Lonely Cowboy

I'm at work, on lunch, hiding out in the library.

I can't get thoughts of horses and cattle and ranches and wide open spaces out of my head.  Sometimes it's like a disease consuming my mind, and it absolutely paralyzes me.  This morning as I sat through back to back meetings, it was all I could do to feign interest.  

I'm sitting here with my headphones on listening to Willie and Waylon, feeling like I just want to go to sleep for a long, long time and wake up in a different world.

I want to wake up in a world with no staff meetings.  No long days staring into a computer.  No artificial deadlines.  A world that's a little less soft, a little more adventurous.  A little more rewarding in less tangible ways.

Eureka!

Well it's official.  I know exactly what I want out of life; no ifs, ands or buts about it.

I've been on this little farmstead going on five months, and already I can't believe I ever lived in town -- any town -- for so much of my adult life.  I have friends with farms and ranches, and I've spent a lot of time on them.  I dreamt for so many years about having a ranch in Colorado.  But always there lingered a question, a doubt about whether such a thing would really make me happy.  I might miss being in or close to town.  I might miss people.  I might miss the convenience and the culture of city life.

Nah.  No f'ing chance.  I've been back downtown several times since I moved, and each time I get out as quickly as possible.  Too many people.  Too many cars.  Too many vagrants.  Too much stuff going on.

I've only got 5 acres here.  And water use (a shared well) is a little restrictive, so no real irrigation is possible.  But I now have 39 chickens, four turkeys, two ducks, several thousand bees, a dozen goldfish, a great dog and a smattering of raised garden beds.  Daily I'm scheming about how to get more animals, and how to ensure they can pay for themselves.  Rabbits and goats are next on my list.

But even that won't be enough.  I am dead set on starting a cattle ranch, having a hell of a lot more land, and being further away from town.  I need cows and horses.  I need a few pigs.  I need way more chickens and ducks, goats and sheep, geese and rabbits, another dog, a cat and more turkeys, to name what immediately comes to mind.

For a long time my idea of a dream ranch really was more of a cabin in the woods.  There was certainly some livestock involved, but my fantasy was mostly focused on hunting and fishing and being in the cabin.  That dream hasn't changed except that the balance has shifted.  I now see myself spending the bulk of my time tending my animals, with periodic trips into the mountains for hunting and fishing.

I always had animals growing up, and being here has reminded me how much was missing from my life by not having any.  It isn't just taking care of animals, of course.  I've got a workshop and storage buildings.  I've got a yard to tend to.  I've got chores to do.  But the animals are what really put the life into my world.  They make me feel alive again.  Hopeful, even.

The Farmstead

So apparently some people -- who shall remain nameless -- think I change my mind too much.  I don't change my mind so often that it's debilitating.  I change my mind just as often as it takes for me to figure out if I like or want something.  Isn't that what life is all about?  Trying new things?  Finding oneself and all of that?

Regardless, I've moved into the house I mentioned in my New Year's post.  I have five acres of prairie just below the foothills.  I have a dog.  I have seven adult hens, and just bought ten new chicks a few days old.  I have a large shed with an covered extension that's partially enclosed by a wood fence and a small chicken coop.  I've come to call that little complex "the barn."

There's a lot of wildlife out here.  We regularly see coyotes, rabbits, prairie dogs, hawks, and a pretty wide variety of smaller birds, some of which congregate in great numbers very close to the house and barn.

Most mornings I wake up early, before sunrise.  I started drinking coffee several mornings each week.  Prior to this, I drank coffee about twice a year.  We cook every meal at home now.  Before breakfast I take the dog out, feed and water the chickens, and pretend for a little while that I'm a real rancher.  On a real ranch.

The morning chores, such as they are, are followed with coffee and breakfast of eggs, toast, bacon, butter, preserves, coffee, fresh milk, and apple juice.  All but the coffee came from either our chickens, a local farm, or is something I made with stuff I bought from local farms.  I churned the butter from raw milk from a local dairy.  I made the preserves from fruit I bought last fall at the farmer's market.  You get the idea.

When I'm home, I spend a lot of time looking out over the prairie, though its a bit bleak seeing as it's winter and we're in a drought.  I also spend a lot of time fussing over the chickens and trying to decide which projects I should actually take on, considering I'm just renting for a year or two (hopefully.)

