Roll Up Your Sleeves

Somebody was talking about the money it’s going to cost folks to buy small bits of advertising time during the Super Bowl broadcast. This talk happens every year around this time. Hundreds of millions generally watch the game, so if you are pushing beer or soft drinks, or some new computer, you can buy a piece of a minute during one of those interminably long breaks built into the game just for such endeavors, and your advertisement will be seen by most everyone awake that day. The competition for those few commercial opportunities is far more heated than the mere physical carnage we hope to see on the field. And time is money.

It will cost you bazillions of dollars to run your ad, so you happily spend a few bucks to make the best ad ever, and thus often the commercials are a better show than the game itself. All that money attracts innovation, so we can expect to be wowed by new technologies and glitz. The audience will be worked over by some of the best minds in the selling industry.

Not long ago the selling industry invented a more economical alternative to the 30 or 60 second commercial. Those game time commercials were becoming prohibitively expensive. Some genius came up with notion of selling really small bits of time during the game, time in which a visual image flashes for just seconds, and only costs a few millions, and that flash done right imprints upon the precious fertile mind of the television watcher, and said watcher will remember and certainly buy that cola the next time he hits the store. Brilliant!! It’s economical, and effective, and the more fertilizer packed into the mind, the better this technique works.

I saw a similar visual flash the other day while wandering about in “social media”. It’s election time too, in case you haven’t noticed, and the clever folks who sell politicians are also trying to leave an impression upon fertile minds. So they are planting brief visual images of their product where their audience will not only be watching, but will pass it on to others for free. So when you open your Facebook page and Susie is telling you what she had for breakfast, just below you nay see a tiny photo of our president, tie off and sleeves rolled up and ready for work. He looks just like a model in GQ.

I know about rolling up sleeves. You see, I’ve always been something of a clothes horse, and looking proper is a priority with me.  Ask anyone. Way back in my youth I read that the clever employer will note how you roll up your sleeves. Pay attention here, cause this can be important. 

It turns out that if you roll up your long sleeves to get to work, hoping to vent all that heat you will be generating by hard effort, and keeping those precious sleeves clean for later when you will be lifting a few down at Rudy’s Pub just like in the beer commercial, you have two options. You can roll the sleeves above your elbow, or you can leave them just below.

What, you may ask, is the difference? Well, the expert I listened to suggested that the true hard worker rolled his sleeves above the elbow, and the guy who was just trying to look like he was working, the guy who was actually not gonna work for you, rolled his sleeves just below the elbow. This phony was only styling. He was a poser. 

And yes…he is our president…..if you can believe the photo I saw recently on Facebook.

Now, perhaps this judgment is too harsh. Maybe our president really does wear those casual pants and that wrinkled work shirt with the sleeves rolled up when he is saving the world. I wasn’t there when the photo was taken. Maybe it only looks like it was staged to sell a product. Who knows if this really is only a clever visual image planted upon fertile minds so they won’t think as poorly of this guy as I do.

My problem is I can remember a primary race years ago when the Democrats were fielding a bunch of hopefuls trying to unseat a sitting president. I often voted for Democrats in those days, and so I watched with interest. You recall the story I once told of watching, early in the primary race, a program put on by one of the major TV networks (like the democratic candidate, these folks also were trying to unseat the sitting president, so they were trying to make these guys look good) and they were introducing the candidates one by one to folks like me who didn’t know all the politicians from the other end of the country. My TV wasn’t working well; I had no sound, so I just watched these men trying to look their best.  I watched them talking without being able to hear them, which actually is a good way to watch presidential debates, but that is another story, and there was this guy from Arkansas, and as I watched his smile and his eyes and his lips moving, I came to an instantaneous and unmistakable conclusion. He was lying. This time, I was right.

And I watched another guy, this one tall and good looking and casually dressed in a red plaid flannel shirt, (like a model in GQ), leaning on a farm fence and hanging with the common man, and he looked concerned and friendly and environmental and he didn’t look at all like some phony crook in a three piece suit with a long history of privilege and family corruption behind him, and I was sold on him. And boy…was I wrong.

