Up and Back

Cats ride for free

 For the purists, summer begins on the solstice in June, for most, it begins on Memorial Day, but for Scott Valley alfalfa growers, it begins when hay season starts.  And, more specifically, it begins when the swathers fire up and start mowing down hay.  

There is usually a span on a couple days, usually in late May, when the farmers start getting restless.  They stare at the skies, then they check, and re-check, their weather apps, waiting for the perfect window of good weather.  When the coast looks clear, they hop in their trucks and start doing laps around the valley, checking to see who was brave, or dumb, enough to start cutting.

Fortunately for me, I couldn't do any of those things this year because I was so far behind, I was still under my machine, changing the oil and prepping it for summer.  I finally got the big red machine ready to go just in time, too, because just when I put on the the last fresh cutting blade, I could hear the distinct whine of a swather motor in the neighbor's field.  And so begins the daily ritual.

Dogs do too

Someone asked me once what cutting hay is like.  You start with cutting a few rounds around the outside of a field, usually 4 but some farmers do 3, then you cut a straight line, either in the middle or along an edge, and start going up, then back.  Repeat that a million times and at some point in late September you've caught up on a year's worth of podcasts and you're done.  It's a job I started doing with my dad as a small kid.  First I'd just ride along with him, then he eventually let me take a few passes, and eventually I was on my own.  A hundred years later, I'm still at it.  Up and back, on repeat.

The Country Club

The view is ok.  I guess.

 I'm a member of a Country Club.  No, don't start humming the Travis Tritt hit from 1990.  This is a genuine, legit country club.  Think: manicured golf greens, goose filled ponds, a driving range, and a cold beer at the 19th hole.  Then think what would happen if the apocalypse happened and the golf course went feral.  It's a cattleman's dream.

A friend of ours purchased this abandoned golf course, one on which I used to play when I thought golf was a fun and worthwhile hobby, and let us put cattle on it to graze down the overgrown grasses.  We spent a few afternoons fixing fences, meeting the neighbors (who had a lot of questions), and adding gates and water troughs.  When the truck released the cattle -- a load of young heifers -- they were in awe.  Not of just the jaw-dropping views of Mt. Shasta, but of the knee high grass.

Release the hounds!

So now, checking the cows is the perfect excuse to grab an old rusty 9-iron, hit a few balls that have been dredged up from the pond, and sit back with a cold one and enjoy the solitude and the view.  Now that's my kind of country club.

Scott Valley Hello

We'll work on driving first, waving later

Whenever my wife and I are driving in a city I always get asked the same question: "Why are you waving at everyone?"  It's a fair question, and I can only say that old habits are hard to break.  Here in Scott Valley, you are pretty much required to wave.  At everyone you see.  I even feel a sense of guilt when I get caught zoning out and I forget The Wave.

And, yes, Scott Valley has its own wave.  It's the peace sign, oddly enough, and I've been noticing lately that more and more people are using it as their wave.  Of course, there are the head nodder wavers, and the flappy-hand wavers, and the one-finger wavers (usually the pointer finger, but sometimes the middle), and the rock-and-roll devil horns wavers, but also, there are an awful lot of peace-sign wavers.  So many that I've officially named it the Scott Valley Hello.

Too cool to wave

Why a peace sign, you might ask.  It all started with my brother, Greg.  His buddy, Roger, works for the county, so we pass him on the road a lot.  When you see the same person on the same stretch of road for several days in a row, you start to get creative with your waving.  Greg started giving Roger the peace sign and Roger thought it was hilarious.  So he started giving it back.  I thought it was funny, so I started using the peace wave at every car I passed.  From there, it took on a life of its own.

 And that is the origin of the Scott Valley Hello.

Corral Humility

This oxbow can support a lot of weight

 We've been spending, off and on, the last few weeks deconstructing, rearranging, and rebuilding one of our sets of corrals.  We set new cedar posts, put up new lumber, hammered nails, poured concrete, welded oxbows, and rehung gates.  Things were looking pretty spiffy, I must say.  We had a few small projects left to make it perfect, but also had a herd of cattle that needed vaccinating, so we ran them through.  We figured it would be a good test of our progress.

I will tell you this: I was feeling pretty proud of the work we did.  We ran the cows through and discovered a few tweaks we'll need to make.  Not the 5 star rating I hoped for, but not surprising either.  Next, we ran the calves through and found a couple more even smaller fixes we'd need to make.  All in all, things were looking pretty good.

Then we ran the bulls through.  There were only 3, but all it took was 1.  He crashed through 8 fences in 2 days -- 5 of which were in our new, beautiful corrals.  It was a lesson in humility, for sure.  And, when we go back to fine-tune our set up (and replace the boards and gates the bull smashed), we might just set the whole damn thing in metal.

Traffic

Day 1.  Moving right along.

