This Time Reminds Me
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It must have
been the winter of ’65-‘66. I was pregnant with Dee Dee who was born in April.
Harvey and I lived on the ranch south of Dodson. A mile-long dirt drive with
three ‘farmer gates’ of barbed wire strung onto diamond willow sticks separated
us from the highway, only three more miles from town.
That grim winter
we were snowed in for ninety days straight. Every day of that time our
thermometer on the post registered below zero. Wind drifted each snowfall until
packed into hard crusts.
Not by
choice but necessity, I helped break and learned to drive Harry and August, our
young, unbroken team of Percheron workhorses. King and Queenie had become too
feeble, too long in the tooth to work under such adverse conditions.
Harry and
August could not put up too much fuss against the high drifts. Harvey climbed
atop the stack, forked hay onto the sleigh. I held the team. Once loaded, I
drove the horses while Harvey forked hay from atop the sleigh down to the
hungry herd.
Mealtimes
became creative adventures when we ran out of basic supplies such as flour,
sugar and dry beans. Before Christmas, Harvey took the team and sleigh to town
to pick up much-needed kitchen staples, to send my letters and Christmas cards
and pick up our mail.
Nobody out
our way had a telephone. During that three month period, the only person other
than my husband I spoke with was Hugh Kienenberger, the blacksmith in town, and
that only because the pump broke.
Cattle had
to have water. It was minus thirty that day in January. The cattle could
survive a day or two without food but water was a necessity.
Harvey
saddled up Sputnik for me while I donned all the warm clothing I had I tied the
broken pump piece behind the saddle and rode into Dodson, big belly and all.
I don’t know
how I managed to get those dang gates open and closed again with the heavy snowdrifts.
I remember I left the last one open until my return trip.
While the
blacksmith hammered out a new pump part for me, I huddled close to his huge
cast-iron red-hot wood/coal stove, trying to thaw my feet for the ride back
where Harvey was feeding the cattle by himself.
I made it
home before dark, fired up my own wood/coal cook stove and fixed supper.
Harvey put
the pump back together. A hundred-fifty bawling cattle crowded against the tank
for a drink.
Vast
differences separate three months of weather-enforced isolation that winter and
this first month of self-enforced isolation, not the least being the ease of
life in my spot of paradise in Mexico.
Perhaps the
main or most vital difference was our focus. The simple feeding, doctoring and
care of the cattle took up our days. We had not been able to use the tractor
with the forklift to feed since mid-November when the snows piled up.
We had a
radio, my constant companion in the kitchen. When we came in for lunch, usually
soup I made the previous night, we listened to Paul Harvey. That summer we’d
bought a used television from a man in Malta. Paid the handsome price of
twenty-five dollars, scrounged from the household budget. We seldom missed “Gunsmoke”,
“Bonanza” or “Ed Sullivan”.
We usually
caught the newscast. Was it at 5:00 or 6:00? If there was news at ll:00 on our
one channel out of Great Falls, we were asleep by then.
Believe me,
life was neither ideal nor romantic. Like all things and times in the past,
some memories seem sweet, some I would not want to return for any reason.
I would
trade the brutal cold, the fears, the sore muscles, the lack of things we today
consider necessities, and the harsh conditions of that harsh winter for one day
of relief from living in this nightmare “Reality Show” of today, in which we
all play a role.
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
April 9,
2020
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