Late this afternoon I ran down to the feed store just before they closed and picked up 7 bales of straw.  I put on my leather work gloves and relished every moment of stacking them neatly in the barn.  I love bales of straw and hay.  I always have.  I love the way they look.  I love the way they smell.  I love the little bits that stick to my clothes.  I love the way it dusts the ground, making a beautiful, soft bedding wherever it's stored.  You can use it as bedding for any barnyard animal.  They make great seats, especially at backyard parties.  You can feed it to most barnyard animals.  It's cheap (usually.)  It's biodegradable.  Stacked, it makes a great wind break or privacy wall.  It's great exercise throwing it around.  What's not to love about baled, dried grasses?

One of my best memories ever of hay bales was one beautiful Colorado afternoon after I had finished doing some work at a horse rescue.  I went into the barn (they had a real, very impressive barn) and I sat down in a perfect seat of hay bales.  Behind me were stacked hundreds more in a huge, rising wall like a fortress.  From my vantage point I could see and hear horses grazing, and beyond them the rolling prairie.  After a few minutes a barn cat appeared from somewhere among the hay bales and kept me company.  It was one of those simple, perfect moments one never forgets.

[sigh]

I tried going back to college.  (Mind you I have a BS, several certificates and have done some graduate work.)  I tried a second BS.  But I hated it.  I just hated being in class with 20 year old kids just starting out.  I hated the idea of tests and cramming.  I hated the idea of starting over at the bottom.  I've already been through all that.  I have a great career and a great employer.  More college, I now know for certain, is not what I want or need in my life.  There's no longer anything that college can offer me that would make me happier or more fulfilled.  You know what makes me happy?  You know what really fulfills me?  It's the stuff I do every moment I have free time.  It's hay bales and horses.  It's gardens and cooking.  It's chickens and goats and dogs.  It's fly fishing a gorgeous Rocky Mountain stream, hunting turkey out on the plains, or elk high in the mountains.  It's sewing curtains and churning butter, making peach preserves and butchering my own meat.  It's building chicken coops and hanging out in the barn. It's marveling at the beauty of the mountains and the vastness of the prairie, and laughing with friends and family gathered around a big table covered with great food.  All of that, that's living.  That's life.  That's what it's all about for me.  Everything else in my life is just a means to try and get more of the good stuff in my life, that's all.  College was a way to get a job, to make money, to be able to afford the life I just described.  What's sad is that work -- and I'm talking about a desk job, not the work involved in running a farm or ranch -- cuts way, way too much into the good stuff.  There's plenty of "work" that's good stuff, and even my desk job certainly has its awesome moments.  But I really feel like my heart belongs close to the earth.  Whether it's hunting or growing a garden or ranching a herd of cattle, my heart longs to be there.  I just need more "life" in my life.

Sometimes I really wish I were Amish.  Sometimes I think I could put up with -- even fake -- the religion, if the trade off meant that I could live in a community where a simple, agricultural life and a supportive community were so highly valued that people actually lived that way.  That's all I want out of life, to live much as people have lived for thousands of years.  Is that so much, really?  I don't need TV or computers, or even electricity.  I need something real and genuine and honest and simple.

I want to get a few goats and a pig.  And we're going to have a big garden come spring.  And I'm thinking about bringing one of my horses here.  I want a vibrant, living community here around me.  Words can't express how much joy the dog has brought me.  The chickens too, and these little baby chicks.  Feeding them, interacting with them, just watching them I can get lost for hours in the connectedness of things.  In one of my favorite books, Animal Vegetable Miracle, the author describes one of her Amish friends who describes his work plowing the fields (with a horse, mind you) and how the whole day to him is just joy as he soaks up the spring sunshine and watches the birds and animals go about their business.  It's a beautiful description of a feeling I know very well but don't get to experience as often as I'd like.

I guess I've rambled enough.  I need to go read something about ranching or homesteading so I can live vicariously.

Evolution of Self

Over a year since my last post.  I hadn't even thought of this blog in forever, and yet tonight, on the first day of the new year, I find myself unable to sleep and needing to clear my head.

So what's been going on since my last post?  Quite a lot.  I've done a lot of hunting, done some serious packing in the mountains, made some new friends, learned a lot, went back to school, and finally got tired of life in Boulder among much else.

