“…and now I didn’t seem to be finding other people who had done any of that.” So said Ivan Doig in the introduction to his popular memoir This House of Sky. He was referring to having done such things on the ranch where he was raised in Montana as working with lambs, picking rocks, bucking hay, digging wells by hand, and other manual labor jobs that few experience anymore.
I understand what he meant. Dad performed most of the jobs a veterinarian would be called to perform today. I held the lambs while his knife made wethers of the rams and barrows of the boars. Shade tree mechanics, I helped overhaul engines and weld broken machines. We had a clipper mill, a hammer mill, scoop shovels, manure forks, hay forks, bale hooks, wire stretcher, and knew how to use each one.
The world is much different now, and I won’t pretend to criticize it, that’s just the way it is now and was then. To survive we performed many tasks manually, but today’s world features digital gizmos on which we punch buttons to operate.
My wife and I got restless and felt we’d sheltered in place long enough and when the weather finally turned springlike a few days ago, we drove to the countryside. Our destination was the large Sheyenne National Grasslands south of Leonard, east of Sheldon, and north of McLeod to give a sense of location and about 110 square miles of public land to give a sense of size. We always called it the government pasture or sometimes the sandhills, and many times as a young boy I’d go with my mother and grandmother picking berries in season. I wasn’t any good for that but remember climbing the sand dunes and sliding back down for fun.
A small cemetery some call The Pioneer Cemetery sits back about a quarter mile from the road and where my great-grandmother and her stillborn daughter rest since 1892 beneath a weathered sandstone marker. A few miles down the road in a cemetery called the Owego Church cemetery her husband lies. A total of four cemeteries in the area hold several relatives on my mother’s side. The two mentioned, the one on Highway 46 by the West Prairie Church, and the Helendale Church cemetery south of Leonard. Things such as this make a person feel attached to an area.
The pioneers who lived and died here had to work with their hands and squeeze out a living by their wits. Things such as cars and airplanes hadn’t even entered their vocabularies yet, and there we were leaving the car on the road and walking in just for a little exercise. And talk about walking, we ended up at the Pigeon Point Preserve maintained by Nature Conservancy where bull whackers stopped overnight as they walked beside their ox powered wagons between Fort Abercrombie to Fort Ransom.
I need to set aside this weekly column because I have another project that I want to complete. My brain doesn’t handle doing too many things at once. If this paper wants my articles again, we’ll see how things look in the fall. Check out my blog - lynnbueling.blogspot.com - for up-to-date entries that I place in it occasionally. I can be reached at lynn.bueling@gmail.com (note the dot in this email address) if you come across something of interest that we could shape into a story for future telling. Adios!
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