My father was the Michael Jordon of cattle buyers.
He was a city kid who grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Which is on the west side of the Mississippi, but actually is south of Downtown. East of that is South St. Paul and to the south is West St. Paul. True. He got his training in the huge South St. Paul Stockyards, starting out as a drover, moving cattle around the yard on foot and on horseback, at sixteen. At one time he had a side business with Mike Farrel’s dad, speculating on buying and selling cattle in the yards. They called it the Emaciated Cattle Company.
When I was about five, he was offered a job buying cattle for Liebman Packing Company, which was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hence the Packers. The job was in the West Fargo Stockyards, just over the border in North Dakota. He worked for them until the early sixties when Siouxland decided to build their big plant. They realized that they couldn’t buy enough cattle to keep the place busy unless they hired my dad. Even with the advantage of no trucking costs, they couldn’t compete.
Here’s how it worked. The feeders brought their market ready cattle to the Stockyards and consigned them to a commission company. The commission company would act as bargaining agents for them. The buyers would go out into the yards and bid on the cattle hoping to cut an advantageous deal. The trick was to be able to look at the cattle and determine the ratio (yield) of their “on the hoof” weight to their dressed weight, hanging in the meat cooler. Then if you knew the going price of dressed beef and the profit margin you needed then you could calculate what a fair price per pound would be. Remember there were no calculators then; he had a series of laminated cheat cards, but I also think he did a lot of the math in his head. He was not a high school graduate. Dad could walk into a pen of 25 cattle, spend five minutes and estimate their yield percentage. If he missed by more than a half of one percent, he figured he’d blown it. So when Dad offered a price, you knew it was fair, so it was kind of a no haggle proposition. And if he gave you a price and you turned him down and you found out you couldn’t do better…well you’d better not come looking for him to give the original price. When he worked for Siouxland, he was the head cattle buyer and had five or six or some number of buyers working for him. He bought more cattle than all of them combined and bought them cheaper.
Mostly the job consisted of sitting around in the shacks out in the yards, playing cards, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until some cattle would come in. Then out they’d go take a look, cut a deal and get back to the card game. There was some bullshitting done in the bargaining process. Once he took me aside and said, “You go over there and sit on the fence and when they bring the cattle in say, ‘Kinda skaggy aren’t they?’” I could say the men were rolling in the alley, but that would be really nasty.
So the owner of Siouxland came to town and personally offered Dad double his salary and he couldn’t refuse. He died when I was twenty. The business was going to auction selling and he had trouble hearing so he figured he would be obsolete before long. The West Fargo Stockyards is a ghost town now.
That’s him in the middle with the groovy glasses.

Warning If you’re a vegan or a PETA member or simply don’t want to think about where your filet mignon comes from, you might not want to read the following.

The highest point in the Fargo-Moorhead area is the manure pile outside the Union Stockyards in West Fargo. It was huge, they drove big dump trucks on it. It had roads up it’s sides. It’s still there. Settled a bit and overgrown with vegetation, probably the most fertile soil in an area known for it’s fertile soil. The soil in the Red River Valley is amazing. The silt from the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz. Black as oil, perfect growing anything, especially sugar beets.
In the early sixties, Siouxland Dressed Beef built a new state of the art packing plant across the road from the stockyards. Designed to kill cattle, sheep and hogs it was at that time one of the highest volume livestock packing operations in the world. That wouldn’t last long because that was a time when the size and efficiency of such operations was growing at an amazing pace. But at that time it was a showcase. The offices were on one side of the building, next to the kill floor. They were lined with windows so the office workers and plant managers could look out and admire the operation. Unfortunately the architects or engineers made a slight miscalculation. The conveyor for the sheep kill brought the freshly slaughtered sheep carcasses right past the window. They were swinging as they came around a corner on the line. They hit the window. So these windows that were put in so the white collar folks could admire the efficiency of their high tech plant were constantly covered by a disgusting film of sheep blood and gore. My dad was extremely amused by this.

ASAP
As Soon As Possible.
I hate that term. What does ASAP mean to you. Here’s what I think when someone tells me they want something ASAP. I think they don’t give enough of a fuck about it to care about when it gets done and what it’s priority is so why the fuck should I. I put it on the bottom of my priority list behind all the things from people who have taken the time to figure out where the work fits in their schedules. I can usually accomodate that. When you really never have any downtime, ASAP is pretty much NEVER.
This has nothing to do with my current shitty mood, though.

