Air Conditioning – Contributing to the downfall of Civilization

           It was 95^o this week – in September - and the world is complaining about the heat.  Air conditioners are working full time in homes, in offices, in stores, and in automobiles.  People now think that they are entitled to be cool – even when it’s hot out side.  Such was not always the case.

          These days my ranch foreman, Eric, and I seek shade when the temperatures climb.  “Too hot for us Northern Europeans” is my mantra.  But such was not the case in my younger years.

Fifty years ago there were two summer jobs that yielded not to temperature: stacking hay, and shoeing horses.

Both of these jobs are labor intensive.  Hay-stacking requires slinging hundreds a day of 60-100 pound bales.  Horseshoeing requires crouching beneath an animal, rasping a foot flat and beating on an iron shoe - with or without a forge.  Most of the time a horseshoer can find some shade; but hay-stacking, by definition, is done in an open field.

In the 1960s, yet, we often carried to the hayfield a gallon jug covered in burlap sacking to both insulate and provide some evaporation to lower the temperature from hot, to merely lukewarm. 

In later years, as home freezers became more common, I always had two jugs in the freezer: one half full – to which I would then add water – and one frozen clear through.  I depended on the constant consumption of cold water, and the continual evaporation of sweat through my cotton shirt to keep me cool.  Both jugs were usually empty by the end of a hot day.

In fact, I am old enough to remember the “Desert Water Bags” that were often seen hanging on the side of a car in the deserts of the Southwest. These were heavy canvas, which seeped just enough to keep them damp – cooling the contents with evaporation.  Cars were commonly seen along the highways with their hoods up, suffering from overheating or a vapor-lock of the fuel system.

It was in the 60s that I first saw a car with air conditioning, and have never lived in a home with A/C.

But now every car and piece of farm equipment has A/C, as do many homes and most commercial buildings. Rather than working with the heat by drinking water and sweating, we are now working against it – conditioning ourselves to be entitled to year-around comfort.  And in the meantime, the hot air is being extracted from our living spaces and dumped out into the environment.

Likewise, we are rapidly losing such things as clothes drying on the line, lawns, and hay fields that once cooled the air around us, and replacing them with clothes dryers, gravel beds, and parking lots that draw the heat in.

 

I’m not fully convinced in the “Global Warming” debate, but I see evidence all around me of the ‘Folly of Mankind’.

Old Man

 

          It is 2021 and my “Kentucky Colt” is 21 years old – getting on in age for a horse.  (Of course I am 71 myself, and some folks think that is elderly for a human.)

 

          I have written much about “The Colt”, as he is such a remarkable animal and we have had such remarkable adventures together.  As my past writings have recounted, he was bred in Kentucky by my daughter Wendy out of a running Quarter Horse mare by her Thoroughbred stallion.  He was born and raised here on the West Boulder, and has long been the incarnation of a Harley Davidson: pure, raw, power.

          Our ranch is steep and rough.  ATVs are not an option over much of this country,  so the “Colt” has been my main ride for the past 18 years - over, under, around, and through the rocks, coulees, brush, creeks, trees, and ridges.  Our default gait for years was a long trot, only slowing occasionally to a walk, or extending to a full out run.  It was only a few years ago, at age 17, that “The Colt” would walk voluntarily.  I could sense that my time on “The Colt” was coming to an end, and I bought another horse to succeed him.

          It took a couple of years to develop that new blaze-faced horse into a cowpony, but there was a lot lacking.  I was never comfortable just giving that Blaze his head racing after a cow; he required repeated urgings to maintain a trot; and he just never had the eager, long swinging gait of “The Colt”.  I traded him off to my granddaughter to use at her dad’s feedlot.  “The Colt” remained my first pick for a tough job.

          I have a couple more excellent horses in my string, but mostly I let Eric or Ted ride them.  Occasionally a few select people have taken “The Colt” for a tough job if I was not available to ride.  But I can only describe my relationship with “The Colt” as “simpatico”.

          Most of our rides here turn out to be long and hard.  Every field on the ranch has some steep, rocky, and brushy terrain.  I always lay a bead of hard-surface weld on their shoes before nailing them on.  Going “over north” requires a quick climb of 1000 feet in elevation in addition to the steep, rocky, and brushy terrain.  There was a time when “The Colt” took it all in his long trotting stride.  For the last couple of years, however, he has settled to a walk until more effort is required.  I could feel him slowing down.  In fact, it was 4 years ago that I wrote a post entitled Slowing Down.

