Richard Grayson
Mysteries of Ranch Management
"He shouldn't have gotten in that truck with them," Betty is saying. "And before you open your mouth, I'm not justifying anything that happened. It was totally horrible and evil. But you wouldn't have gotten in that truck. Brant wouldn't have. You're both cautious." I sigh. "We're older." "Besides," Betty says, "neither of you is 105 pounds. You two galoots, people are more likely to be scared of you than the other way around." "I'm a galoot?" I ask her. Properly managed livestock grazing is a sustainable form of agriculture and is compatible with a wide array of other sustainable uses of rangeland and an efficient method for converting low quality forages to high quality agricultural products that supply human needs worldwide. Managed grazing may be used for expediting desired changes in the structure and function of rangeland ecosystems. It can be complimentary and synergistic with other rangeland restoration technologies. Ever since the Matthew Shepard murder, guys I meet online in chat rooms always ask me, "Aren't you afraid to live in Wyoming?" Well, yes, I say, but not because of gay-bashing, which is more likely to happen while you're standing on a street corner in the Castro or in Chelsea. I'm afraid to live in Wyoming for other reasons. Don't ask me what they are, other than that I'm afraid to live anywhere. As for being gay, I've found living in a small Southern town--even a small Southern university town--is a lot worse. The South is crawling with Pentecostals and Southern Baptists and all the other types of holy rollers who'll tell Tinky Winky he's going to hell. In Wyoming, we've got churches, but you don't feel religion in the air. Cowboys are surprisingly tolerant, I try to tell guys in chat rooms. But they just go, oh yeah? Exotic noxious and invasive plants have a major debilitating effect on rangelands and other grazed ecosystems worldwide. Noxious and invasive plants threaten biological diversity and the structure, function, and sustainability of ecosystems. The affected ecosystems and their native or desired species should be restored and protected from noxious and invasive plants. Yeah. Like we've got a guy in town who works as a telephone lineman who wears a dress. Okay, he's married and straight and has two boys in high school who are both rodeo stars or whatever they call athletes who do that sort of thing. This guy comes to your ranch to fix the phone line and he's wearing a long pleated skirt and you just say, "Hi, Bob (not his real name), because you grew up with him and there aren't that many people around here and you all know each other. When I came here, I was disappointed that he wasn't gay. "A lot of people think he is," says Betty as she pulls her van into the parking lot of Wendy's, "but they're ignorant." Ignorant in a different way from the people who think Betty is in a wheelchair because of a rodeo accident, of course. Leafy spurge (Euphorbia esula L.), introduced to the United States from Eurasia in 1827, has become a troublesome weed in Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Nebraska. Those people are ignorant because Betty misleads them. Guys will come into the Mint Bar and if they're going to get drunk enough or if they're pushy enough, they'll ask her how come the chair. "Rodeo accident," Betty will say and then stare down at her glass of beer. Betty's car crash could be considered a rodeo accident only in the sense that that afternoon she'd attended the rodeo in which her brother performed. But the car crash happened late at night and was the result of her being young and wild and drunk and out of her mind on crystal meth, which is real big among Wyoming teenagers. "Would you get the peas for me?" Betty says at the salad bar, because she can't reach. Most Wendy's don't have salad bars anymore--mostly just the ones off the Interstates, like this one. I-90 is where Betty slammed her car into an omcoming semi. I put the peas on her plate, load up on tiny pieces of broccoli and cauliflower myself, and we find a table, not a booth, where I can put her chair in place of one of the Wendy's chairs. From the window I can see the Big Horn Mountains, snowcapped in May. Leafy spurge is found in about half of Wyoming's counties (Figure 1). It is most common in the state's northern and eastern areas. Leafy spurge is found primarily on untilled land such as pastures, range, roadsides, woodlands and farmsteads.. According to the Wyoming Seed Law and the Wyoming Noxious Weed Law, leafy spurge is an exotic and invasive noxious weed. Brant is practically the only gay guy I know around here--a slight exaggeration--so we're together a lot. He's Betty's brother, but aside from