The Equanimous Mind

The cucumbers are winning. I’ve given some away, made pickles, served them fresh at every meal, and still they’ve outrun me. I’m glad I didn’t plant zucchini!   

I love rummaging around in the garden and coming upon a wayward dill plant with its lovely fragrance.  I cut some heads to go in a bouquet with volunteer celosia and sunflowers. I planted these three plants a few years ago from seed and now they come up wherever they like. They create a random arrangement each year. Vegetable gardens are a thing of beauty, some with manicured rows and crisp edges, others, like mine, with overgrown abandon.  

The goldfinches have the airwaves to themselves lately. There are still a few kingbirds around, but they're silent. And even the owls have quieted their nighttime screeching. The slide toward fall has begun.

Seth and Anna are back at school. I hate to see them go, but this is life as we know it. We had such fun while they were home. They helped us move cattle and work on the cabin and spent quality time with the whole family. Their Washington DC experience was grand, but neither one plans a career in the east.  

I have a new word, equanimity. I read about within a Buddhist framework, but all the major religions teach it. Equanimity means an evenness of mind. It acknowledges that good times and bad times, neither one, last very long. Better to cultivate a calm contentment.

And lest you think it means to be detached or apathetic, Wikipedia says it is rather a “mature radiance” and “warmth of being.”  

This philosophy fits me and Mark this hot, dry, summer of 2013. Good for parenting children who are now adults. Good for finding new passions and growing up. Good for the ups and downs of ranching. Good, even, for quietly letting some of the cucumbers turn into mulch. 

the crew

   

time out for women's work

all is well

It's about Water

All three kids are home and we’ve had some good conversations. Callie likes to ask roundtable questions whenever we’re together: Who was your favorite teacher and why? Who inspires you the most? What is your favorite form of water? (now, that’s original!)

Someone answered, “rain on a tin roof.” Another, “a slow moving river.” Still another, “ocean waves.” Callie contributed, “hot water in a tea cup.” For me it was easy, “a drink from the spring on Meadow Creek.” The best drink of water you’ll ever taste.  

It rises up out of a rocky side hill, making tiny pools as it meanders down through rocks. Watercress grows here. If you ride by you just have to stop. You can cup your hands and scoop it to your lips (always losing some of the precious stuff on the way up), or you can lie flat on your belly and stick your face down to the water. Neither approach works very good. So this summer I took up a tin cup to leave at the site. The cup is bright blue; you can’t miss it. It’s nestled under a sagebrush just northwest of the spring.

Sounds romantic doesn’t it? And romanticizing water is easy to do if you’re a rancher during this hot, dry summer. Our irrigation water is running short. One stream has officially been cut by 30%, and the others are weakening.

Wildfire is another concern. South and Central Idaho are burning as I write. The news reports talk of people evacuated and homes lost, but what they don’t say is the numbers of livestock at risk or the harrowing work of ranchers moving cattle out of harm’s way.

And if you save the cattle, what are they supposed to eat? The thought makes me shudder.

We had one scare during a lightning storm last week. Mark caught a horse and hustled to the hills just as the BLM was arriving with their rigs. Then a rain storm let loose and it was all over.

Water. Life. same, same.  

The Good Stuff

Harvest is on in Southeast Idaho and grain dust hangs in the air. Clouds of the stuff rise slowly, pointing out combines working in the distance. We’re not grain farmers, but the straw that’s left behind is great for lowering the cost of hay over the winter. We hauled all day yesterday and the banana yellow stack is safe and secure for another year.

Between loads I snuck in some reading - Marion Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project. I’m trying to practice her admonition to answer the question with everything you write (even an informal blog entry): “What is this piece about?” It shouldn’t be so hard, but I wrestle with the task every time I go to the keyboard.

The images of even one week are hard to narrow down. It started with the youth rodeo, a family and community tradition since Mark’s grandpa helped start it 48 years ago. It began as a project to “give kids something to do in the summertime,” and turned into a two-day event that’s the center of family reunions and home comings, and my hometown’s claim to fame. The sign on main street reads: “Welcome to Firth, Home of the Little Buckaroo Rodeo.”   

Then on the following day my three local sisters and I took a road trip to Soda Springs Pride Days to revisit our history, eat wild salmon for lunch, and stop at an important site on the Oregon Trail where the route splits south to California and north to Oregon. Mom, who loved western history, was with us that day in spirit.

The week finished up with our annual Just Reunion. It was a big deal this year because our family association acquired the deed to the old ancestral home upon the death of my uncle last year. The house was built in 1887. It’s a beauty of handmade brick fired on-site and full of the original antiques. I grew up next door, so returning to the house, mopping the floors, sorting treasures, is a labor of love. The note that once hung on the door, “I am home, come in” is gone, but my grandma’s love holds me tight each time I enter.  

Dang, I’ve done it again, tried to cover way too much and got lost in the details. So what is this blog post about? 

Clancey gets a ribbon

Sisters

Doing a Tom Sawyer at the old house

All photos by Becky Davis

Home Again

I welcome August with its burden of productivity. Everything is reaching up and out to collect sunshine, and down deep into the earth to set seed and store reserves for the winter. The nights have been dipping into the 50's. I wear a sweater to fix breakfast in the morning and it feels divine. 

We’re finally getting garden produce. Mark explains it this way: vegetables out of a home-grown garden taste like they’re supposed to. A carrot tastes like a carrot. 

