90% of the time I head out on the range to brand, I drive out myself after the crew of cowboys has left. I don’t believe in waking babies if I can help it. Well rested babies are happy babies and happy babies make for happy mommas. And everyone knows that if momma aint happy, nobody is happy. So to make this momma happy, we go branding but AFTER the babies wake up. You get it…
But as I was saying, I get the privilege of finding my way all on my own. I get to follow the over simplified yet confusing directions to try and find hundreds of cows corralled in the some remote area of the range. I’m actually getting pretty good at finding my way around, but that is only from trial and error from the last few years.
Sometimes I think that my husband forgets that my knowledge of the area (read hundreds of miles and thousands of acres) isn’t the same as his. He tells me directions that would be totally relevant to someone that has lived here for decades and knows everyone. Like when he tells me to turn left at the Taylor Lane. Of course there is no road officially named Taylor Lane but there is a road that Charlie Taylor has property along so of course, that is Taylor Lane. Too bad I didn’t know that. Fortunately, The Rancher told me that across from the road are several, very large hay sheds. Unfortunately, there are hay sheds all along the road like that. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
I swear that some of the roads that I get to drive across the range aren’t “roads” at all but are more like goat trails. They are rough and bumpy and winding and seem to take you nowhere. Eventually you see the cloud of dust from the cows after you have bruised your sacrum from bouncing along the goat trail and you let out a partial sigh of relief. I say only partial because you still have to finish driving the nearly debilitating road to get where you are going and if you breathe too deeply, you feel it in your sacrum…
If the roads aren’t yucky and bumpy, they are probably washed out with craters that are waiting to take out the underside of your truck. Or they are slick and muddy with a special kind of gooey stickiness that has the potential of stopping you in your tracks. I once was explicitly following The Rancher’s instructions that nearly stranded me in the middle of the range’s biggest mud pit. He had forgotten that there was a small road that followed the fence line before his road that followed the fence so when he said take the first road to the right just after the fence it got me into big trouble. My “road just after the fence” was a small road that took me to the end of a bunch of wheel lines and was subsequently a nightmare to drive down.
You are probably laughing at me and thinking, why didn’t I recognize that I was heading down the wrong road? Here is my defense- the road was good when I got started, much better than many of the roads I had driven on before. And secondly, I could see the cows and they were absolutely, straight ahead of me. It was nearly infuriating how I knew it was going badly but I could see where I needed to be. But by good luck and my rancher’s wife skills, I made it alive. Barely…
Despite the roads criss-crossing the range, they all take me where I want to go. And there is probably a lesson to be learned in there. In life, we all have a destination in mind and the road to where we want to go isn’t always easy. It can be frustrating how slow and painful and painfully slow the going may be, but there is so much to learn along the way. And if we don’t learn anything along the way, at least we got a great laugh at how terrible things can get!
