More of the Same

It’s hot. We’re sleeping in the basement where it's cool and quiet. No dogs barking or kingbirds squawking at 4:30 am. By fall we’ll move back upstairs, but for now it’s a mini-getaway for us.

This morning we watched a colorful tanager feed on the berries of the chokecherry out our living room window. I told the numerous robins that perhaps they could feed elsewhere. I like them, but they’re a bit mundane, choose another bush please.

We’re moving cattle every 10 days or so in the mountains, which is a big switch for us. We’re following the advice we heard a smart rancher give one day: “shorten your graze periods and lengthen your recovery periods.” It’s stressing us in ways we didn’t anticipate and it’s not perfect, but things seldom are. We’ve had a few pleasant overnight stays in the mountains. Being in the high country early in the morning and late at night means spotting elk, mule deer, sage grouse, and listening to the nighthawks boom.

I’ve enjoyed some time away from the ranch rummaging through boxes of memorabilia with my sisters. It’s taken us years to tackle what our grandmother and uncle left behind in their home built by my great grandparents. We hate to disturb some of the drawers and shelves that have remained untouched since the last occupation over 20 years ago. My uncle saved everything. I hauled box after box down the steep attic stairs one very hot day. One curious find was a large box filled with crepe paper streamers, all a faded green. Their household was staunchly democrat and there was a stash of John Kennedy campaign materials and articles written after his assassination. There were piles of books and magazines, and the occasional handwritten letter to keep us interested.

We have a box labeled for each branch of the family, file folders for each individual, a box to take to the local historical society, totes for scrapbooks to deal with later, and piles of items with some value that we need to think about. It’s a labor of love, and with my dear sisters, what I would do just for fun.

Summer is cruising along at warp speed. Oh, to hold on to these evenings! We watched the July full moon, the buck moon, rise at dusk on my birthday. We christened the new redwood deck and made merry as I tried to forget how surprising the number on the cake was.

All of it - aging, the intoxicating days of summer, the cool breeze coming through the windows when I can’t sleep - take on a special poignancy when I’m immersed in the lives of my ancestors. We are the same. Especially so since our livelihood is the land, and we cherish country living as they did. My grandma talks about beet harvest, flood irrigating, and the first killdeer of spring as the important events they were. An optimist, nearly every diary entry begins with, “Lovely, lovely day.” She also wrote in a letter, “We lived through the depression and two world wars and loved every minute of it.”

I promise today to be more like her. 

moving heifers at home
 Anna and Clyde

moving the herd in the mountains
Tin Cup Spring
Seth and Dot

A Shift in Baseline

Previously printed as commentary in the Post Register, Idaho Falls, Idaho, July 22, 2018

My Dad, born in 1919, worried in his later years that we were losing monarch butterflies.  He’s gone now, but he was right. According to science the monarch population has plunged. When I was a kid we always had a few jars of milkweed leaves to feed our captive caterpillars for the fun of watching them turn into butterflies. It’s just darn hard to find them anymore, even though our ranch is rich with milkweed, their sole food.

But here’s the thing, kids these days don’t regret not having the experience of watching a caterpillar hang upside down, morph into a cocoon and emerge as the delicate and wondrous monarch, because it just isn’t part of their normal. Their normal has more to do with organized sports and screen time. There’s a name for this phenomenon, it’s called the shifting baseline syndrome.

The term was coined in 1995 by fisheries biologist, Daniel Pauly, who used it to describe how each generation is blind to the loss of species diversity and abundance because they never experienced it differently. His focus was the ocean and the breathtaking mass of species present when we first started to study the sea, and how subsequent marine biologists missed it because they only saw changes related to what they themselves encountered in their own career.  

This hits close to home when you work the land as we do. My uncles, during the homesteading era, lived year around in the mountains where we now graze cattle in the summer. They trapped the creeks every winter and the number of pelts they collected sound like fiction. And by then there were only remnant beaver populations from the staggering numbers present prior to European discovery of the West. Shifting baseline.

My ranching father fought the troublesome weed, burdock, in his day. It is especially annoying to livestock owners because it produces burrs that cling to the coats of cattle and sheep. Burdock is still here and we still fight it, but Dad would be horrified at the new adversaries that have made their way to the ranch in 2018. This is the current generation’s new normal.

Shifting baselines are all around us. One I’ve watched over my lifetime is the growth of homes in the country owned by folks that commute to municipalities for work. It used to be that if you lived out of town you had a farm. Not so anymore. The newcomers are friendly people and mostly good neighbors, but if the trend continues, as it surely will, our ranch won’t fit here in the future. Shifting baselines sneak up on us and lull us into complacency.  

As I watch young people behave, even ranch kids, I’ve developed the sobering suspicion that they don’t have the same land ethic as their forefathers. Some jump on this or that environmental cause, but they lack a basic understanding of how the whole ecosystem works. Some just don’t seem to care. But perhaps it’s not that at all, perhaps they just don’t know what they’re missing. 

taken in 2013, I haven't seen any this year.