While any of the above topics could make a lengthy blog post by itself, the major topic on my mind tonight is that I seem to be having a major shift.  For years, decades in fact, I've fantasized about a log cabin in the mountains.  I've always loved the West.  I still love it dearly, with all my heart.  But, having lived out here for many years now, my perspective has shifted.  I find myself fantasizing more and more not about living in a lonely cabin in the mountains, not even about a sprawling Western ranch, but instead about a lush, green farmstead in the East.  Weird. 

I grew up in East Texas, which gets about 40 inches of annual rainfall.  It's hot and humid in the summer, quite mild (but still humid) in the winter.  It's flat.  There's not an abundance of large wildlife.  There are no really large tracts of wild public land.  But it's green.  Where I grew up, the trees are tall and thick.  The lakes are muddy, but abundant. 

Where I live now in Colorado, we get less than half that amount of rain.  At about 15 inches annual, the short grass prairie is one step away from sandy desert.  It's sunny and dry, which makes for a very pleasant climate, but it makes for a very hard living if you don't depend on food and water being trucked in from far away places.  It's gorgeous here, of course.  The hunting and fishing are good (though, unless you live in a pretty remote place, you still have to drive to get to them.)  There are thick forests up in the mountains, but the soil is thin and rocky, the weather harsh, the growing season short.

It's very clear to me now that I suffer easily from cabin fever.  During the hunting season I'm good.  There's plenty to get out and do.  But during the rest of the year, I find myself going stir crazy, even when the weather is nice.  I've noticed that when I close my eyes at night, I'm no longer drifting off to a log cabin hidden deep in the mountains.  I'm not longer visiting vast cattle ranches on the lonely plains.  Instead, I'm on a quiet but thriving farm.  The farm is a patchwork of thick hardwood forests full of birds and deer, open meadows with waist high grasses, and old apple orchards filled with pink blossoms in the spring and crisp, sweet fruit in the fall.  Instead of a cabin, I see a quaint old farmhouse with a wraparound porch.  There's a big red barn, a huge vegetable garden, chickens, goats, a few dairy cows, a pig pen full of happy spotted pigs, a big old draft horse, a barn cat and a border collie.  There's a nice pond out back stocked with fish where I go skinny dipping in the heat of summer.  There's a root cellar, and a pantry full of home-canned produce.  There's a big stack of firewood I cut from my own woodlot.  There's an outhouse, a well, a stream full of trout, a big compost pile.  The whole place is alive and green in summer, bursting with flowers in spring, painted in deep reds and yellows in autumn, and of course at least a little snowy in the winter. 

Sometimes I really miss the tall trees.  I miss walking in the rain.  I miss thick, rich soils that support an abundance of lush growth.  I miss hardwoods, good for building and burning and smoking meats.  Often I find myself wanting to settle not in a cabin in the mountains with nothing to do 9 months out of the year, but instead to be part of an active, living farm.  I love pigs.  I love cows.  I love dogs and cats and goats and chickens and horses.  I love canning and growing.  The problem with the west is that, if you strip away the modern infrastructure, it's one hell of a hard place for a human to live, and is best suited for a nomadic lifestyle, just like the hunter-gatherers who once called this place home.  I want the safety and comfort of a farmstead.  And I want the responsibility that comes with it.  I need projects.  And I need companionship of animals rather than people.  I still want self-sufficiency, but I now realize I can be much more self sufficient on a farmstead.  I can produce far more on far less land, and I won't have to range over wild, rugged terrain to do it. 

I'm torn over this evolving perspective.  On the one hand I still feel like my heart is here in the West.  On the other, I find myself longing for a life like the Amish, only without all the religious bullshit. 

I feel a little better writing about it, but it just isn't enough.  I think I need to take a vacation, a roadtrip out east.  I haven't done that in probably 15 years.  I've always loved the Deep South.  Tennessee and Virginia were some of the pretties places I've been.  Even being from East Texas, I remember being struck and by how tall and thick the forests were in Missouri. 

Could I ever really leave my beloved Rocky Mountains?  It's hard to imagine myself being a resident of Tennessee or Virginia or Georgia.  But it's easy to imagine myself on a lush farmstead, too. 

I'm moving next month.  I'm moving out of town and renting a small house on 4 acres.  I'm already halfway packed.  I'm getting dogs, chickens, pigs.  I'm going to try my hand and being a farmer, or as much of a farmer as I can be considering I work a full time career and I live on a semi-arid plain at the foot of the mountains.  I'm taking this time to experiment, sort some things out.  I'm curious to see where this will go.