Do you ever want to run away and just start over?

“It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearin’ Milk Bone underwear.”

All the hilarious comments have cheered me up immensely and perhaps prevented a murder.

I got beaten up pretty badly at work yesterday. Square peg, round hole.

L took me to the Wolves game last night, part of my birthday present. Isn’t that sweet. Nose bleed seats but it was fun. We wandered around downtown afterwards while the traffic cleared.

My plants survived. It’s supposed to warm up now.

I’m not feeling very clever right now.

The technophobe in the cavalry uniform is Happy Easter, a character from Milton Caniff’s strip, Steve Canyon. OK so I’m old and had a comic obsessed youth.

I’m looking forward to going into work even less than a usual Monday today.

Last night I burned the audio book biography of Ben Franklin. I’d never get through it reading, so my next fifty or so trips between work and home will be dedicated to learning about one of my favorite historical figures. Printer, inventor, publisher, statesman, sex maniac, he had it all.

Like Fleener I rehearse anticipated arguments in my head. Compulsively. I say my parts outloud. Some folks think I’m crazy.

Last fall I planted hundreds of bulbs. It was hard work. They’re starting to come up now. It was supposed to get down into the low twenties last night. I was too lazy to go out and cover them. I AM crazy.

Yesterday morning there was one of those scary looking centi- mille- bunchapedes in the shower. It was about half drowned so I stepped on it and sent it down the drain. My foot went numb and stayed that way for about four hours.

No one else in the house has to get up this morning, but ollie the cat is sitting upstairs by the three bedroom doors meowing. He’s been doing it for a half hour. I’ve fed him, but he won’t shut up. He does this every day. As soon as he hears my feet hit the floor, he starts talking.

The black dog is scratching at my door.

OK a big pat on the back for the first person to tell me why I used this image. What’s the reference?

Happy Easter

It’s now snowing. Windy and cold. My bare garden is infested with slate colored juncos. Always juncos. Those tough little bastards actually fly south to here. Or the the ones who just stay here, cardinals and crows and chickadee’s. I want a warbler, damnit. How about an indigo bunting just for kicks. The hawk is back though. Good hunting brother, get those woodchucks before I have to.

So I hear some interest in the story of the big burn. It will be awhile before I get to that one. I need to do it right and that means discribing the landscape and weather conditions and how they combined to create a fire storm. And I’m a little intimidated by the task of doing that clearly. It wasn’t a big fire by Yellowstone standards. Probably not even a thousand acres. But it was very intense.
I guess I make this time in my life look all exciting and romantic, but remember I’ve been verbally polishing these stories for thirty years. They make great party stories and help me compensate for the dork I really think I am. My plan after college was to work seasonaly jobs so I could develope my art on the off season. My goal was to become a famous painter. I ended up turning my back on art, drinking very heavily, not to mention other substance abuse, having truely nasty relationships with women, getting very sick, becoming so distant from reality I couldn’t figure out how to stop my beard from taking over my entire head and generally losing all confidence in myself. All this time, driven by an insane urge to compensate for my youthful athletic failures and suddenly blessed with a new body forged by fire, I became obsessed with basketball and spent the part of my life that sane people spend forming careers, polishing my game. And for what? So I can hobble down stairs like an 80 year old when I’m 55? So I can’t straighten my legs out and there are only a few positions I can sleep in without pain? So I can be stuck in a low level corporate lacky management job that requires more organization than you could distill out of a hundred of me and where I have to deal with managers who have more organization in their toenails than I will ever have? And artists who make me look like an organizational genius? And never, ever saving a fucking dime?

On the flip side….it was often FU-UN!

I once carried a five gallon gas can attached to a pack frame up a cliff was steep enough to require climbing on all fours and had little patches of open flame all around.

