The [What Week Is This?] Update

Here are some of the highlights from the last week or so.

Firsts

• Put a tag in a calf’s ear.
• Notched that same calf’s other ear.
• Burnt pastures.
• Watched as Dad “put down” a cow with a broken hip.
• Took down a section of old barbed-wire fence.
• Made the rounds of feeding cattle.

Outside of my own personal history and context, this isn’t much of a list. Its unremarkableness is part of its significance, however. Consider the following from Wendell Berry’s “Think Little” and “Economy and Pleasure,” respectively:

The average American farmer is now an old man whose sons have moved away to the cities. His knowledge, and his intimate connection with the land, are about to be lost.

One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children. As industrial work excludes the dead by social mobility and technological change, it excludes the children by haste and danger. The small scale and the handwork of our tobacco cutting permit margins both temporal and spatial that accommodate the play of children. The children play at the grown-up’s work, as well as at their own play. In their play the children learn to work; they learn to know their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.

The fact that I am now, as a forty-year-old, accomplishing some of these “firsts” that might have been accomplished long ago is indicative of the extent to which my own childhood was “segregated.” As a child and an adolescent, I saw that segregation as a blessing. As a younger man, I rarely thought about it. Now, however, I find myself lamenting the fact that I was so completely excluded from the work of my dad.


There’s an Angus Ambassador?

Last Thursday, the weather was wet and the creek was high, so Dad decided we should grab the kids and head to a bull sale over in Fredonia. A ranch down in this area that runs registered Angus cattle was selling about 80 bulls and a few high-end cows. I’d been to several cattle barns and livestock sales, of course, but I had never been to one that was quite this specialized. It’s a little bizarre. The sale included a twenty- to thirty-page program printed on glossy paper, with key stats for the registered bulls, almost like the batting averages or RBIs on the back of baseball cards. The stats included averages and scores related to everything from the birth weights of a bull’s progeny to ultrasound readings reflecting the muscle mass of the rib eye. The beginning of the program included a list of the ranch’s “Reference Sires,” the notable ancestors for the various bulls in the sale. If you’re at all familiar with horse racing (i.e., watch coverage of the Kentucky Derby or something), then you might have a sense of what I’m talking about. Otherwise, I suspect the whole thing would seem rather arcane and bizarre. I’m thinking there’s an essay in the whole experience—perhaps something akin to Susan Orlean’s “Lifelike” (BAE 2004) or David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” (BAE 2005).

As we were sitting in the sale barn, eating our complimentary lunch, and waiting for the sale to begin, a young woman walked in wearing a tiara. Kind of surreal. Later, after she had donned a leather sash (think of a cross between the Miss USA pagent and the National Finals Rodeo), I gathered that the young woman was the “Angus Ambassador.” Who knew?


The Writing Life

Quite apart from the challenges of time management (both the weakness I have cultivated over my life and the demands of ranching, fathering, and trying to write), the writing life during my stay in Kansas has been frustrating. Some of these frustrations have to do with audience. (Who is the audience for the essays I’m envisioning? Why would that audience be interested in what I have to say?) I’m trying to keep reminding myself about Peter Elbow’s article on ignoring audience, trying to realize that concerns of audience are a bit premature. Another frustration is focus. Because I’m thinking about these essays as a collection, and because at least six of those essays (not counting any new possibilities that might surface along the way) are related to the family ranch in one way or another, I find myself jumping mentally from one idea to the other without taking/making the time to really dive in on any of them.

Then, this evening, I picked up Essays of E. B. White, which I checked out from the Independence library, and encountered what I believe will be a new friend. To my recollection, I had never read any of White’s essays. Having now read only the foreward and the first essay (“Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street”), I’m hooked—both consoled and encouraged.

From the forward:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

Can’t help but wonder what E. B. White would think about blogging.

A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a ply, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined life.

While I can’t claim the title of “essayist,” I’m at least encouraged by the degree to which my life embodies the “rambl[ing] about” that White describes.


From “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street”:

[…] I would rather have a ringside seat at a cattle sale than a box at the opera […]