Callie arrived home yesterday to stay a couple of months - to rethink her options and detox from the city. She flew from JFK in New York City (with its 8 terminals), to Salt Lake International, and then on to Pocatello Regional. This little airport is a great place to start detoxing, as they roll the staircase to you on the tarmac to deplane into our gloriously dry, Idaho air. She walked into the building and around the corner to get her baggage, then out the front door to the car parked just a few feet away. There's not even a stop arm at the exit. Sweet.

When we got home she headed straight to her old bedroom for a long nap and then went to the Reservation to check alfalfa with Mark. Then we picked beets, beans and cucumbers from the garden - all the while sampling peas straight from the pod. We paired the bounty with grass-fed steaks for supper on the terrace and listened to the owls in the trees. We discussed topics ranging from the aggressive nature of the great horned beauties to life lessons from Alan Watts.

This morning she and Mark headed to the hills to gather strays. And tonight she’ll get in on the little kids’ rodeo that Mark announces, now in its 48^th year. The rodeo grounds are down by the Snake River, across from the high school track where she won medals as a teenager. Detox, yes.

welcome home

fresh  (very)

Spreading Water the Old Way

In New Mexico they call them acequias (ə-ˈsā-kē-əs), ditches that carry water from a river to farm ground. They hearken back to the ancients in the southwest. Our ditches (not nearly as romantic sounding as acequias) are only 130 or so years old, but they bring life to us just as they did for the pioneers when Europeans first came to this area.

I fancy the ditch out our front door as my very own acequia. It diverts from the Blackfoot Slough, a canal which follows an original high-water channel for much of its length. Our ditch then runs through a grove of cottonwoods and across the front lawn of the house. From there it sidles a giant black willow, goes under a footbridge and waters the horse pasture.

Flood irrigation is not the most efficient method of water delivery, but in the regenerative and sustainable agriculture world, it’s a star. It is powered by gravity alone, so opening headgates, installing dams or “checks” in the stream are all that’s needed to irrigate the ground. Heavy equipment is used at times to clean and repair the channel, but the system is largely dependent on hand labor once it’s up and running.  

Our ranch is surrounded by large center-pivot irrigation systems. Efficient, productive, modern, they’ve got it all - and the power bill to go with it. I would never say that flood irrigation trumps pivots; the “circles” feed a lot of people. But the canal system is valuable historically and culturally, if not for the ecosystem it maintains. It provides a summertime riparian extension of the river. Where pivots homogenize the land with monocultures from pavement to pavement, ditches help retain some of the naturally diverse landscape. Often lined with willow and cottonwoods, our acequias are beautiful and provide habitat for all kinds of creatures.

Another benefit of flood irrigation is that while underground pumping pulls water to the surface, the ditches recharge the aquifer, an attribute that becomes more important all the time. It must work economically too because we're still here. Five generations and counting.   

a four-way concrete "check"

water makes it way down a "land" at dawn

for the birds

dogs love to "change water" almost as much as they love herding

  

Grouse and Grazing

I’ve been hobnobbing for three days with distinguished company – a range scientist, three biologists, and me. The first day I was pretty intimidated, just listened as they threw around scientific names of grass and brush species. By the second day I was participating in the discussions. By the third day I was arguing with them! Gotta love that.

We toured range sites throughout southeast Idaho for possible inclusion in a research project to study the effects of livestock grazing on grouse populations. According to my scientist friends, the study would be the first of its kind and will require careful planning and collaboration with diverse interests to be successful. The variables are so great, the data so elusive, that it’s never been tackled before.

I was honored to be included. It’s what I might do for fun, look at other grazing scenarios in different areas of the state with a few scientists to fire questions at. When in a group like this I often think, “If only I knew what you know, and all that I know as well, then we could make progress!” But alas, we only know from our own experience. That’s why we need each other.    

The best conversations we had were around the campfire at night. We love this land and all that it supports, and know it is more than grouse we’re concerned about. We wrestled with some little questions and some big questions. How do we address the increasing use of 4-wheelers on public land? What to do about invasive species? How do we engage the public without damaging the resource? How best do we take scientific data and make it applicable “on the ground?”

All good questions. Issues that will only be unraveled through alliances like these - where learning from one another is the objective, without pretense and above the political fray. 

Big Butte in background
good for grouse, good for cattle

black sage (artemisia nova) on left
low sage (artemisia arbuscula) on right

Fourth of July Weekend

The weather has cooled off after a series of 95+ days. It’s too early in the summer for this! We don’t have air conditioning; instead we open all the windows at night and shut them up tight about 8:00 am. It works great unless the nights are too warm and muggy.

We spent the Fourth in the hills with the cattle. Mark took a few minutes to hang a beautiful new flag on the garage before we left. We intended to make it home for the fireworks, but the day got too long as it often does in the mountains. We saw a few colorful explosions above the city lights as we topped the divide heading home at dark. The radio was playing patriotic songs including Neil Diamond’s “America.” We found out later that Seth and Anna had seen Diamond in person at the Capital Fourth concert.

Maybe missing the Fourth of July festivities was the impetus for Mark to take some time out of his Sunday to finish a project I started last fall. I had dug an old gate out of the ranch junk pile and brought it home to install at the front entrance to our yard. I transplanted some hollyhocks to the site from my Uncle Doug’s yard and gathered some lichen covered rocks from the mountains. Now all I needed was to catch Mark at the right time to set two posts and hang the gate.   

Turned out today was the day. He found an old cedar post standing solitary out in the sandhills. It was once a corner post to an old arena and would be just right to anchor the gate and complete the vintage look I was after. Mark loves cedar posts, says they never rot. He said this cedar was alive when Christ was a child.

Turned out nice don’t you think?