          This week we made a circle downriver, in anticipation of working the calves on Sunday.  There were some 5 pairs down on the river that we took up Sick’Em Creek and put in the gate near “Ted’s Camp”.  There were another handful on up the mountain side that required us to climb a thousand feet in elevation to put in the gate on the “pine ridge”.  Then we had to drop over into Alkire’s to dump another handful down into Mendenhall Creek.  And last were two pair that we brought back up to put in the Sick’Em Creek field with everyone else. 

          It was a pretty good ride.  We’d been moving for a couple of hours on some steep terrain.  We’d zigged and zagged through the trees and brush, climbed through a gulch, across some rocky side-hills, and busted out a couple of times to turn the cattle toward the gates.  I was tired.

          But now the job was finished and we turned toward home.  “The Colt” knows this country as well as I do, and I was curious which path he’d choose. 

Most often we’d head past the Pothole Lake and down Mike’s Coulee.  But that would require us to circumnavigate the Sick’Em Creek meadow and climb another couple of hundred feet.  Down the east fork of Sick’Em seemed easier.  But it’s hard on a horse to go downhill as well, and it was a long way to the bottom.  I gave “The Colt” his head.

“The Colt” and I had often come up the east fork gathering cattle in the Sick’Em Creek field.  It had been a few years since we had taken cows down the creek – and that had been a battle.  But that’s the route he chose.

Again, that trail is steep and rough.  But “The Colt” took it at a trot. We crossed the east fork a couple of times, and quickly doubled back.  We crossed the main fork, and I grabbed the horn as “The Colt” lunged up the steep bank on the other side, past Ted’s Camp.  Then I grabbed the horn again as the colt lunged up the couple of hundred yards on up to the main trail.

“The Colt” dropped back to a trot up the trail to the gate into “The Desert” field, and stopped for me to open and shut it behind us.  A long trot again as we crossed the flats of the desert claim, and down into the brushy draw.

It seemed to me that the easiest way home from there was down the road and into the hayfield – but “The Colt” had another idea.  Rather than continuing downward, he elected to cross the draw and up the ridge on the other side.  Over the ridge, he picked up the cow-trail that side-hilled straight westward toward the barn.

Through the next draw we were still following that contour trail when he seemed to realize that this was the one that the cows followed through that next finger of thornbrush where the opening was too low for a horse and rider.  “The Colt” abruptly turned right, and I grabbed the horn again has he lunged straight up the mountainside until he reached the upper trail, which led around the top of the brush. 

Over the saddle he trotted, across another rocky side-hill, over the home gulch, and down to the orchard and the gate toward the barn.

 

I’d felt a little guilty taking this old man for a ride that I had known could have turned rough.  That “Sassy” mare was fresh shod, and would have been just as eager.  I would need “The Colt” again for gathering and working calves in just a few days. 

But while “The Colt” hadn’t started this ride exhibiting all the power he had in his younger days, he had still jumped out anytime the situation required.  And it was obvious on the ride home that he still had plenty in reserve.

Why would I need to go to all the work of training a new horse?

Dally-Wrap

The correct English definition of the word “dally” is to ‘fool around’.  Not so in The West.

To a cowboy the word means to wrap the rope around your horn to hold on to whatever it was you have roped. Like many Western words, this one comes from the Spanish: Darle Vuelta – give it a turn.

Especially since the advent of nylon lariats in the 1970s, cowboys have wrapped their horns with rubber so the dallies have a better grip with fewer turns.  At one time we used the rubber “chaffing rings” from split-rim pickup tires.  But split-rims were outlawed by OSHA as dangerous when improperly seated.  So we switched to bands cut out of inner tubes.  And now everything is tubeless.  So in the new millennium, packages of dally-wrap are sold at the local ranch supply.

Commercial dally-wrap looks like oversized rubber bands: about ¾” wide and 8” long.  Each of these bands can make three wraps around my horn, and there are maybe four of them laid on it.  I carry a package of dally-wrap when going to brandings, as sometimes the rope will jerk through and grind off some of the rubber.

Today I needed dally-wrap for a different application: a pipe was leaking.

This West Boulder water is as pure, cool, and tasty as any in the world.  Our house water emerges from a spring on the hillside up the creek, is captured in a concrete vault, and is then piped down some 500 yards, to emerge in the basement and be distributed throughout the house. 

There is no better water in the world to nourish both body and soul.  But apparently it’s a bit caustic to copper pipes.

