Each fall I throw together my saddle, bedroll, and bridles, and make a pilgrimage down to Lake County for the fall works—gathering, sorting, and shipping cattle--in the herculean effort to feed America. I do it to help my friends, but the rewards are mostly selfish. I get to cover the country horseback, in a way most folks don’t anymore, and work with people whose shared sensibilities and sense of purpose are a balm against the industrial levels of friction found almost everywhere else—and increasingly here in Sisters.
But friction finds a way, and this year we were gathering cattle out of the Morgan Fire, watching sugar pines blow up like rockets, manzanita thickets roaring in flame, and wondering why ten million dollars of equipment was parked a half mile from the head of the fire--doing nothing--by order of the federal government. You can ask that question all day long, and you should, but good luck getting an answer out of anybody.
Things just don’t, if they ever did, work that way anymore. So, with unusual speed and intensity, and gulping smoke, we trailed hundreds of cattle through a pile of bulldozers, skidders, and feller-bunchers parked like fossilized dinosaurs while the forest burned.
Like so many other aspects of life, it’s often what gets left out that helps define what something is. In art they call it negative space, the space between the leaves that helps define the tree. That’s true of cowboying, and ranching, and with something folks don’t often see from afar—the ranch kids.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Craig Rullman on Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.