Through the Lens

The news cameras rolled into Karval yesterday. The filmed the new sign reading, “100 Years of Community”. They filmed vacant buildings and then they got down to business.
They met with Marc Hollenbaugh who told them the truth. It’s bad. There are fields and pastures buried in someone else’s topsoil. The dirt, the actual definition of displaced soil, sits in drifts over fences, behind windbreaks, over piles of tumbleweeds, behind every piece of sage, and around houses. Fields of green wheat are blown smooth, the wheat invisible.
They ran into Nelson Taylor who didn’t sugarcoat anything. This will cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. His numbers are conservative. He’s tired of the wind. He is an institution in Karval and he is worried.
The cameras missed a few things that are harder to see. They missed the frustration each time a piece of legislation is passed at the “inconvenience” of rural Colorado. These are not people who can bear any more burden nor can they vote with any more passion.

Pray for Rain

Pray for rain. Please.

The road graders rolled out of the county yard early this morning to try to repair the damage. Not a speck of gravel left on the county roads, ranchers’ teeth rattling around the washboard-covered curves this morning as they set out to feed cows, check for calves, and start the neverending task of fixing fence.

The fences are all bearing the load in one way or another. Some lean under an invisible force to the south. Others stand in sand, covered in tumbleweeds, with drifts of dirt from someone’s field or pasture covering them to the top wire. They look like something from the Dust Bowl or the desert or somewhere haunted by ghosts of people

From the FarmWife Project: Grass Fire, Rachel Vermillion

It’s dry and there’s no denying it.

Bankers out here are graying at the temples and the elevator manager can’t quite get it all to pencil. Discs are parked, hooked to fueled-up tractors, lying in wait of lightning. Cigarettes. Flat trailer tires sparking. Fools.

Guys are talking like they’ll have to sell their cows if it doesn’t do something by the end of the month. There’s no grass and even though they’ve only fed a few bales, there won’t be any more.

Sure, the wheat is drilled but it’s storing just as well in the ground as it would have in the bin. I toss my little bucket of water on the poles just to try and keep the hot wire grounded.