The new house was built in 1983.  This was in the period after iron pipe, and before plastic.  It was the material of choice for both home and commercial plumbing from about 1950 to 2000.  But again, copper pipes have their limitations.

I’d run across this issue years before in a small rural hospital.  We were advised that we should calibrate our water softening system to maintain one grain (or one-tenth of a grain – I don’t remember) of hardness, to protect the copper piping.  And now I was faced with a leak in the copper water pipe, which was spreading water across the basement floor.

The first step was to vacuum up the growing pool of water.  That required a trip up to the Quonset on the four-wheeler, a swap to the side-by-side, cleaning out the shop-vac, and returning to the house.  Then vacuum the puddle; and determine the source.

The sheetrock was damp at the base of the wall at the point where water was spilling.  I used a utility knife to cut through the sheetrock and pull it away, up to the source of the water leak – a pinhole in ¾” rigid copper pipe.

Back in the side-by-side, stopping first at the horsebarn, I cut off from my saddle horn the outside strip of dally-wrap – which already had a significant lesion.  At the Quonset I picked up some hose clamps and a nut-driver.  Back in the basement I cut a piece out of the rubber dally-wrap to fit around the pipe.

Taking a dally around the pipe with the dally-wrap, covering it with the hose clamp, and tightening it with the nut-driver, I stopped the leak.

A dusty old cowboy can now take a nice warm shower. 

Remind me to tell you about how this dusty old cowboy took a shower many years ago – when he had no plumbing.

Dancing Boots

In the early 1970s there was a thick outdoor-goods catalogue published in Minnesota by a fellow named George Leonard Herter.  It contained knives, guns, clothing, tents, dutch ovens, fishing poles, sleeping bags, and anything else you can think of in regards to the outdoors.  Herter also wrote a number of books, including How to get out of the Rat Race and Live on Ten Dollars a month.

George was pretty impressed with himself, and with all the goods he sold in his store and catalogue.  Every item was described in glowing terms, proclaimed to be the best design and quality available, and endorsed as being the item that was used by the “real” outdoorsman.

Herter’s sold a line of high-topped, round-toed, flat-soled, leather boots of the style I would call “engineer boots”.  George claimed that these were the “real” boots for riding, and that all the “real” outfitters in Minnesota rode in these boots.  He said that what were commonly called “cowboy boots” were really Spanish dancing boots, and weren’t created for riding at all.

In fact, English riding boots are flat-soled and low-heeled, as are the boots now worn by many of the contestants in such arena events as reining and cutting.  And a proper riding instructor will insist that you ride with only your toes in the stirrups, with your weight balanced on the ball of your foot.

Years later I was reading an account by Ralph Moody in his book Home Ranch which validated George’s assertion. 

The book told of Ralph’s childhood in Colorado at the turn of the 20^th century.  He was only ten when his father died, and Ralph had a summer job on a nearby ranch.  Apparently Ralph had been riding in typical lace-up work shoes, and was thrilled when his crew went in together to buy him a pair of “Spanish boots”.

Over time, these tall, high-heeled, pointed, Spanish dancing boots came to be the standard footwear of the western horseman – and were commonly called “cowboy boots”.

All bronc riders, and many ranch cowboys, sit with their boots plowed into the stirrups up to the hilt, with the thin ox-bow stirrups cradled under the arches of their feet. 

The tall heels and rounded arches of those Spanish boots aren’t just for show – they serve a real purpose in holding the stirrups when the riding gets rough.

And so, indeed, they are dancing boots.  As I have written in several of my stories, working cattle ahorseback is a mounted ‘dance’, and one must be outfitted with the appropriate footwear.

Smooth Operators

          Branding this year was another smooth operation.  A major contributor to this event was my old Wilsall Ranch Rodeo partner Darin Veltkamp – and his older three progeny.

          I bonded with the Veltkamp boys nearly 25 years ago when I had reason to sort some cattle with Darin’s twin brother Phil.  We share the same style of cattle-handling – which is what led to our teamwork in the Ranch Rodeo competition among 40 of the top cowboys in Park and Meagher counties.  Darin and his kids have been working cows with me for 20 years, and the four of them are now a major component of the branding roster.

          Gathering the cattle for the branding is usually a non-event, as the cattle are still near the corrals.  The next step is far more important – that of sorting the cows away from the calves.