the obvious difference that he has the use of both legs and a penis, they're nothing alike. He works on a ranch about 30 miles from town basically running things now that the owners have gotten too old to manage themselves and their own sons have moved to Colorado and California. Most young people know cattle ranching's a dying industry, not because of weirdo vegetarians like me, but because the profit margins are impossibly thin for small ranchers. People are selling out to big companies, or in some places, to real estate developers who'll turn the place into a thousand ranchette homes. Like Betty says, Wyoming's biggest exports are coal, oil, natural gas and Gen Xers. The majority of graduates of the Unversity of Wyoming move out of state. Brant didn't. He put his B.S. in Ranch Management to good use, or so I imagine. More than the good use I put my B.A. in Legal Studies to, anyway. I left law school after the first semester. When finals were over, I knew I'd totally failed, so I just packed up and moved back home and fell into a suicidal depression. Even learning that I'd gotten B's in Contracts and Torts and an A in Property didn't help. A selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor did--somewhat. Leafy spurge is a persistent, deep-rooted perennial which reproduces by seeds and roots. Leafy spurge has a somewhat woody crown below the soil surface. Each crown area produces several upright stems giving the plant a clump-like appearance. In addition, new stems arise from buds on lateral, secondary roots. Except for the fact that he's not my type and that we're sexually incompatible, Brant is perfect for me. I'm not suicidally depressed anymore, but I have a phobia about open spaces. Don't tell me about Gretel Ehrlrich's The Solace of Open Spaces and all those other books that extol the wonders of arid, endless Wyoming. When I get out in those fields, I feel like I'm going to be lost in the vastness, that it's going to swallow me up. I can get a panic attack out there sometimes: those vast sightlines, the confusion between background and foreground, between me and the rest of the world. Other times I can deal with it. It depends. Brant's ranch is 27,000 acres, and sometimes I can drive around it with him or with him and Betty. I like the prairie dog towns, with them popping up their heads from the holes and then popping down quickly, like you were in a room full of jack-in-the-boxes popping out at different times. Brant's attitude toward prairie dogs must be similar to that of Cambodian farmers toward the land mines in their rice paddies--except if you step into a prairie dog hole, you don't lose your legs. The first time Brant took me out to the ranch, I not only liked the prairie dogs, but I made the mistake of remarking on the beauty of the purple flowers covering the hillsides. "You're admiring my enemies," Brant told me. Stem growth starts in April, making leafy spurge an early, vigorous competitor with forage and pasture plants. The plant bears numerous linear-shaped leaves with smooth margins. Leaves have a handsome bluish-green color but turn yellowish or reddish-orange in the summer. (Figure 2) We went to bed together for the first time after he told me about leafy spurge. It was okay. Leafy spurge produces a flat-topped cluster of yellowish-green, petal-like structures called bracts, which bear the true spurge flowers. The showy, yellow bracts appear in May and give the plant a "blooming" appearance. The true spurge flowers, however, develop about 10 days later and have small green bracts. The branding: First you are alone, you and Betty in her chair and half a dozen women with as many children, some older men, a few horses, a long table, a line of pickup trucks and vans, and dried cowshit. It seems as if nothing will ever happen. And then, out from behind the breast-like hills, the first cowboys on their horses appear--the oldest of the cowboys rides a mule because it's easier on his bad back--and a few dogs, and the heads and heads of cattle. (Head is a synecdoche, standing for all of the animal.) Suddenly you are surrounded by the cattle, heavy-footed, dewlapped, filthy with fresh shit. It's May, and the calves are still with their mommas. But not for long. When all the cattle are in the corral, two cowboys on horses get the momma cows out of there. They go under protest: lots of mooing. It's like the first day of nursery school, only here mothers are the ones crying. There are a few grown cows still in the corral when the cowboys start lassoing the hind legs of the calves and dragging them out to you. Your job is to hold down the calf's hind legs; a heavyset girl is holding down the front legs. Sometimes this requires more