The cattle on a thousand hills—and in the valleys, too
Chuck Peek
Driving west out of Holdrege, Nebraska, you soon pass little Atlanta, whose “wigwam” used to stop school tours going east and west across the southern part of Nebraska. It was the only place I ever shoplifted. I was probably 12 or 13 when I kyped a pair of sunglasses that I later, under some duress and much chagrin, returned.
West of there, the terrain turns to hill country, with deep and jagged ravines stretching to the north and south down each side of the roadbed. Some years, it seems these ravines are the first to show the signs of the seasons as they change—the first to look like winter is coming or spring is here.
Although the clay sides of the ravines are eroded by rain and wind—everywhere jagged and rough—at the bottom there is often a small irregular meadow leading almost always to a pond or tank where cattle and wildlife come to drink.
The whole of the southwestern tier was once more known for wheat than for corn. Still, although once-higher prices for corn have tended to drive out a lot of the wheat and milo that used to be more plentiful, these ravines are far from mono-chromatic. Pretty much brown and green to be sure, but so many shades of each. I’m always struck by how many brown shades there are along the side of a single ravine, and how many greens the new spring growth brings to life.
Above and beyond on every side lie the fields which show the signs of plowing up or planting among the tillage left from last year to anchor the ground, always good where the soil is thin and dry and in danger of blowing away—eventually to be silt in the Gulf of Mexico. The settled life of farming ever contends with vagrant habits of earth and weather.
On the uplands, amongst the farmsteads, you see the occasional feed lot, larger and larger it seems as just a handful of food processors now control the markets for what the land will yield in the way of pigs and cows, chickens and turkeys, corn as the row crop and between the rows occasionally planted in whatever will keep the weeds down.
In the spring, the large feedlots from which we get the fat calves for market are often mostly mud. Some of them, like the Timmerman place near McCook, run thousands of head at a time. Vast mounds of hay to feed them, fatten them; vast amounts of waste to be removed—sometimes to plague the water supplies of towns down the way in the direction of the drainage.
How much of the process of a packing plant is the result of feeding a hungry world? How much our demand for cheap food? How much the greed of a corporate world gone the way of the robber barons? Even in their midst, COVID-19 has had the salutary effect of making us look again at the lot of workers on whom we rely for our food, at the restoration of smaller food processor operations such as were frequently found in small towns of Nebraska when I was a boy.
Much has changed, but the eroded ravines, the green meadow, the little pond fed by springs or spring run-off—these remain pretty much the constant scape of the Republican Valley. As a teenager, I rushed past them at 55 mph on highways that had curbs. Today, I slow to 55 to see the sight of spring and hear the psalmist exclaim about the cattle on a thousand hills.
++
True to my resolve, I’m keeping these blog posts pretty short for the foreseeable future. Look for another in July, tentatively called “re-opening”.
capeek 