          Darin heads up the contingent sorting cows out of the “bridge trap”.  They throw open the gate into the bull pen and cut back the calves - allowing only the cows to leave the trap – ending up with a big bunch of mostly calves.  I generally take half of the cows into the corrals to sort up the alley.  I have the option of letting a group of cows out through another gate into the bull pen, or turning a sort of calves into the branding corral. 

It’s a competition to see who can sort their bunch faster.  The slower group is subject to the hoots, hollers, and helpful advice of all the members of the group that finishes first.

All of this, of course, is done ahorseback.

With the calves corralled, the next operation is to run the cows through the chute for their annual vaccinations.  Darin usually heads up the operations at the chute, while I work the back end, keeping his chute full of cows.

Then the branding.

We believe that the fastest, easiest, and least stressful on both man and beast is to heel the calves out to the fire.  Three or four ropers ride into a pen of some 50 feet square, flick a loop around the hind legs of a calf, and drag them to the waiting crews of wrestlers.

As the title of this essay implies, this operation went smoothly.  We branded and vaccinated some 150 calves in about an hour and 50 minutes.  Then we went to the house for lunch.

We’d already branded Darin’s bunch, and then Craig’s bunch, a few weeks past.  We had much the same crew – and much the same fun.  This was in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when much of the world was on lockdown.  Yet we all worked together, ate together, drank together, and told stories together - without the benefit of facemasks or hand sanitizer.

The operation a few weeks later was not so smooth.  There were about ten calves that were born too late for the main branding.  We called a neighbor, and set up again to get this last little bunch.  I was the designated roper for this event.

The last ten head at any branding are caught at a much slower rate than the bulk of the calves.  The assumption has always been that it is because these are all the ones who have jumped and kicked and evaded all of the previous loops thrown at them.  But this little exercise proved to me that it is simply harder to get an effective shot at some heels when 1) there are fewer heels from which to choose, and 2) the remaining calves have far more latitude to jump and run. 

One always prefers to catch a calf by “two hocks” – both hind feet.  It’s easier on the calf, the horse, and the wrestlers.  In fact in some neighborhoods now, a roper is expected to drop his loop if he picks up only one hock.  Of these ten calves I caught four by the traditional two-hock method.

I caught two more by throwing a head-loop, then waiting until the loop fell back onto the hind legs before I dallied. 

On three calves I jerked my slack on just one hind leg, and let my wrestlers deal with it.

Rather than chase the last calf round and round until he presented his hind legs, I simply dropped on a head-loop.  He sprang away too quickly to finesse the loop down to his ankles, so I pulled my slack and went to the fire.

He jumped and ran and circled my horse until I had to tie off to my horn and go down the rope to help the wrestlers throw him.  It took as long to brand these ten as it had taken to brand 100 a few weeks before.

It didn’t go any better after this mini-branding when we went out to catch a neighbor’s bull.

We don’t turn in our bulls until mid-June, so that we begin calving in mid-March.  This bull would be throwing calves in February – and he wasn’t the sort of bull with the genetics we desire.

But when we went after him, he threw up his head, pushed past the horses, and ran the other way.  We tried to hold him together with a few cows, but failed at that also.  Had I some backup, I’d have roped him and taught him some respect!!

I called my sons – who are both proficient with bull-whips.  They couldn’t make it up to the ranch.

I called my neighbor Lonn, who is a proficient roper.  He wasn’t home.

I called my granddaughter. She had more pressing projects.

Eric and I went out a few days later.  Our first mission was to move the yearlings to fresh grass.  That didn’t take much longer to accomplish than it takes to tell about it.  Then we went hunting for the bull.

That field is only some 300 acres, but it’s rough, rocky, and steep.  We had, however, picked our two best horses for open country cow-work.

We found the bull in the far southeast corner.  We were able to throw a dozen cow/calf pairs together with him, and took the works right down the east fence.

We’d left the gates open, and the group traveled nicely the whole mile or so back to the river, with the bull in the middle of the pack.  They all crossed the bridge; the bull went into the corral with one pair; the pair cut back nicely; and he was caught!

There were two escaped yearlings in this little bunch of cows, and we headed them all back from whence we’d just come.  When we reached the gate where we left the yearlings an hour or so before, it was easy enough to cut the yearlings back and push them through the gate to join their peers.  We returned to the barn with smug smiles.

Saturday had gone anything but smoothly for us.  Yes, we’d gotten the job of branding the tail-enders done, but we weren’t proud of way we’d accomplished it. 