wrestling--rassling, everyone calls it--than other times. A woman uses a sort of staple gun to attach a yellow marker to the calf's ear. An older man gives the calf an injection. The hard part is when the electric branding iron singes the calf's flesh. The calf makes unearthly sounds, its eyes roll. If it is male, someone comes with a scalpel and cuts off its testicles as cleanly as possible. You see blood and someone else sprays the wound with disinfectant. The calf somehow manages to get itself upright and make its way to the adult cows. They tell you they usually find their mothers. They ask you if you'd want to brand for a while instead of rassling and holding down the hind legs of the calves. No thanks, you say. One calf kicks you in the upper thigh as Betty takes photographs from her wheelchair. Her brother, your lover, is too involved in branding another calf to notice. Seeds are borne in pods which contain three gray-brown, sometimes speckled, oblong, smooth seeds. At maturity pods pop open, throwing seeds up to 15 feet from the parent plant. About 140 seeds are produced per stem and seeds may remain viable in the soil for up to 8 years. "You want to have a doctor look at that?" Betty asks me. "No," I say, not wanting to appear un-Wyoming. "I'll let Brant look at it later." I grin, first at Betty, then at the seven-year-old blond cowgirl carrying around the bucket full of bovine testicles. "Sheila will make calf fries out of them this afternoon," Betty says, speaking of the ranch owner's wife. The cowboys go crazy for them. Brant likes them, so does Betty. "You should try them," Betty tells me. "They'll put hair on your chest." "That didn't work for your brother," I say, still rubbing my thigh. I'm wearing Levis, which would make me really out of fashion in San Francisco or New York. Brant and most of the real cowboys are wearing Wranglers--it has something to do with the stitching being reinforced where cowboys need it. I don't think they've sold Wranglers at urban malls for years. "For me, either," Betty says, and I have to try hard to remember what she's talking about: having chest hair. Brant's heard about my getting kicked. He touches me on the shoulder, just cowboy to cowboy. "You okay?" he asks. "Fine," I say. "If someone was going to brand me and castrate me, I'd probably kick the guys who was holding me down, too." "I'll take note of that," Brant says. "I can't blame the poor little feller," I tell Brant. "And its not like he knew I was--" And in the half-second that Brant thinks I'm going to say gay, I see fear in those baby-blue eyes. "--a vegetarian." Betty laughs. "We'll have to see if there's some tempeh calf fries we can fix up for you," she says, as Brant and I go back to work. Leafy's spurge's peak germination time is later April to early May. Leafy spurge seedlings can vegetatively reproduce within 7 to 10 weeks after germination. New seedling develop throughout the summer but do not flower during the first year. The '90s boom in the Rockies passed Wyoming by. We're already the smallest state in population, and we're losing people every year. With oil prices low, lots of people have lost jobs. The coal mines over in Gillette are still going strong, but it's not like it was in the '80s, people tell me. So what if we're 50th among the states in job creation? We've got that image of the cowboy on a bucking bronco on our license plates, and we don't want economic development if it means choking on it like they do in Colorado. "It's this crazy cowboy myth," I tell Betty and Brant. "Do you know how many people in Wyoming actually work in ranching and farming? Four percent! The majority of people work for the government or in the tourist industry." This is one time I'm in the majority here. "Can the people in Denver look out their window and see deer, wild turkey, fresh streams?" asks Brant. "We're the last defense against modernism," Betty says. "Modernism is Picasso, James Joyce," I tell them. "Modernism happened a hundred years ago. It's post-modernism you guys are fighting against--post modernism!" The state tourist commission's slogan: "Wyoming is what America was." Leafy spurge plants contain a toxic substance which causes scours, weakness, and even death in cattle. Cattle avoid eating growing leafy spurge plants. Grazing studies by the University of Wyoming show that forage growing in leafy spurge patches is poorly used by cattle. Betty and I are working out at the Y. I'm spotting her on the weight bench. She's got an incredibly strong upper body for such a little girl, but of course she needs it because of her legs. "You're not going to be here a year from now, are you?" she says, after her last set of 10 reps. I shrug. "For your sake," she says, "I just hope someday you put down roots somewhere." "I'm not a plant," I tell her. "I don't know," Betty says. "You resemble those cottonwoods leading to the ranch house a little." Shoulder presses are next. By contrast, sheep will graze leafy spurge. Recent University of Wyoming research showed that after a one to three week adjustment period, sheep readily grazed leafy spurge. Spurge intake increased during the summer, making up 40 to 50 percent of animal intake by mid-August. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Brant is watching two dozen sheep happily munch leafy spurge. It's a rare congruence of pleasure and need. But there is so much leafy spurge, so few sheep. What disgusting to cattle is delightful to sheep. Producers interested in sheep production may find them of value in controlling but not eliminating leafy spurge. Extra fencing of leafy spurge patches may be required to assure intense grazing to stop seed production. According to the Sheridan Press, today is Depression Screening Day at Northeast Wyoming Mental Health Services. But I am miles outside of town, riding my bicycle on U.S. 16. It is comforting when the driver of every car or truck that passes lifts a hand to wave at me. There aren't many of us in Wyoming--the state is like a small town with a very long, very empty main street--so I wave back at the cars. I stop to watch the wide load of somebody's house on wheels move past. Out in the country, it's cheaper to move houses than to get construction workers to come and build new ones. When I first came here, Betty and Brant would be telling me, This house used to be over by the creek, This was an old railroad depot and they moved it near the barn. I start bicycling again. I'm going uphill now, and against the wind. There's a wonderful smell in the air. It smells like lanolin to me but is probably some plant I'm not familiar with. At a creek, I stop to rest and drink some water. For whatever reason, I feel calm; I know today is not a day when I'm going to have a panic attack. "You're getting sagebrush in your veins," Brant tells me when I finally reach the ranch hours later. He puts my bike in the pickup and spends the night with me in town. Herbicides can be applied in either late May or early June during flower development, or in early to mid-September when leafy spurge plants have developed new fall regrowth. Fall treatments to actively growing plants control established leafy spurge more effectively than spring treatments. In most of her dreams, Betty finds herself walking. I once had a dream that it was me in the wheelchair, not Betty. I had another dream in which I was making love to Betty. This was one dream too embarrassing to share with her. It doesn't mean anything. I've been gay forever and about once a year I dream about sex with a woman. It's almost always wonderful. But it's not natural, not like Betty walking or sheep grazing leafy spurge. Expanded investigations toward biological control of leafy spurge are in progress. The Wyoming Department of Agriculture has several research units investigating leafy spurge control by insects and disease organisms. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is involved in the rearing of biological control agents, including several promising insect species: the fall midge, flea beetle, and long-horn beetle. At the Sheridan County Library, I check out this book called The Gay Place. The librarian smiles profusely to show me how tolerant she is. This is post-Matthew Shepard. But The Gay Place is a novel that has nothing to do with homosexuality. It's this really amazing story written by this guy who worked for Lyndon Johnson as a press secretary. He was a former political reporter who ended up, after writing this incredible book, dying at 40 while working as a dishwasher in an Austin Hotel. He was a speed freak who choked to death on vomit after too much crystal meth, the same drug that Betty used to do before her accident. The main character of The Gay Place is obviously based on Lyndon Johnson, this flamboyant bully the book calls Texas Governor Arthur "Goddam" Fenstemaker. He's called "Goddam" because that's his favorite adjective, adverb and interjection. When Brant and I meet for lunch at the Busy Bee in Buffalo, he asks me how come I'm carrying the book with me. The title must make him nervous. "I brought it to have something interesting to read while you're making what you call conversation," I tell him. Then I tell him the title is misleading. Sort of like the name of the town of Buffalo, which was not named for the bison. (If you dare, you can check out mangy varieties of the animal and then eat buffalo burgers at a ranch/tourist trap 18 miles out of