The real Al Gore was born wearing a three piece suit and grew up in wealth, political influence, and privilege, in exclusive downtown hotels and a mansion back home, and the closest he ever came to that down home environmentally casual red plaid flannel nice guy feet firmly on the good ground common man image he tried to convey was when he stepped in a pile of dog crap with his handmade Italian shoes while getting into the limo. The guy was pure 1%, if you get my drift. And somebody should have been occupying him.

So anyway, I was looking at this tiny flash photo of our president, staged to look like he is just an average guy you might buy a beer for in a college town hamburger joynt, and what’s not to like? And alongside the photo is this brief synopsis of his rags to riches American Dream life, and who wouldn’t conclude that the guy is REALLY working hard to help folks, if that evil bunch over there would simply get out of the way. The folks selling him will tell you he deserves four more years to try to make things right again.

Choked me up. Really, it did. Wow, what a guy!

Couldn’t help contrasting my life of privilege with his struggle. You’ve all heard the story of how his poor single mom did her best to rear him, and then the wonderful grandmother took over, and then there was college and Harvard law school and then all those socially responsible jobs helping out the poor before public demand sent the man into politics. And then, all by himself, he made president. It’s heartwarming. No wonder he has to roll up his sleeves. One more roll up his arm to above the elbow and he’ll get that right, too.

Now me, I had it easy. Two parents. They stayed married and both worked to provide for their kids. I had it made. Poor Barack…his daddy left pretty much without a word, off to try to start revolutions, preaching hate for America, and planting babies. His mommy apparently couldn’t care for the boy, so grandma took over. By all accounts Grandma was very good to him. There was that exclusive expensive prep school, but that is good for a boy. And Grandma, the wealthy bank executive could afford it. I went to Cary Grove Community High School, and it was very good for me, too. It was free, so yeah, I had it made. 

Barack had to go to that expensive private university, Columbia. Good school, but boy is it expensive. I had it easy, going to a state university on scholarship. I went on to further education, while Barack headed to the jungles of Chicago, organizing the community, working to help the common man, and in the process herding hundreds into voting for the corruption and fraud that is the entrenched Illinois crime, I’m sorry, political party that runs the place. He made lots of useful friends working to line up those folks. These friends are helping him out to this day.

Barack later did well in Harvard Law School. He is a bright guy. Somehow he found a way to pay for this, one of the most expensive schools in the history of the world. Maybe his friends helped. Welcomed back to Northern Illinois, he landed jobs and handled responsibilities easily. Shows the value of good friends. I headed west to practice my profession, and Barack made more friends by being helpful himself. I made an easy living by showing up every day, buying my tract home and putting a few bucks away for retirement. Barack struggled on, but managed to acquire a small fortune and his mansion in a neighborhood of good wealthy friends. 

 At the urging of and with the support of his friends, Barack entered politics, and thrived there. Being the great guy he is, he rewarded his friends with power jobs and plain old power. And with this power he set out to save the world. Which brings me to the other tiny photo lower on that same Facebook page.

Nothing tugs on your heartstrings like the photos of those wet starving puppies and kittens that the fund raisers down at the Human Society of the US put up on TV. That’s guaranteed money, and they rake in millions from the kind people who see those photos. The HSUS people are little more than good business people. They take all that money from folks who see those pathetic photos and want to save animals, and they save the money, giving oh just a little to themselves to keep them in mansions too. Don’t hardly spend a dime on actual animals, but what of that?

Somebody must have been watching this success, for now you can find pictures of sick people on Facebook, and they tug on your heartstrings too, and you will stand in line to help Barack’s friends provide free health care for all of these people. They deserve it. It’s a basic human right. And we can afford it. Just give Barack’s government the money and they will make it right.

Probably, somebody will put up a tiny photo of a hungry person next, hoping for food for life, and some guy who’d like a nice house, and don’t forget the lady who’d like free clothes. These are basic human rights too. I suppose we should get the government to provide these, too. It’s worked well before, in nice countries we all remember. Barack’s friends are all for this. Seems likely he is too. 