 If you're hankering to go and check out bucks in their velvet or collect empty beer cans, you could do worse than driving Eastside Road.  It starts in Ft Jones, changes its name to East Callahan somewhere in the middle, and ends up in the city of Callahan.  It's usually the road less travelled.  With exceptions.  Funeral processions, slow tractors, and cattle drives all force the normally slow Eastside drivers to an even slower crawl.

Day 2.  All balled up.

We've driven one of our cattle herds down this road twice in the last week.  The first day was on a Sunday and it was cold and raining and we had a crew of 10 horseback cowboys and cowboygirls.  The cows probably thought they were heading for greener pastures and made it the 5 miles in record time.  The only slowpokes in the bunch were the bulls who were on the last days of their breeding season.  You can guess why they moved slowly.  The next day the herd was vaccinated and dewormed and then on Tuesday we saddled back up with 6 riders and took them another 6 miles to pasture.  By now the cows were skeptical and sore and moved at a turtle's pace.  Even my out-of-shape horse was sulky.  The cows tried to eat every blade of ditch grass along the way and became a mass of several hundred balled up bovines.  There was no driving through them without serious risk of a new cow poo paint job on your rig.  When we finally made it to the pasture the line of cars piled up behind the drive rivaled rush hour on the 405 in LA.

Most people around here accept cattle drives as a minor inconvenience.  I saw a lot of folks driving through with their smart phones out, videoing the progress.  And (at least on this drive) everyone waved, smiled, and gave us an encouraging word.  Life in Scott Valley generally moves at a slow pace, but, especially in the spring, things start to speed up.  We just add a few cows now and then to remind everyone to take a breath, slow down, and smell the manure.

Hot Heifers

Bad Beezys

 We preg checked our heifers this week.  If you've never seen cattle get pregnancy checked, you're in for a real surprise.  It's not pretty.  Usually Greg, sometimes me, and in this case, a veterinarian, puts on a long glove and sticks one hand, then forearm, then elbow, then bicep, in rectally.  From there, you can feel the cervix and uterus and lots of mushy parts and sometimes even a live calf, all through the wall of the rectum.  It's messy (lots of projectile pooping), but it's the quickest, easiest, and most effective way to tell if a cow is bred.

Friday Feed Line

Heifers are a special bunch.  As young females, they're not always great at navigating a chute or our corrals.  We had a new vet here and we wanted to impress him with our bitching corral set up.  What impressed him most was the leaping ability of our young cows.  Pregnant and open cows go in separate pens and we quickly ran out of places to put our open heifers because they had crashed thorough so many fences and broke so many boards.  When they did finally get their turn in the chute, they'd lie down, back up, and were just plain uncooperative to the guy who was only trying to stick his arm up their ass.

After the 3rd jailbreak we started apologizing to the vet and swore up and down they'd never acted like this before.  It felt like taking a toddler to a nice restaurant and watching in horror as she throws her mashed potatoes at the neighboring table.  After the 5th fence crash we starting thinking about career changes.  Luckily, it ended there.  We liked the new vet as he was both helpful and didn't seem to mind a little chaos.  We had a pretty good outcome with the pregging, and found out that Dylan's fair heifer is very pregnant.  We survived to stay in ranching another day.  It couldn't have gone any better.

MTV Spring Break: Hanna Brothers

Wheel lines.  Ug.

 The closest I ever came to having an MTV-style spring break was a few years ago we took our kids to Disney World and then stayed a few days in Daytona Beach.  Daytona Beach?  I grew up in the 80s and I watched a lot of MTV.  I knew what coastal Florida looked like in mid-spring, and it definitely was not a place to take kids.  Hoards of drunken college students blowing off steam?  This was the best (or worst) idea ever.  I couldn't wait.  Then we got there.  Apparently, Daytona Beach hasn't been a cool spring break hangout since about the time I quit watching MTV.  The closest thing we saw to mayhem were the cheerleaders there for a national competition as they practiced their routines on the beach.

My helper.

In college I never went anywhere for spring break.  My friends all headed south to Lake Havasu but I was always broke by Easter so I came home to the work on the ranch for a week and make enough money to get me to summer.  Things haven't changed much since then and we usually don't go too far during break.  This year was no exception.  I fed a lot of cows and started up wheel lines because of this unusually dry spring.  The kids tagged along in the feed truck with me.  The excitement was that we started working to fix up a set of corrals, and that's really depressing that that was the highlight.  Almost.  

The real highlight is our version of Friday Night Lights.  Every Friday the Drill Team meets up at the Pleasure Park to practice.  The parents drink buckskins and grill and it's become a spring tradition.  I'll probably expand on this later (mostly on the choice to name a rodeo arena "Pleasure Park"), but it was a perfect way to wrap up spring break.  MTV would never air a Spring Break: Hanna Bros. edition, but I don't think I'd want it any other way.