Can You Still Hear the Bulls Screaming?

Baby jerks

The bulls were screaming last night.  If you've never heard bulls bellowing, it sounds a lot like a bagpipe and a chainsaw had a very colicy baby, and then forgot to change its diaper.  They woke Regina up at 1:30 AM, which means Regina woke me up at 1:31 AM.

"Do you hear that?" she asked.

I told her that I do now.

"I think they're in with the heifers," she said as she went outside.

Old jerk

When your wife goes outside in the middle of the night to see if the bulls are out, it's a good idea to join her.  And she was right; an Angus bull jumped the fence and was in with our 2 young Belted Galloway heifers.  Not the cross breeding we want, so we had to chase it out.  And man, was he pumped up.  Two bulls on the other side of the fence cheered him on as I ran laps, chasing him around the pen.  The bulls across the street thought they were missing out, so they joined in on the loud noises contest.  Everyone was hollering, including me.  I won't tell you what I yelled, but it was certainly colorful.

After 3 laps around the pen, the jerk finally found the gate and joined his compadres.  Regina and I spent another half-hour fixing fence by dying flashlight while the bulls kept up their choir.  It sounded like we were in the middle of the elk rut in Yellowstone.

We finally got back to bed, and know what?  They shut up, mercifully.  I suspect they moo-ed themselves hoarse.  But I was so amped up from running (probably less than 100 yards) that I lay awake for another hour, and kept thinking, "The bulls, the bulls, the bulls ..."

   

Manic Spring

Springtime on the ranch is bananas.  It's a little like getting in the passenger seat of a car with an overly-confident 16 year old.  Lots of go fast, stop quickly.  When the sun comes out, as it usually does in February and March, every tractor fires up, every calf needs to get a vaccination, and every project we've put off for the last 3 months needs to get done, NOW.  It's 100 mph until, undoubtedly, it rains, or snows.  Everything comes to an abrupt stop.  The tractors get parked, the corrals get too muddy, and everyone sits at home at stares at their Weather Underground app until ... magically, the sun shines (usually the next day), and we repeat.  It's exhausting.

These 2 photos were taken just seconds apart

Every season has its rhythm.  Summer is when you put your head down and work long, steady hours.  Fall is, well, almost as crazy as the spring (working cattle and haying collide), but it's also hunting season, which makes it exciting.  In the winter we take a breath, and then, blam, here comes spring.  Spring is everyone's scary drunk uncle who has a neck tattoo and crashes your kids 3rd birthday party 
and brings a puppy and hooker so no one knows if they're mad or ecstatic.  And here we are, it's not even technically spring, but it sure feels like it.  So, spring, welcome.  Come on in.

Nothing Hurts

Ranch MD

 My big toe hurt, and I was sure it was gout.  Everyone's most trusted doctor, Web MD, confirmed it, and I prepared myself for a new, healthier lifestyle.  Running shoes were purchased.  Then, like a Phoenix rising, a crescent of black emerged from the base of my toenail and I realized that I had somehow smashed my toe, probably by a large animal, and forgotten about it.  

It made me laugh because I should have known better.  Bumps and bruises are just a normal part of ranch life.  For far, in 2021, I've had my right thumb caught in a halter on a calf I was halter-breaking and sprained it; sliced the base of my left thumb while castrating calves; fell, headfirst, off a feed truck that was about 13 feet off the ground, and landed, fortunately, on the back of a cow who wasn't pleased, and face planted in the dirt.  My pupils didn't match for 2 days, but I sure slept like a baby.  And that doesn't count the bruises, nicks, sore muscles, tweaked back, or black toe.

This is from a cow kick to the lip

A few years ago I came off a horse in a bad spot and broke a few ribs and a vertebrae.  I was laid up on the couch for a few weeks and my kids would see me winching in pain whenever I moved.  They'd ask me what hurt I'd tell them, "Nothing hurts."  It was supposed to be a bigger message about grit and perseverance, about hurt vs injury, and probably about self-care.  I think they saw it as a lesson in dad being dumb.  But, hey, it's just part of the job.  I try to be safe.  I try to be careful, but cows kick, chutes pinch, swather blades spin, and feed trucks are pretty damn high off the ground.