And like when he community organized folks to vote for the corrupt machine in Chitown, he’ll be luring the voters with free this and that to keep voting his own machine into power.

Sure, it’s expensive and the government can’t afford it now, but remember…all those folks from privilege out there? Barack says they have all the money. Barack wants it. And so do his friends. And in the end, this is  how he will put those friends in charge of all of us.

Four more years.

The Bison Shoot 1/22/12

So, just how do you justify shooting a bison inside of a fence?

Dr Bob

As a child, I learned how to fly fish on manmade ponds which were built by a rich guy thirty-five years earlier. I attempted to catch trout with my fly rod, and those few I did manage to hook went home to become dinner for my family. The wooden box at the head of the last pond where the creek flowed in had a wide door on top you swung up out of the way, and inside sat a baby scale to weigh the trout and the record book where you recorded your catch, number and weight, for the homeowners’ association. I don’t remember how much they charged for a pound of fish, but Mom got the bill at the end of the month. From time to time she suggested that I don’t catch so many fish, onna count of what they charged for a pound of fish.

This wasn’t on the Big Horn River in Montana, or some untrammeled creek in Colorado mountains. It was instead in Northern Illinois, not exactly a hotbed of fly-fishing for trout in the 1960’s when I was there, or the 20’s when the ponds went in. The rich guy built the kind of estate I might consider if I won the lottery. The Roaring Twenties let a few folks get this wealthy, without ever even winning the lottery. Don’t know how this guy made his bucks, but he built a mansion with them, in the center of 360 acres of hills and forest overlooking the Fox River, and it was a nice place. A series of springs fed a creek that ran through the center of the property, and a sequence of rock dams along the stream left him with 13 small ponds and the larger one in which I caught those fish. They were still there when the estate became a subdivision and we moved in.

This rich guy built his own hatchery to supply trout for the ponds, and years later as I grew up on that property, I caught hatchery raised fish. And I suppose the money I cost Mom went to the expense of running that hatchery. Without the hatchery and the ponds, there would have been no fly-fishing for trout in my youth in Northern Illinois.

A farm prospered a short distance to the north and west of our family home. Descendants of the first Hallstroms worked that farm, my father’s two uncles and an aunt. Beulah raised the chickens and gathered the eggs. Herb and Cliff farmed the fields, planting feed corn during the times I remember, and fattening a few steers. I recall some sows popping out pigs, too. Somehow I doubt those three ever harbored the notion that dinner magically appeared plastic wrapped in a refrigerated compartment set strategically to the rear of a chain store.

We miss Clyde. He was that gray cat who presided over our backyard for those many years. Clyde hammered the gopher population, munching down on those voracious rodents. Our landscaping plants thanked him, for dead gophers don’t kill plants by eating all their roots. Without Clyde guarding the farm, the squirrels and gophers ate more from our garden than we did last year.

We want to eat more from our garden, as much as possible. Our own vegetables are not only handy, but they are as fresh as we want them to be. They taste much better, and you certainly can argue that they are better for us than that engineered synthetic rubber in the chain store that is shipped in from who knows where.

We have to compete with the rodents for the fruits of our garden, and I expect to win. That’s just life. And death.

Reality involves competition. Clyde ate gophers. We want to eat zucchini and green beans from our garden. So do the rodents. I’ll be fencing off and covering the garden this year to keep out as many as I can. And I will kill as many gophers and squirrels as I can. Nothing personal. No blood lust here. It’s simply competition.

We eat red meat and the occasional fish. There, I’ve said it. This can start an argument. There are many arguments I could address. I cannot resolve the rift between big government folks and the individual rights/responsibility folks. I won’t solve the abortion debate. I don’t step between the Mac people and the PC folks. I’ll stop here because of how long this paragraph could get.

This tale is not about the morals or merits of being an omnivore. We eat red meat and the occasion fish. The discussion starts here with this as a given. I’m not going into any of that other.

