Ranching Conversation

Dear Reader,

If someone was to follow my family around all day with a video camera, you would think that all we did and thought about was work that had to be done on the ranch like feeding and rotating cattle, fixing fence and mowing the lawn, grooming horses and riding colts. Even our down time revolves around ranching. Many evenings will find us at the barn roping the steer dummy after chores are done, or sitting on the porch examining the cows as they come up with their calves to drink from the trough. You would probably think our whole life revolves around cattle, which it does, but if you turned up the volume on the footage that was captured you might be surprised about what our conversations were about. When I was a little girl my dad told me one time that because a cowboy has so much time on his hands to think “You can ask a cowboy about anything, because he has an opinion on everything.” Not every ranching chore requires the full capacity of your brain, so there is time for the mind to wander and ponder any subject under the sun.

My siblings and I were born to parents who had a love for history and literature that was nurtured into us. My mom always read aloud to us before bed or during the day after she had put the baby to sleep, and she always made sure that we made frequent trips to the library. Our dad secretly fed us history when he told us “stories” and civics when he made us listen to talk radio while we rode with him in the truck. This type of raising, paired with the freedom to explore through homeschooling and the isolation of being on the ranch, leads to little girls who read books in the truck after loading the trailer and little boys who use parliamentary procedure to argue with their sisters. Some people write off ranchers as only being knowledgeable in the practical knowledge of animal husbandry and maybe the history of ranching or animal bloodlines, but you would be surprised by the hoards of specialized knowledge that is carried around in rancher’s heads and the debates that have ensued. So, let’s turn up the volume on that footage and see what the ranchers are talking about.

Music:

Growing up I have always said that I had a classical education in 21^st century music with a focus on the 70’s to early 90’s Classic Rock and Country Music. When there are miles spent in the truck doing ranch errands or driving home from working cattle and countless hours spent fixing fence, that leaves a lot of time to listen to music. This can lead to some interesting arguments of who’s version of a certain song is better. I don’t think that my little sister has forgiven me for saying that the Los Lobos version of La Bamba is better than Richie Valens’ version. Or it can lead to some interesting comparisons of songs from different genres. For example, Dwight Yokam’s “Close all the Honkey Tonks” is just the country version of the classical singer Josh Groban’s “Home to Stay.”

Literature

With five children born within 9 years of each other, there is bound to be a wide reading interest. There have been many arguments (not even debates) in our house of whether Louis L’amour is a better author than J. R. R. Tolkien or if Pride and Prejudice is, in fact, superior to Jane Eyre. But having siblings with different tastes is nice, because if I need a quick fact about a Greek god, I can just ask the sister who likes to read the Percy Jackson books and if I need a random fact about small engines I can just ask my little brother. Another fringe benefit of having siblings with wide read interest, we discovered, is that if we listened to each other talk about the books we had read, a lot of the time our mom wouldn’t make us read them for school since we already knew the story (or because we knew it well enough she thought we had read it).

Debate:

My family loves to argue and debate over things just for the fun of it, even if it’s a really stupid subject. Even in our everyday conversations and family meetings, we have implemented to some degree basic parliamentary procedure. What first started out as somewhat of a joke, when my dad was mediating a disagreement between our youngest sister and our brother, became a household practice after they started using it by themselves in their arguments. Our latest debate was if an iron blade burns and/or  kills Fae (fairy people), then would a steel blade do the same thing? The conclusion was that yes, it would still kill or burn a Fae, but it may be less effective than pure iron, because steel is just iron with part of the carbon refined from it, given that carbon was the “burning element” in the iron. (We have yet to meet a Fae to confirm this theory or not.)

Now you probably have an idea of how true the saying “You can ask a cowboy anything, because he has an opinion on everything” really is. Is the cowboy’s opinion always right? Maybe not, but there isn’t much he isn’t willing to take a stab at. He doesn’t really have anything better to think about anyways.