Teresa Jordan - The Last Summer

 

 

The year I graduated from college, my father sold the ranch in Wyoming that had been home to my family for almost 100 years. This ranch had survived the Indian wars and the Great Depression, fire and flood and drought and plagues of locusts, but it could not survive the death of my grandfather that had happened a couple of years earlier. As soon as I picked up my diploma, I headed home for what I knew would be the last time. Now, my father had seen this coming, and he'd sent me to college so I'd be prepared for a very different sort of life. But until the sale of the ranch was a reality, I really hadn't confronted the big question, which is, “Who would I be without the land and the animals to define me?”

 

Now, this ranch was such a beautiful place. It started about 50 miles northwest of Cheyenne, and it ran eight miles along Chugwater Creek and there were these big, broad, beautiful meadows that raised tons and tons of hay. And the cattle would winter on these meadows, and they would have their calves. And then in the spring, we would trail them up into the high country and they'd spread out over that prairie grass and they would get shiny and fat. But when I came home that summer after I graduated, the ranch didn't look like that anymore. We were in the third year of a desperate drought. There had not been a drop of rain in over 12 months. And without the rain to wash it off, there was dust on everything. It was like color-- it robbed the color from the world.

 

And I was so connected to this land. It was not just that I had been raised there, but generations of my family had been raised there. It was literally in my DNA. And to see the land hurting like this, it was as if my own skin were parched and cracked, and aching. And drought makes everything-- drought puts stress on everything. It weakens it. And it wasn't just that the grass was so sparse, but we had sickness in our calves. So, I came home to take up my usual job, which was to take care of the cows in the summer while the men put up hay, but it was a really different job than it had been before. I really had never dealt with sick calves. I'd have an occasional one, five, or six over the course of the summer. But that summer, I was doctoring a dozen a day and sometimes twice that many.

 

To doctor a calf in open country, I had to rope it. And I was not a good roper. But there was so much at stake, and I got better pretty fast. And I would throw the calf, I'd get on top of it, I'd pull the pig and string out of my back pocket and hog tie it. And then I would inject it with penicillin and give it oral antibiotic.  And then I needed to mark it. I needed to know who I had doctored and how many times. So, every day I'd have a different mark. I had these big greased crayons-- grease-paint crayons in my saddlebags. And one day I'd put a red circle around the right eye and then a yellow stripe down the nose the next day. And some of these calves I had to doctor so many times that they looked like clowns. [audience chuckle]

 

The other thing that I did that summer was it was my job to keep the windmills running. And in the high country, all our water came from windmills that pumped the water from the ground. And there is a great technology in Wyoming. Wyoming is, I believe, the windiest state in the Union. But that summer, nothing, there just there was not a breeze. And if you don't have wind to run the windmills, then you've got to put a pump jack on it, a gasoline powered engine. We used these little three horsepower Briggs an& Stratton miserable engines that I swear were only put on this earth to make me tear out my hair. [audience chuckles] I was not a very good roper, but I was a terrible mechanic. And that summer I didn't have a choice. I learned how to take a carburetor apart and put it back together, and sometimes if I couldn't get one of these little miserable sons of bitches working, [audience laughter] I would have to take it clear off the mill and put a new pump jack on it.

 

There was this one day, a really hot day, and it was in the hottest part of the day and I had this jack that I could not get running and it was up above me and I realized I was going to have to take it off. And so I'm working up above my head and it's leaking and this gasoline is running down my arm and it was hard to get the right leverage and I could not break this bolt loose. And I was pushing and pulling and grunting and cussing and this gas just kept running down my hand. And there was just a point where I was just so frustrated and I just lost it and I threw this wrench down into the dirt and I stomped down off this mill. I just went over to the pickup and I sunk down on the bumper. And I put my head in my hands and I just lost it. I just sobbed. And I remember just saying over and over, "This is too hard. This is too damn hard." Those were long days.

 

There were a lot of days that I would wear out two horses. And when you wear out two conditioned cow horses, I was dead tired when I would get home. And I remember this one night, I went up to take my bath and I was so tired I couldn't even get undressed. I was just sitting there with my hands on the sink and looking at myself in the mirror. I don't think I'd really seen myself all summer. I was looking at myself in the mirror and I always wear these sleeveless snap button cowboy shirts. And I was so strong. These calves by this time were 350 pounds and I had the arms of an Olympic swimmer, and it struck me that I would never be that strong again.

 

And then on the 22nd of July, I woke to my father shouting, "It's raining, it’s raining." And I went downstairs and I could see him out there in the yard. And he had his hands up to the sky, up into the rain. And he was saying in this sort of dry hyperbole that was his idea of a sense of humor. He was saying, "Thank you, Lord. Not for me. I've seen rain before, but for the children." [audience laughter] And I'd come out into the yard and I think he sensed.  I was there and he turned around and he saw me. My father was not a playful person, he was not a hugger. But he saw me there and he just picked me up into a bear hug and he swung me around and he was laughing and I was laughing.

 

And so I went out to get my horse. And all summer long I'd just gone out in the horse pasture and I'd grabbed whatever mount I wanted for the day, but that day, this rain made them just as crazy as it had made us. And the horses were just running and kicking and bucking. It took me forever to get a horse. And finally, I got a horse and I got saddled up and by this time this mist had started to come in. And then by the time I got up on top, it was fog. It was just this thick, impenetrable, pea soup fog. I really, I couldn't-- I could hardly see past my horse's ears. And it was clear to me, I couldn't see anything.

 

It was clear to me I wasn't going to do any good there. So, I just turn around, call it a day, and head home. And now a fog like this in open country is-- it's so mysterious. It just--. You're completely engulfed in this white cloud. You can't see anything. It's mysterious and it's wonderful. And it's also sort of terrifying because you really have no grounding. And I wasn't entirely sure where I was, but I just trusted my horse and he found the sand draw to take us down. I think I probably felt this before I heard it, but these cows start-- these running cows start coming up behind me and my horse was just wanting. He just was dancing and prancing and wanting his head. So, I just gave it to him and we took off down that sand draw at a dead run, racing and literally blind, abandoned. And I was just laughing out loud.

 

And that was it. The drought had broken and it rained for several days. And even before the rain stopped, the grass had started to green. And then the sun came out and the wildflowers just exploded. Then in just a few weeks, my family moved off the land forever. And that all happened 40 years ago, but it's still so alive to me. It is still so vivid. But when I go back there in memory, what I think about is that day that the rain came back. That summer had been so hard. There had been so many things that I had needed to do that I did not know how to do, but somehow, I had learned to do. And that had to bode well for whatever lay ahead. Thank you. [cheers and applause]