Little Fuzzy Scrotums

 I've never been good at meeting new people, and I'm even worse at starting conversations with them.  I usually say something about the weather, then instantly regret saying anything at all.  But there's one topic I can bring up, in the right company, that I'm always eager to hear people's opinions on.  And that topic?  Castration.

It's calf working season here on Hanna Bros and a few of the other local ranches.  Every ranch has their own style of not only castrating bull calves, but of livestock handling and vaccinating.  When I help out on another ranch, I always try to go with the mindset that I'm going to learn something.  Sometimes I learn how NOT to do things, sometimes I learn new combinations of swear words, and sometimes I learn a better way.  

If you ask most cattlemen why they castrate the way they do, their answer would probably be, "Because that's the way my dad taught me."  And there are, surprisingly, a lot of ways to skin a cat, or, more specifically, cut a scrotum.  Some slice open the sack, some cut off the top, and some use rubber bands.  Some are slow, some are fastidious about cleanliness.  Some go at it like they're killing snakes.  Each way has its merits.  I never realized the variety of methods until I helped some friends works calves a few years ago.  Their castration process was just a little slower than most open-heart surgeries.  They asked if I'd like to cut one and when I castrated in the way I'd been taught they were equally horrified and impressed at the speed it took.  I knew no other way.

Every rancher I know is just trying to do right by their animals.  It's why I like to ask about it.  We are a "Cut off the top of the scrotum" family.  We flip the the fuzzy little scrotum away and hope the dogs don't eat them.  They're worse than hairballs on cats if they eat enough of those.  My niece used to collect them and make little Russian hats for her Barbies.  We pull out one testicle at at time and cut off the little tubes that come out with the nuts. (I should have paid more attention in sex ed.  I'm sure I could Google that, but the ads that would pop us as a result of that internet search?  No way.)  Lastly, we spray on a little antiseptic spray and turn the calf loose.  They're sore for a couple days, and then, with their minds changed from ass to grass, they're back to normal.

So if you ever find yourself in the awkward position of meeting someone new, and that person happens to be a rancher, go ahead, ask.

Bringing Blogging Back

It's 2021 and the kids are telling me that, like Champion sweats, blogging is cool again.  I'm not going to let that train pass me by again, so here we go.  Dispatches From the Ranch, round 2.

I started this blog a bunch of years ago, to log the cuteness and insanity of raising children on a ranch.  I got inspired to document the daily collision of ranching and children one day when I slow-motion watched Dylan, strapped in her car seat, roll off the dusty bench seat of a feed truck.  From that crash, a blog was born.  I kept on posting until I felt like that time my horse and I bonked heads and I came home so loopy I told Regina the same story 3 times in a row.  Plus, reading about other people's kids.  Oof.  So I shut it down.

Blame it on Covid, but I have the itch to fire this baby back up again.  And, since it is called "Dispatches From the Ranch," I'm going to tell you about ranch-life.  A lot of folks have pretty vague notions of what it is "we" (see: ranchers) do.  So I'll tell you.  Mostly.

My goals are to be brief, to be a little funny, and to post weekly.  If I hit 2/3, I'll be stoked.  Here we go.

Me.  Ranchin'.

I Hate Eleanor Roosevelt

Man, I started out 2018 with guns blazing, cranking out a post almost every week.  Dispatches From the Ranch was humming right along.  And then summer hit.  I knew there'd be a lull in my writing as hay season takes up a good portion of my energy.  But once fall rolled around I figured I'd jump right back into my old writing habits.  Nope.  Work, hunting (an upcoming post, for sure), and general laziness gave me the title of a measly once-a-month blogger.  December was looking pretty grim to even put a single post out into the ether, that is, until Grady came home from school and told us that he hated Eleanor Roosevelt.  Regina looked at me and said, "Well, there's your next blog."

Grant's not bad, but that Eleanor Roosevelt?
Just awful.

