true. Eventually I turn off the burner and then I stand by and watch the dial slink down until finally the milk’s temperature falls to 112 degrees, cool enough for me to add in cultures for yogurt or kefir or buttermilk or cheese. While I wait, I pasteurize milk, cut cabbage for sauerkraut, mix spices for Kimchi, bottle up Kombucha, or hang up cheese to set. Jesse says that I am the Fermenting Führer or the Dairy Duchess. I am spending a lot of time in the kitchen. I am doing a lot of milk related work. She says, “Soon you’ll be the Milk Maid.” Yeah, that’s if Norma stays put long enough for us to milk her.

Norma doesn’t seem inclined to stay put long enough for us to milk her. In fact, she becomes more and more unwilling to be milked. At least by anyone other than Greg.  

She jumps the fence first thing on Monday morning. Greg is there with me that time. Now he can see the trouble we’re all having with her out in the pasture. He chases her inside the fence with a dirt bike and Boss the dog’s help. Michael and I make sure the calf doesn’t get out. We get about a gallon of milk and no more than that.

Tuesday morning as I’m coming in to do laundry I see Jesse standing in the garden. “Norma jumped the fence,” she says. “The baby got out too.” I gaze out across the field and see Greg up on Blue the horse herding Norma and her calf back to the barn. No more pasturing for her. Not for now.

“It’s taking four people to milk her today,” Jesse says when we meet by chance later. “And she’s still not milked. They’re bringing the milking gate back to the barn now.” Norma can’t jump the barn fences.

We hope. 

Eventually, Norma does get milked. And that means I’ll have plenty of milk to use for more yogurt, kefir, buttermilk, cheese, and pasteurization. These summer days, these ranch days, I’ve got my fingers in the pie of all things dairy.

Bear in Mind the Chickens

The Ranch Hand’s Diary:

Bear In Mind the Chickens

It's Tuesday. My day off. I sit on the porch in the sun talking on the phone to my mom. I'm gazing out into the trees when suddenly I say, "Holy smokes! I just saw a bear." The unmistakable shape, on all fours, ambles behind a fortress of trees and out of my sight. I wait for it to reappear on the other end, but it doesn't show again. "I just saw a real live bear," I say to my mom with a touch of disbelief. "Oh wow!" she says.

The bear is the week's big news. Even bigger news on Friday morning when Jesse walks past the broilers only to discover one of the pens smashed, half the chickens eaten or killed, and the other half, some injured beyond repair and the rest right as rain, scattered around the grass with eyes either closed in coming death or wide open with dazed freedom.

Karen, Jesse, and I catch the live chickens and put them all together in the second pen. We collect the dead and bag them up. Karen dispatches a handful of fowl whose injuries are irreparable. "Sorry baby," Jesse says to one chicken huddled panting in the grass, bloodied and fatally doomed. Then Karen and Jesse take the still living chickens over to the reinforced and electric-fence enclosed turkey pen where they’ll be safer for the time being. I water trees.

Later, in the kitchen, I tell Jesse, "I'm sorry about all your chickens."

"On a ranch like this," she says, "you live with the fact that at any time, inevitably, everything might die."

The rabbits might eat all the new garden shoots, a frost could kill all the fruit trees, an owl could get the turkeys, and a bear could easily eat half the broilers.

A ranch, the wilderness, shows that never-ending circle of life and death. Always life and death. Death and life.

"Rilke said," Jesse says, even later on, when we’re in the kitchen cleaning up, "that animals have their backs always toward death and their faces toward God."

I think about how death could be a looming, scythe-wielding specter or an event that is already happened and therefore no longer needs to be dreaded or feared.

Greg calls the Fish and Wildlife Department and they send someone out almost immediately to set up a trap for the bear. The cows, curious, always so curious, sniff the trap, sniff at the decaying scent of the elk meat left inside to entice the young, male grizzly in, and then wander off to graze.