town). The town was named after the city of Buffalo, New York. And then I say Wyoming is the only state whose name appears to be a present participle. "Go home and read your book," Brant tells me. In addition to insect predators, disease organisms which attack leafy spurge are being investigated. University of Wyoming research has focused on two rust fungi which attack specific spurge species. Biological control is in the experimental stage at this time. I drive up with Betty to Billings on I-90. It's not so much fun anymore now that Montana has reinstituted a daytime speed limit of 75 and the speed limit is no longer "reasonable and prudent." Using her van's hand controls, Betty usually thought 92 miles an hour was reasonable and prudent. She forgets to buy gas for the van before we leave and we have to stop at Lodge Grass to fill up the tank. The 120-mile drive is pretty empty, but I've done it so many times now, I'm used to it and I don't get antsy. Most of it is through the Crow reservation, and the highway keeps coming to signs that say Big Horn River because the river keeps meeting I-90 again and again. Custer met the Cheyenne and Sioux here. I think the Crow were fighting on his side, which is why they don't mind the federal monument being on their reservation. Still, they renamed it is 1991, from the Custer Battlefield Monument to the Little Big Horn Battlefield Monument. There's a dispute as to how to translate their word for themselves, but the English signs all call them Crow. On I-90 you pass a town called Crow Agency, which is a pretty creepy name for a place to live if you ask me. Finally we get to Billings, which, unlike anyplace in Wyoming, actually resembles a city. We stay at the Hillside Inn, on the grounds of St. Vincent's Hospital. If you're coming from Wyoming or North Dakota or other parts of Montana for a medical procedure, it's the place to stay. Betty isn't the only guest in a wheelchair. Other people walk around the motel corridors with canes, bandages, and portable oxygen tanks. After a couple of hours in the Rimrock Mall--you never know how much you'll want to be in a mall when you haven't seen one in half a year--we have dinner in a nice restaurant. It's in the old historic district by the railroad station. Next door to the restaurant is the Rainbow Bar. When I first came to Billings, I was excited because I saw the name Rainbow Bar and the rainbow colors and so I assumed it was gay. But it was mostly a cowboy bar. There were some gay guys there--I met a Mexican-American student from Montana State University the first time I went there--but the name Rainbow had nothing to do with the gay symbol. There are no gay bars in Wyoming, just regular bars that gay people can go to, like the one where Matthew Shepard met his murderers. Vigilance is necessary to identify new infestations of leafy spurge. So it's Brant and me. "Aren't you both settling for half a loaf?" Betty asks. I think of what Gov. Arthur "Goddam" Fenstemaker says in The Gay Place: "Half a loaf?....Slice of goddam bread, even." At Albertson's I buy Wonder Bread sourdough loaves. They haven't much taste, but each slice has the advantage of being only 45 fat-free calories. I'm reading a biography of Justice Cardozo now. The one thing I remember from my Torts class was this opinion of Cardozo's we spent a lot of time on, Palsgraf v. Long Island Rail Road. Some woman got hurt when something fell on her, and I don't remember what Justice Cardozo had to say about it. I haven't gotten to the part of Cardozo's biography that mentions that case. I'm only a quarter way through the book, but near as I can figure it, Cardozo went through his long life and never had sex with anybody. Brant's a lot, lot better than nobody. I should tell him that. Three great mysteries there are in the lives of mortal beings: the mystery of birth at the beginning; the mystery of death at the end; and greater than either, the mystery of love. Everything that is most precious in life is a form of love: art is a form of love, if it be noble; labor is a form of love, if it be worthy; thought is a form of love, if it be inspired. --Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, 1931 So the next time I'm staying over at Brant's place at the ranch, after dinner, after sitting out on the porch watching the stars, after sex, I say to him: "So, cowboy, do you think we love one another?" His head is on two pillows. His eyebrows arch, he sighs, he scratches his left shoulder, and he says, "Love's a funny word." I nod. That's all I'm going to get out of Brant. It's fine with me, actually. And I say to him, "Spurge is a funny word, too." Brant smiles. "You're goddam right," he says, before closing his eyes.