Building a Prairie Unit

For over a year I’ve been posting short essays centered around a 100 acre prairie restoration on the farm where I grew up in Day County, South Dakota. The blog has slowly expanded to the restoration’s place within the entire “home farm”, 590 acres including other native prairie pastures and haylands as well as cropped ground. That is not all the land that my wife and I own, however. We have also accumulated 420 acres of native grass pastures in several transactions which are managed within our cattle LLC, a business set up to own the pastures and cow herd that grazes them, and which allowed us to take on a partner, Mark, a young farmer who lives ten miles east of us.

The story begins 36 or 37 years ago when I visited with a middle aged farmer from 15 miles northeast of where we now live who had hired me to take soil samples on his crop fields. After a few minutes lining up that work we began visiting about the pasture which took up almost all of his home quarter. I complimented him on its excellent range condition and asked if I could take a walk in it. He was flattered, and said I could walk in it anytime. Though it was grazed, it was full of four foot tall indiangrass and big bluestem seedheads waving in the October sun.

I kept an eye on the pasture over the next couple years, and soon noticed the quarter to the north was almost as good. The owner had recently gone bankrupt in the carnage of the farm crisis of the 1980’s, and the pasture was ungrazed. I couldn’t resist trespassing to have a look around, and found a good quality tall grass prairie.

Why hadn’t these prairies been turned into corn and soybeans like the rest of the neighborhood? The glacial history had left a legacy of boulders that you can literally step across in some areas without touching the ground, as well as an intricate network of wetlands. In between the rocks and the water is a deep, rich clay loam soil as productive as any in the area. You might call it the “Flint Hills effect” after the area in Kansas and Oklahoma which houses the largest area of remnant of tall grass prairie, still there because the underlying geology makes farming too painful.

From there we move forward to the year 2000 and a conversation with Russ, a client from that neighborhood. He was attempting to buy a quarter of farm ground about two miles south of the pastures I’ve discussed, and mentioned there was an adjacent 80 of pasture he wasn’t interested in. He encouraged me to look into it. The pasture wasn’t impressive when looking at it from the road, but made a better impression as I walked across it. The fences were crap and there was no stock dam for water, just a shallow scrape which would dry up in a drought, but there was 40 or 50 acres of decent quality prairie. I saw potential there.

The realtor I went to visit was a nice gentleman named Chuck. ” Bobbie thinks she has a buyer for the 80,” he informed me, “but I don’t think it is a done deal, I’m not her agent on the pasture, but I’d like to see her treated fairly. If you think you have financing I will inform her of your interest.”

A few days later I got a call from Chuck. “The deal on the 80 fell through. The buyer said he would be by with a check on Tuesday and didn’t show. You know how worried old people get. She cancelled the sale at the end of the day and wouldn’t even talk to him the next day. Now, she is going to give you each a chance to rebid. Get me your bid in the next couple days and I will present it to her.

I went home to talk to my wife, Linda, who was very nervous about the whole deal. She was, however very interested in grazing cattle. She has a degree in range management and a great affinity for creatures great and small. She had also recently had a bad experience where a business relationship with a neighbor to manage his cow herd had been yanked from under her, which left her bitterly disappointed. Linda was born to run cattle. Because of that I had recently bid on a quarter of pasture at an auction but had been outbid. We also had just finished paying off the mortgage on the little farm where we live, freeing up some cash flow. I resolutely put in a bid of $28,000, $350 per acre, figuring we would have well over $400 per acre into it after fencing and cleaning out the waterhole, which was the high end of the pasture market at that time.

The next day I was back in the realtor’s office. He stood there shaking his head, “Poor Bobbie doesn’t know what to do. You both bid the same amount. She is thinking about re-advertising the land. She really wants to be done with this, though. What would you like me to do?”

The realtor was tramping down the path in front of me, sweeping the leaves away and inviting me through the gate. That’s how it seemed to me, anyway. The other bidder must have really pissed him off. He wouldn’t have done this if the land had been listed with his realty, but he wasn’t going to make a dime off the sale; he was doing this as a friend.

“Would you be willing to take her a bid for $28,500?” I asked.

“I would be happy to do that,” he said. And a couple days later we got to sign the papers purchasing what we now call Bobbie’s 80.

Because of the native prairie and the many wetlands on the pasture we were able to obtain US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) easements on it, which took some financial pressure off us, becoming a late down payment. At that time we had no cattle, so it was used for horse pasture, hayed and rented out for several years. It was also the site of many enjoyable walks.

The next opportunity came five years later. Russ had the chance to buy another piece of land which included 210 acres of grass, the land I had walked over about 20 years before. The grass was intertwined with the farmland, so was being sold as a 480 acre unit. I walked the land again and hesitated a bit, as the intervening years had not been kind to the pasture. Leafy spurge had greatly increased, necessitating herbicide treatments which had almost eliminated native forbs without really controlling the spurge. Nothing but rudimentary patching had been done to the fence for twenty years, and it was a mess. The dugout was badly silted in, necessitating an intricate piping system by the last renter to bring water from the farm site half a mile away. And it had been badly overgrazed, meaning the mosaic of tall prairie grasses I had seen were no longer evident.

Once again, the components were still there, however. The native grass bunches were still visible within the bromegrass and spurge. There were still some native forbs. Fences can be rebuilt and dugouts cleaned out. We told Russ what we would be willing to pay him, so he had that in his hip pocket when he went to the auction, and we were soon the owners of 210 more acres of native grass pasture.