My job in the Forest Service was to dig fire line. That meant using a Polaski, which I guess is a pickaxe by another name. It had a horizontal blade for trenching and a vertical blade for chopping roots. You dig a path 18 inches wide down to mineral soil. In the area where we worked that meant digging through at least eight inches of duff. Duff is the decomposing forest floor that can smolder and burn and carry a fire a hundred yards underground to flare up three days after you think you have the fire out. Most of the time the areas that we were digging line around weren’t burning. Sounds like a government job doesn’t it. What we were doing is preparing areas that had been clear cut for “controlled burns” The loggers came in and took all the trees suitable for lumber and then the government contracted guys to come in and “slash” which means to cut and pile up all the little brush trees that the loggers wouldn’t take and then we came in, dug a line around it and in the late summer came back and set it on fire. That’s right, pyro’s dream job. I put quotes around “controlled burns” because they usually were out of control about 3 minutes after we set them on fire. My big “controlled burn” story will have to wait for another blog though.
We were always on call to fight wild fires when they popped up. Unfortunately (there I said it) there weren’t many wild fires that year. Not enough lightning. You see fire fighters make there money working overtime on fires. It wasn’t a real profitable year, but I got my taste of fighting wild fires.
We were working at a site late one afternoon when our boss, Terry Stranahan, Godzilla himself, or as I called him, Stammerin’ Stranny, got a call on the radio. A construction crew had been building a bridge across the North Fork in an area where the canyon wall came right up to the river. They backed some heavy equipment into a brush pile at the foot of the cliff. It caught fire and burned up through the brushy parts of the cliff. I don’t know if “cliff” is the right term, the landscape consisted of sharp vertical outcropping of rocks that went up maybe eighty or so feet up, with little draws that were moderately pitched enough to grow some hardy brush. There was about five acres of scattered fire that had pretty much burned itself out by the time we got there. But you can’t just leave it, because it will come back and bite you in the ass at noon the next day. I really don’t have much of an opinion on forest management and fire, so if you’re a “let it burn” person, work with me here. Pretend the Forest Service knows what it’s doing. Normally we’d set up some pumps in the river and hose it down until there was no more open flame and then sit on it for a couple of days to make sure it stayed out. But this situation posed a problem. You can only pump water up so far. I’d sound smarter if I knew what that height was, but I’m sure someone will tell me And this fire was well above that level. The boss scouted out the situation. The pumping truck arrived. Here’s what we did.
We had a big collapsible plastic swimming pool with and aluminum frame. It folded out to about 5’ by 8’ by 3’. Two of us teamed up to carry that up to a flat spot at the top of one of the outcroppings. Another guy took the pump. I can’t remember if one guy muscled the pump up or if we teamed up. I know we used two guys to carry the bilge pump out on the tow when I worked the river. Anyway, needless to say there’s some urgency about this so the boss is whipping us pretty hard and my lungs are on fire from the first time up the hill. Stranny looks at me and says, “Well, now we need gas for the pump.” I scramble back down and strap the gas can onto my back and climb back up. I’ll admit to being a little nervous. We now had the pump down by the river filling the reservoir and I sat down on a rock to catch my breath. Stranny spots me and says, “As long as you’re resting go get us a hose pack.” A hose pack is eighty pounds of heavy fire hose coiled into a canvas backpack mounted on a frame. The end of the hose comes out the bottom, so you can hook it up and take of, stringing hose out behind you. This is an activity that will, as an old logger once said, “give you muscles in your shit.” At that time I was 6’1” and about a hundred and forty-five. Can you say rail? My legs were already trembling and I was having a hard time catching my breath. Down the hill put the hose pack on start back up. I’m now so pissed at the boss that I’m going to show him that I’m a real fire-fightin’ sumbitch and I’m am just blasting adrenalin. I hit the top crazed, probably foaming at the mouth. They grab the end of the hose and hook it up to the pump. I can’t remember if Stranny just said, “Now string it out over that hill and down into the draw on the other side.” Or offered to have someone take over for me and I told him to fuck himself, but I hooked up and took off over the rise. I crashed through some bush at the top and came out into a bowl the size of a nearly vertical football field that was mostly burned, with little patches of flames around it. And there, near the top was the a team of women digging line across the head of the fire. The visual I get of this is that they were all wearing denim shorts and work shirts with the sleeves cut off, but that couldn’t be because they were working for Smokey the Bear and would have had to be wearing long sleeves and pants, steel toed boots and orange hardhats. I was almost ready to drop in my tracks when I saw them there, but suddenly I was so inspired and wanted so badly to look macho that I completely revived and ran that hose out like a rutting mountain goat. And probably smelling just as bad.
And that’s how I came to carry a gas can on my back through a fire.

I said “hose bag”