I recently attended a benefit
for an organic farm in Missoula, Mont., a town known for its
leftist politics, environmental activism and outdoors culture.
Missoula can be described as part Portland, part Telluride, a “New
West” city by any measure.
So I found it strange that
both the performers that evening kept referring to their
connections to the ranchlands of eastern Montana, far across the
continental and cultural divides. Poet Philip Burgess, for example,
grew up in the northeast corner of the state and talked about how
his grandmother had homesteaded on her own, married, and then lost
her ranch because of her husband’s financial bumbling.
Folksinger Martha Scanlan opened with, “Don’t Bury
Me On The Lone Prairie.” Although she’s from Minnesota, spent
her adult life in Missoula and now lives in Tennessee, her
ancestors settled near Livingston, Mont. Images of the open range
permeated her songs.
Afterward, I went out for a beer
with my friend Mary, a fifth-generation Montanan, who had finally
given up trying to carve a life on the family ranch and had moved
to Missoula with her husband and son. Life on the ranch was grim,
she said. Although her sister and her family lived there, friends
and community were lacking. The winters were long and cold. Unless
you really liked cows and horses, meaningful work was hard to come
by. Coalbed methane development loomed oppressively over
everyone’s life.
As a conservationist, I fully
recognize the adverse impacts of overgrazing, and I’ve even
worked at closing some of the more inappropriate grazing allotments
in the West. Yet like Philip, Martha and Mary, I have a deep
longing for “the ranch,” that mythological place that inspires
poetry, song and some sort of search for meaning. The wide-open
spaces of the West might seem a cliché, but as they are being
transformed into subdivisions or grids for gas drilling, perhaps we
need to pause for a moment and consider the importance of “the
ranch” on who we think we are.
By now, nearly everyone
has experienced the loss of a favorite childhood place, perhaps a
vacant lot, a nearby stream or a patch of woods, since transformed
into ranchettes or shopping malls. The Wal-Martization of our
childhood landscape is nearly complete. But Westerners still
maintain a collective ideal of the past, of a time when life was
pioneering and we survived on our wits and hard work.
It
is also true that life on the ranch has always been romanticized in
fiction and film. Who wants to get up at dawn when it’s 30
below and feed cows? Who would spend a day and a half in spitting
snow riding up every draw and hollow looking for a stray calf? Who
wants to experience the gut-wrenching pain of cows bawling for
their young as calves are shipped to market? Who would tolerate the
financial insecurity of fluctuating markets? The answer, of course
is: Most ranchers.
I once overheard someone ask
Mary’s father what he would do if he won the lottery. “Well,
I’d just keep ranching until it was all gone,” he replied.
Whatever we think about how some ranchers work their land
— and some work it as hard as they work themselves, by which
I mean, too hard — our identity is still informed by the
West’s mythology. The easy way would be to deny any
connection, to sever the relics of a cowboy past and embrace a
cyber future where landscape is synonymous with viewshed, perhaps
paid for by bits and pieces of conservation easements. But now,
more than ever, our society needs people who work the land, who are
shaped by drought and the changing seasons and empty sky. We need
to know that the landscape is still home, even if we can’t
live there.
That need fills the coffeehouses of Missoula
with people who have lost the ranch, both literally and
figuratively, and their longing is palpable. For many of the same
reasons we need wilderness, we need the ranch to keep us sane, to
establish a sense of place and continuity in a world seemingly bent
on self-destruction.
It’s good to know that every
morning, despite bombings, wars, the spread of nuclear weapons and
bankruptcy scandals, someone pulls on a pair of boots, rubs a sprig
of sage between his or her fingers and squints at the sky,
wondering if it will rain.
Greg Gordon is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives and
writes in Cascade, Montana.
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