Of course, I couldn't let that one go unnoticed, even if technically he didn't tell us.  Grady, as many of you know, talks to us through a mixture of sign language, a few words, and in iPad app that he either types on or uses picture icons to put together words and sentences.  A great way for us to check up on his day at school is to look through his talking history.  It's an odd peek into his day and we piece the words and phrases he's used to paint a picture of what he learned that day.  I feel like a linguistic detective.  Grady's very into LEGO people, so their names often pop up in his history, as well as classmates, and random icons that he clicks because he found them interesting.  Harry Potter pops up frequently, as does Harry Styles (I'm still really not sure why the latter made the cut to even have his own icon, but someone in R&D must have been a big One Direction fan).  There's stuff that pops up from his science lessons, language arts discussions, and numbers from his math lessons.  And then there's always a few head-scratchers in the mix.  That's where "I hate Eleanor Roosevelt" comes in.  Eleanor Roosevelt?  Never mind where you stand politically, she was quite a badass (and was niece to a genuine badass, Teddy).  Eleanor was regarded as a humanitarian, a thoughtful diplomat, patient, and kind, and generally well loved.  No one hated her.  Until now, I guess.

Grady dismissed our questions about it with a shrug, so we may never figure this one out.  And while politics are usually not a favorite dinner table conversation, it's gotten really quiet since First Wives are off the table too.  I guess we can always talk about religion and sports.

Adulting 101

The Eastside Gang spent last weekend off the ranch luxuriating in the East Bay with our friends Perry and Lisa.  They have a couple of pretty rad girls, so we brought our monkeys and turned them loose on the electric scooters that can be found on every corner in Oakland.  Ok, that would be irresponsible, but we did find an abandoned Byrd, or Lime, or ScootScoot, and all took turns ripping up and down their cul- de-sac.  The adults spent 3 days eating and drinking our way around the greater Bay Area.  I kicked it off right by immediately devouring 2 lunches on our first day there.  How could I not?  On our way to tacos we passed a nondescript corner store with a line of people out the door.  There was a hand-written menu taped to the window with 1 sandwich, 3 pies, and 4 kinds of cookies.  Lisa causally mentioned, "That's Bake Sale Betty's."  BSB?  WTF?  I'd been reading about her delicious fried chicken sammy for years, so, of course, I had to pop in after devouring several tacos to give it a try.  Yep, well worth it.

Perry is my favorite bartender.  Never mind that he works in a bank, if he had a waxed mustache, sailor tattoos, and rolled up the cuffs of his jeans over his Danner boots he could work nights in the hiperest of hipster bars.  And, after a dinner of my only favorite pizza in the world (Zachs: deep dish sausage, mushroom, spinach), he made an assortment of cocktails that had me sleeping like a baby.  He might have roofied me for all I know, but the delicious drinks were worth it.

The only hiccup in our quest for the best food in the Bay was at a science fair.  But, it was a science fair at AT&T Park, so as the kids and I examined eyeballs and brains in the visitors' dugout, my stomach didn't really care that all it was getting stuffed with was ballpark fries.  And I didn't really care either, because I knew we were heading for a shining star (or, rather, 2 shining Michelin stars) for dinner at Chez Panisse.  Regina and I have wanted to eat there for years and so we decided to treat ourselves for our 19th anniversary (it's the food anniversary, according to my made up list).

I made the reservations and that, in itself, was a challenge.  Reservations can only be made 1 month prior, so I set a reminder on my phone and, one day while I was out feeding cows, I called.  It was busy, so I called again.  Still busy.  I hit redial.  Yep, busy.  I had the feeling that this might be a popular joint in town.  Redial, redial, redial.  I felt like I was trying to win Metallica concert tickets through a radio station -- 97th caller wins! -- but finally, after 20 or so tries, I got through, and got the last seat for an 8:45 dinner reservation.  8:45? Were are we, Lisbon?  That's often my bedtime, but anything for Alice Waters.  Of course, the meal was amazing and, besides our friend Paul asking the waiter why the burnt-honey ice cream was burnt, was super adult-like.  For us, anyway.

The East Bay offered us even more than that.  We got to hang with friends, eat good food, dive into cool cocktail bars, go on a distillery tour, and even go to a youth soccer match that amazed Dylan and Grady (matching uniforms! more than 2 soccer balls for warmups! painted field lines! a ref!).  We drove home, wore out and happy.  When we adult, we adult well.