The bear is not caught Friday night or Saturday night. Sunday, the Fish and Game guy moves the trap behind the garden where he and Greg have discovered a bear-killed cow, one of the ranch’s yearlings, and the reason the bear has been sticking around. The Fish and Game guy sets up a camera and Sunday night it records the grizzly getting in the trap then out again. In and out a second time. Rewatching the video, they see the grizzly has a collar on. He'd been caught last year and released when the Fish and Game Department had been after a troubled sow and her three cubs. With trap experience, this grizzly is wary.

On Monday, Fish and Game set a snare. If the bear is caught in it, they’ll dart him and then take him to some place where he (hopefully) won't cause so much trouble.

It's Tuesday again. The bear is still not caught. It's my day off and I linger over my first cup of coffee while waiting for my laundry to wash. Jesse comes in for some breakfast. I ask her about the Rilke line so I can look it up. I find it and read it out loud to her.

The free animal has its dying always behind it and God in front of it, and its way is the eternal way, as the spring flowing. Never, not for a moment, do we have pure space before us, where the flowers endlessly open.

            -Rainer Maria Rilke

Then I make light of a dark, sad thing by saying, "The caged animal has a bear always behind it and God before it."

Jesse corrects me, "The caged animal has the bear always behind it and humans before it." We don't quite laugh. For the remainder of the chickens are to be processed on Wednesday. They're called broilers for a reason.

"This may be awful," I’d said days earlier, "but do you think it's better to be eaten by a bear or to be eaten by humans?"

Those chickens, the broilers, truly do have death, the specter, behind them always, but the sweet part is that for the time that they lived they had a beautiful life. Jesse loved them. She made sure they had fresh grass to scratch, sometimes moving their pen to new grass twice in one day. She carried them out fresh water to drink and gave them plenty of food to eat. In addition, she spoke to them with a soft voice of love saying, "Hello, babies," when she was near them.

Maybe she was the God in front of them. She made their life beautiful. For all those chickens, she was the God they knew face to face, and in a way because of that, the death that was always behind them, when it came suddenly to them in the form of a bear, became as beautiful as the life they’d so rejoiced in living.

Leaning Towards Tuesdays

The Ranch Hand’s Diary:

Leaning Towards Tuesdays

The days are long. I find myself leaning towards Tuesdays, my day off, and know that's no way to live. I leave the cabin in the mornings before seven o'clock and often don't trudge back until after nine PM. I learn to use our afternoon breaks to take time to myself. Evenings are for nothing more than a quick shower and a falling into bed.

Working alongside Jesse, we garden, water, weed, tend chickens, move fences, herd pigs, fertilize plants, inventory food, doctor horses, prune cottonwood trees, clean bathrooms, and help with kitchen work. During our breaks we plan our fall trip. Hash out ideas. Talk about the world.

On Saturday, I turn thirty-seven years old. I talk to my buddy Stevie, tell him I herded cows last week, and he tells me with thread of jealousy and a great deal of pride, "You have such an awesome life!"

After we hang up, I look over the tall grass I'm pulling and remark to Jesse who is sifting compost, "It's nice to be reminded how awesome our lives are." Sometimes in the midst of the work—in the striving to make money when I have to—I can forget.

As if to add evidence to that reminder, Jesse throws me an afternoon party with presents and everything. She gives me a log dragon with wishing hearts and stacking stones to decorate my room with. She’d spent her day off looking for treasures. It’s just what I wanted. For dinner, Lara, the cook, makes a requested cashew stirfry. Then she serves up a delicious and gluten-free lemon-curd frosted cake.

In the mornings before I leave my cabin, I change out the log dragon's heart. But what could I wish for? I'm full with all that I have. Sure, work is hard and days are long, but the mountains are all around me, the fresh air is alive with life, I’ve got my sister to share the load of the chores with me, and daily adventures to have. I’ve got an awesome life. I eat leftover cake for breakfast on Sunday and Monday. It's just as good outside of a birthday dinner.

On Monday, I water trees. Later, Jesse and I weed out dandelions and dead grass from a rooftop garden. We clean one of the cabins. In the late afternoon, we book tickets to Berlin.

Jesse arranges with Karen for all of us to share the chore of tucking the chickens and turkeys in for the night. This means I get some evenings to relax. The summer doesn't seem so hard to work now.

Week two is in the books.