The main ranch pond – usually cross fenced through the middle, the fence wound up completely exposed.
This summer was brutal. Heat and drought combined like a one-two punch in what seemed like a cruel and final knock- out blow to many.
Mind you, all was not a loss. The country folk are long-thinking…one season, one year is not the end-all and be-all when your family is on the land for a hundred years.
On a ranch there is never a total loss. I remember reading Little House On the Prairie when I was little and Ma saying, “There is no great loss without some small gain.” I didn’t understand that until this summer.
This summer that sent so many around us scrambling for water and hay. This oppressively hot drought… What possible good? On the ranch? Always something.
Our ranch pond is fed by a small underground spring so we didn’t go dry. But we are low. Like my patience after a newborn arrives…like a low tide leaving life exposed to the harshest rays.
And so, in homesteader fashion, we sought to improve. Nothing is ever truly finished on a ranch. Ever.
Digging dirt and muck away from the very heart of the pond.
This pond that has watered the livestock for more than 60 years bared herself to the sun and got a makeover.
Stacking the dirt from the deepened pond onto the dam – widening and strengthening it so it will stand for another generation. Or two.
By the time the Bobcat built up the dam and scraped the clay, silt, mud and debris from her very core, the pond is developing a fine shape.
“There is no great loss without some small gain.”
Come rain and better seasons, this pond will stand for another 60 years or more. My kids will tell their kids how in the summer of the big drought they could walk across the pond without swimming and their kids will marvel at the thought.
Because the mindset here is long-term. They may seem a slow-moving people. They did me when I first moved here. But I’m learning that temporary ills are often easier to handle when you look beyond your own moments.
Yeah those flowers in the first picture? Are usually completely underwater.
That’s crazy. It makes me think of summers that I spent in Lake Tahoe. Some years, the water level was so low that our beach looked unrecognizable.
We are just coming out of a flooding natural disaster. Seems crazy. I have an abundance of water around me as well as people losing their homes to water and you are longing for water.
Hang in there!
It has definitely been a long summer for sure. I am glad for the break we have had and praying that the forecasted rain really does show up. I love the quote and it is definitely fitting right now.
This is such an excellent post. First of all, I appreciate your long-haul perspective, and second, well. Your writing conveyed the sense of ranch life so well that I felt I was there.