I wanted to explore here how we wish to go about this. We want to do with our meat as we wish to do with our garden. We want to take the responsibility of obtaining our own meat and fish, and thus improve the quality, freshness, and arguably, the health benefits from this. This is why we may someday feed a steer on our retirement property each year. I’m sure Cliff and Herb would appreciate this. And this is why I hunt and why I will fish when I no longer must work, and thus have the time.

I’m not at all sure how many more years I will be able to hunt for elk. Long our favorite meat, for years I have willingly spent the time and money for the chance to bring home this food. But the mountains are growing taller, and my legs shorter, every year. Someday I will no longer be up to the task. Throwing hay over the fence to our steer frankly would be much easier.

We have considered buying a buffalo calf and feeding it up to eating size instead. We very much enjoy the meat from a bison. But keeping bison behind a fence is much more interesting than an Angus steer. Might not be up to that challenge, either.

Which brings me to my recent bison “hunt”….

Elk hunting is a sacred endeavor to me. Took me years of internal debate before I decided to try this. Twas a difficult decision. But from this I have learned the truth of what the native hunters always knew. Without being spiritually ready to pass the test, you don’t see any elk. When you have earned them, you do. You can believe this or not, but without hunting elk you cannot know.

A hunt for Bison would be much the same, but truly wild bison wander few places in this country. Politics and bad science have put the much needed bison hunt north of Yellowstone Park on hold. A few hunts can be had on reservation land if your checkbook is big enough. Custer State Park in South Dakota holds a small hunt to manage their bison population. And I will be looking into this one.

A lottery is held for the few tags permitting a bison hunt in the Henry Mountains in Utah. This would be a true wild buffalo hunt. But winning this lottery is as likely as winning the one that would set me up on a wooded estate, and it is every bit as physically challenging as an elk hunt.

However, many ranches raise bison instead of beef cattle for the growing market of folks who wish to eat bison meat. I can buy one of these animals, and I can assume the responsibility for the act that turns a living animal into the freezer wrapped protein we will consume for the next year. So I chose a bison shoot to fill the freezer this winter.

Hatchery produced fish from an artificial pond rather than a wild river. An Angus steer raised on our own land. A bison harvested from a ranch, a fenced-in piece of its native prairie. Not the same perhaps, as bringing home the meat from a wild elk living high on the mountain. But this is not 1830 and I’m not Jeremiah Johnson. It’s not the same as that plastic wrapped mystery in the store, either. All things considered, this does in fact, work for me.

Jan 8, 2012

Hi all

Just back from a bison "hunt". I don't actually refer to this effort as a hunt, for I knew in advance where the bison might be. More a bison shoot. The ethics of which I shall address someday.

Brilliant sunlight bored into my eyes. This far up the map, the sun hangs lower in the sky than I am accustomed. And it lends less warmth. The wind arrived unimpeded by that five strand barbed wire fence, a few miles north and out of sight on the other side of the low ridge. Not one tree stood in the way. By local standard, it wasn’t much of a wind that day. Just enough to qualify for what they call a chill factor on the TV weather. It found its way past my collar, right there at the back of my neck. By local standard, it wasn’t cold either. Somewhere in the high teens. Shoulda been below zero this time of year. They are having a mild winter so far, but that will change.  Still, my hands stiffened faster than they used to.

South Dakota prairie grassland extended to the four horizons under a seamless, intensely blue sky. Last summer had been remarkable. More than enough rain, at all the right times, and warmth that didn’t cook everything to death. Everything grew beyond reason. The old folks just nodded, and said, “Don’t get used to it.” Next year, this could be a brown wasteland. But for now the bison stood knee deep in grass in January, and they weren’t complaining. 

A small herd of bison cows and calves fed in front of us. Behind them, on the slope rising to the north, six bulls lounged in the sun. They were built for a Dakota winter. Their ancestors thrived here for millennia despite four foot snows and wind fresh from the Arctic, bringing with it sub-zero temperatures. They are large enough to hang onto their heat. Their coats grow dense this time of year. And they can plow aside the snow with their huge heads, finding grass for their calves and themselves. They no doubt enjoyed this mild weather, but I’m sure the old cows just nodded and said, “Don’t get used to it.”