Today, however, we’d made one big efficient circle:  We’d picked up the yearlings and put them on fresh grass;  We’d continued the circle to ride through the cows and find the bull;  We’d come up the far side of the circle with the bull, and captured him in the corral;  We’d returned to the field with the cows we’d used to accompany the bull; We’d gathered some escaped yearlings and threw them back with their bunch. 

We’d accomplished a smooth operation – and we’d recovered our pride.

True Detective

Caution – This post contains graphic descriptions that may be offensive to some people.

          About 22 years ago I sent a message to my brother that I had been dating a gal who thought she could make me politically correct.  He messaged back that she should settle for socially acceptable.

          I can’t make any sense out of why most people do what they do.  In fact, I don’t much care what people do.  But I do study the behavior of cattle and horses.

Our calving operation is designed to take advantage of the natural behavior of cattle.  The entire calving field is visible from my kitchen window.  We feed and bed at one end of the field, knowing that two hours after feeding the cattle will break for water.  Most of the cattle will then drift back to the feed and bedding – but those few that are beginning labor will drift to the end of the field away from the rest of the herd, and toward the calving shed.

This evening I noted one cow traveling away from the herd in the suspicious manner of one that is beginning labor.  It was plenty cold, and it would be beneficial to put her in the shed before dark, where her new calf would have a much warmer and drier environment for those first challenging hours of his life.  I fell in behind her.

As I followed her toward the shed, I began my detective work.

Pregnancy in a cow is not obvious as it is in a human.  A cow eats a large amount of course roughage every day, and the volume of that feeding is about as much as the fetus growing inside her.  There is only a subtle difference in the position of her distended rumen higher and to the left versus her distended uterus lower and to the right.

Immediately after calving one can see the reduction on the lower right side; and a cow also goes off feed for the first day, reducing the volume on the upper left side.  So her figure does change quickly – for a day or two.

As I followed this cow, however, her profile was ambiguous.  Her lower right side was not so pronounced, but neither could she be described as gaunt.

As a cow comes within a week or two of calving, her labia become relaxed and swollen.  Her udder begins to fill up

The labia of this cow, however, was not typical of a cow near to term.  Nor was her udder tight and swollen.

There was no accumulation of amniotic fluid on the tail to indicate that she had recently calved. 

As I drew along side of her I could see that in fact two of her teats had been sucked, and the fullness of her udder had been drawn down by a calf.  Why was she leaving the herd in such a determined fashion?

As we rounded the corner of the shed, the answer became apparent.  Her calf was stashed in the brush behind the shed – as far as it could get from the rest of the herd.

All those signs immediately added up.  She had calved a couple of days before, and hence her labia were healing and returning to normal.  She had just filled up with hay.  She was leaving the feed-grounds to return to her calf.

Mystery solved.  Another case closed in the life of a cowboy.

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Hot Box

            We’re right in the middle of calving, and they’re popping out at the rate of about 5 per day.  That’s real nice when the weather is good – but we just got hit with another winter storm.  It was 17 above when I went out this morning for my first check, with another 2” of fresh snow.

            We had put out straw last evening, and the cows were nicely bedded down – except for one.  She had chosen to “socially distance” herself from the crowd, and calved a hundred yards away in a snowbank.

The calf was still pretty fresh at 0600, and I left Mom to finish her job of cleaning him up.  But after I had made coffee and eaten breakfast, I could see from my kitchen window that the calf was still not up and sucking.

A new calf can stand an amazing amount of cold if he is licked off and gets a belly-full of milk.  But that belly-full of milk is essential.  When I went back down, the calf was still lying in the snow, and was now shivering.  I went to the shed for the sled.

I rolled the calf in and started back toward the shed, with the sled at the end of a 25’ rope behind the 4-wheeler.  The mom was very attentive, and followed the calf all the way into the shed.

There I fired up the generator and transferred the calf to the ‘hot box’: a tall plastic affair with a big front door and a slatted floor.  The 220-volt heater blows warm air up through the grate to warm the calf up. 

Left out in the snow, the calf was rapidly becoming hypothermic.  He would quickly use up the meager store of sugar in his bloodstream, and become hypoglycemic as well.  Only an hour before he had been happy and warm inside his mother’s womb.  But he was rudely dumped out in the cold, hard, world, with his source of nutrition abruptly disconnected.

In the meantime, two more cows had calved.  But these two chose the warm straw and the company of the other cows.  Their calves will be fine.

An hour later I pulled the cold calf out of the hotbox, and he was soon filling his belly with fresh warm colostrum.  He’ll be fine.

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