A Rancher's Heart
Ranching is not romantic. It’s a tough, dirty, lonesome, stressful and often heartbreaking job that never ends.
You get crap on your face, blood on your hands, and mud in your boots. Your truck gets stuck, your tractor gets stuck, your ATV gets stuck and your horse shies at a piece of trash and runs away while you are left rolling on your back with a broken leg and its two miles to the house.
Fence must be mended or cleared using handtools in either hot or cold conditions. Trees must be pulled off fences. Water gaps torn out by floods must be fixed, sometimes during the flooding. Smashed knuckles, broken bones, runaway equipment, psychotic livestock, crazy neighbors, and the incredibly variable weather all conspire to make life difficult.
Throw in low prices, rising costs, your bank under pressure from regulators, normal family squabbles, and sometimes its not worth it.
Then there is the livestock. You have to empathize with them to care for them, but they die! They die! Calves die. Moms die. Bulls die. They get up one day limping and you try to take care of them working every day for months and when you think they will make it, you go outide on a clear spring day and they are dead, all bloated up.
When you haul them away, the carcass breaks open and the wind shoves the stench onto you. And then the chain gets wound around them and you have to go dig in the muck and your own vomit to get the chain loose. Then the next day your favorite horse breaks a leg. Then the next night comes that knock on the door and someone telling you your whole herd is out on the highway.
Then that late March blizzard comes and two hundred calves must be thrown in the ossuary over the next week. Then you have to get up the next morning and do it again. Usually, by yourself, whether you are sick with the the flu or not, and have to go on.
You must crawl into a corral pen with one ton angry beasts whose horn is stuck under a gate. You must somehow get that calf out of the fence its tangled in while the mother, driven by her advanced genetics, tries to kill you. And when the day comes that you do get plowed, you will still have to drag yourself out and get the gate shut, make sure the stock has water, take a shower to clean your bone-deep lacerations, then drive yourself to the hospital.
Only in professional sports or in the military are men and women expected to play hurt, yet ranchers ranch hurt all the time. And the only purple heart you get is the badge of a permanently missing finger or crooked scar.
The toughest people on the planet are men in their late forties who have successfully farmed and ranched as owner-operators all their life. You can recognize them by the scars on their bodies, their missing fingers, their 2-percenter looks, the will to perservere, and the fact that they are still here. There is no tougher, harsher judge than the march of time. ( The pussies that have 100 acres or 25 cows or a bunch of hired studs don't count.) The only people that can come close are the First Sergeants and CSM's or Master Chiefs who have 20+ years in combat arms.
Your heart has to travel light. To survive you have to give up everything that you once thought important to make room for the will to perservere. All else is inconsequential.
You get crap on your face, blood on your hands, and mud in your boots. Your truck gets stuck, your tractor gets stuck, your ATV gets stuck and your horse shies at a piece of trash and runs away while you are left rolling on your back with a broken leg and its two miles to the house.
Fence must be mended or cleared using handtools in either hot or cold conditions. Trees must be pulled off fences. Water gaps torn out by floods must be fixed, sometimes during the flooding. Smashed knuckles, broken bones, runaway equipment, psychotic livestock, crazy neighbors, and the incredibly variable weather all conspire to make life difficult.
Throw in low prices, rising costs, your bank under pressure from regulators, normal family squabbles, and sometimes its not worth it.
Then there is the livestock. You have to empathize with them to care for them, but they die! They die! Calves die. Moms die. Bulls die. They get up one day limping and you try to take care of them working every day for months and when you think they will make it, you go outide on a clear spring day and they are dead, all bloated up.
When you haul them away, the carcass breaks open and the wind shoves the stench onto you. And then the chain gets wound around them and you have to go dig in the muck and your own vomit to get the chain loose. Then the next day your favorite horse breaks a leg. Then the next night comes that knock on the door and someone telling you your whole herd is out on the highway.
Then that late March blizzard comes and two hundred calves must be thrown in the ossuary over the next week. Then you have to get up the next morning and do it again. Usually, by yourself, whether you are sick with the the flu or not, and have to go on.
You must crawl into a corral pen with one ton angry beasts whose horn is stuck under a gate. You must somehow get that calf out of the fence its tangled in while the mother, driven by her advanced genetics, tries to kill you. And when the day comes that you do get plowed, you will still have to drag yourself out and get the gate shut, make sure the stock has water, take a shower to clean your bone-deep lacerations, then drive yourself to the hospital.
Only in professional sports or in the military are men and women expected to play hurt, yet ranchers ranch hurt all the time. And the only purple heart you get is the badge of a permanently missing finger or crooked scar.
The toughest people on the planet are men in their late forties who have successfully farmed and ranched as owner-operators all their life. You can recognize them by the scars on their bodies, their missing fingers, their 2-percenter looks, the will to perservere, and the fact that they are still here. There is no tougher, harsher judge than the march of time. ( The pussies that have 100 acres or 25 cows or a bunch of hired studs don't count.) The only people that can come close are the First Sergeants and CSM's or Master Chiefs who have 20+ years in combat arms.
Your heart has to travel light. To survive you have to give up everything that you once thought important to make room for the will to perservere. All else is inconsequential.
posted by Red River at 2:20 PM
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