Bison and mankind have shared this land since the glaciers melted away a few years ago. Primitive man stumbled in after crossing the Bering Land Bridge, and found the bison here, shortly after the mastodons, saber toothed cats, and giant bears went away.  Or maybe after the mankind hunters killed them off. When the White folks showed up, the Sioux and assorted other native tribes wandered the land, dependent upon the bison for sustenance. Several groups of natives predated the Sioux, each supplanted by the next, more ambitious or talented or nastier tribe. The Sioux were doing well when the Europeans arrived, but they couldn’t compete. Not with those evil nasty Europeans. Evil nasty nasty Europeans. Shame on them!!

There….we’ve gotten that politically correct self-recrimination thing out of the way.  Don’t want anyone to think that success should pass without an appropriate amount of blame and guilt.  

We spent some time with the descendants of those White conquerors.  They’ve put in enough time here so’s you can assess how they are doing. First off, they’ve set down roots. Deep ones. Like the cottonwoods that survive the climate there. Deep roots come in handy when times turn tough. The people here are inseparable from the land. They know they cannot live without it, and that they must not only care for the land, but also give thanks for it. And they don’t wish to leave this place, even though other places might carry more glamour, or simply an easier life.

The folks with whom we stayed are a might different from most around our home. They tend toward quiet, and modest. And they go about all that needs doing without protest or complaint. Work for them starts with the dawn, and stops when they can’t see anymore. Their faith comes easily to them, kinda like breathing and eating. They simply do it and live it every day. The sun comes up in the east, and their faith is there to greet it. And they plug in the truck each night so it will start in the morning, regardless where the thermometer ends up, cause ya still gotta do your part, too.

The animals need care. Morning and night the people go out and break the ice so the calves can get water. Most years, the grass is thin by now, so they roll out the hay for the herd to eat.  See a coyote stalking the sheep? Get rid of it. That’s why the rifle lives in the truck. Loaded.  For the coyotes. They can trust their neighbors, so the front door isn’t locked. 

When we were ready to leave, and the truck was packed, they gifted us with something precious to them. And this gift tells much. We left with a photo of their family, four generations, twenty-three people from 92 years to 2 months of age. Precious.

I was taken with the similarities, with how much the folks living on the prairie of Dakota these days resemble the Sioux and their predecessors. 

The land and the weather and the bison defined the Sioux. These things defined the Sioux because they provided the sustenance needed by the Sioux, and also the challenges the people met to survive. And the faith that sustained the Sioux derived from these conditions. 

 Not much has changed. The weather and the land still define the place. The animals may be mostly Angus or Hereford now, but the bison are starting to come back. They still do well there. And the faith of the people blends into this land, too.

Historians like to say that when the Sioux killed a bison, the only thing they wasted was the grunt. They feasted upon the meat, and preserved what they could of the rest. They tanned the hides to build their shelter and provide their clothing. Bison horns served as spoons and cups. Various innards could be used to carry water or cook food. And bones could be turned into weapons, needles, and toys for the children. So when they felt the need, they used it all. Certainly, the bison filled many a need for the Sioux.

The historians conveniently overlook those times when the Sioux killed a few dozen too many bison, and they took the tongues and left the rest for the magpies and coyotes. But ya must do this to make the Sioux look good, and thus make their conquerors look bad. I don’t think the Sioux were perfect, but I don’t feel the need to condemn those folks who took over after them, either. The earth abides, and the people adapt, regardless who the people may be.

For my part…I chose from the herd that morning a bison cow with no calf, which meant that she would have gone to the butcher soon out of economic reality. My rifle was chambered in 45/70, an obsolescent cartridge once popular with buffalo hunters. She was quickly dispatched, and then loaded onto the flatbed pickup. The meat cutter turned her into nearly 300 pounds of meat. And we are having the hide tanned for a robe, and the skull cleaned and bleached. We didn’t save the bladder to carry water, nor the rumen to cook in, for we have other things that fill those needs. So I suppose we weren’t as frugal as the Sioux. But somehow, I don’t suppose the Sioux would prefer a rumen if they were also offered a microwave.