Once more we placed FWS easements on the new pasture, and rented it out while we planned its future. The future of the pasture became secondary to my own future that fall, when life slapped me upside the head. I was diagnosed with stage 3/4 squamous cell cancer of the head and neck about the time of my 51st birthday in the fall of 2006. While my original diagnosis had implied that treatments were rarely successful, I had the good fortune to be referred to Mayo Clinic. At Mayo I came under the care of a prestigious team pioneering a new treatment regimen. All three doctors in the team, the surgeon, the medical oncologist and the radiologist, separately told Linda and me the same story. They would beat the holy hell out of me; I might never work again; I might never eat again; I would lose my saliva and probably lose my teeth; and I might need reconstructive surgery. At the end of my ordeal I would be cured of my cancer. Was I in or out? I signed on without a moment’s hesitation.

The treatments took three months, mostly on site at Mayo. At their conclusion I recuperated in a hospital bed in our living room at home, and within a few weeks I began to get out a little. By summer I was able to get back to work, though I had two separate scares on recurrences of the cancer. A recurrence was even scarier than it sounds because there were no tools left in the toolbox to fight the cancer. Mayo had already shot their wad. Luckily, one of the recurrences wasn’t cancer, and the other one was cut out before it got a chance to spread, so we walked on the proverbial eggshells and tried to get back to something approaching normal life.

About the time I started to feel like I might have a future we heard that Ray, the owner of the pasture that began this essay, had passed away and that the land would be for sale. Russ had been renting the farmland for some time, and was given the opportunity to purchase the farm, and he once more came to us as a partner. Land prices were much higher than when we purchased Bobbie’s 80, we had more debt and my health was still dicey. Linda, who didn’t grow up on a farm, with its attendant comfort with debt, told me she had to go into the bedroom and put a pillow over her head to block out the stress and worry. We still weren’t sure I had beaten the cancer as there seemed to be a new worrisome development every time I visited Mayo.

This was too good of an opportunity to pass up, however. Adding the 130 acres of Ray’s pasture would give us a contiguous 340 acre unit which allowed great flexibility in management, and could be complimented by Bobbie’s 80 which was only two miles away. Russ put a three way deal together on Ray’s two quarters: we would buy the 130 acre pasture, Russ would buy the 150 acres of farmground and a third party would buy 40 acres which included the house, farm buildings and livestock lots. Once again we placed FWS easements on the land which meant that in seven years and three transactions we had permanently conserved 420 acres of prairie.

We had already formed an LLC two years before, which gave us a vehicle to bring in the young neighbor, Mark, who was looking for ways to enlarge his livestock operation. We sold Mark a 50% interest in the LLC at a very reasonable price, but the decision was as selfish as it was altruistic. We had unloaded half the financial risk, bringing the debt down to a very reasonable level, a big concern with my health situation. More important, we now had a young, strong, capable partner who could shoulder at least half the load in both labor and management. Mark winters the cows and feeds out the calves. Linda manages the six months on pasture. Together they make decisions on goals and actions. Though Linda was born in suburban Chicago, she was meant to be born on a ranch where she could care for livestock. Over the course of seven years we got Linda her ranch, composed of 420 acres of prairie. We found a partner for her whose skills complement hers. Thus, while I write blog posts about all my activities on my home farm and its restorations, Linda is doing creative and innovative grassland management with the mouths and hooves of 100 head of stock cows and the attendant calves and bulls. It’s a full and busy life.

Retirement Manifesto

There are several great existential questions we all face. What is my purpose? What is love? How do I understand and approach God? To me, they all come down to a single question: How do I spend my time? All the metaphysics in the universe disappears at the moment I choose what to do next. Nothing counts until I take an action. That is how I fulfill my purpose, show my love and approach the infinite. The motto of the Benedictines is instructive: “Ora et labora”, prayer and work.

For the past forty years I have tried to answer those existential questions within the framework of my crop consulting business, where I spent half of my waking hours. That path is closing off to me as I turn the business over to my successor, Arne. While Arne is remarkably tolerant of my continued attempts at guidance it is steadily becoming his business. I am working about half time this year, and will retire completely within another year or two. How will I spend my time now?

There is the siren song of retirement: I can travel, visit the kids and have a kick-ass garden. For me there is the added factor of dealing with my health issues. Between tube feeding and trachaeostomy care it is pretty easy to blow an extra two to four hours per day. I have also made contact with the Minnesota Land Trust and the Nature Conservancy, and will begin volunteering later this summer. Already it sounds like a full retirement.

Except that it isn’t. The core frustration is that at 64, through my work history as an adult, I have accumulated over forty years of knowledge, forty years of connections, forty years of history and forty years of watching how things fit together so that good results can happen. How can I waste that?

And so, as always seems to be the case lately, we come back to my restoration and the rest of the 590 acres of the farm where I grew up. I did a little math and it seems that there are four acres for every person living on the planet. That’s four acres of tundra, taiga, temperate forest, prairie, savanna, tropical rain forest, desert and farmland available to grow food, fiber and provide the ecosystem services we need for life to be full and abundant. I am tremendously fortunate to own and control those 590 acres, but with great fortune comes great responsibility. This is a weight I must bear, a grand task I need to give myself to.

The task is to come up with a vision that can turn into actions that elevate the ability of those 590 acres to sequester carbon and harbor Dakota skippers, but also to produce wheat, corn and cattle, clean water and wildlife habitat, and perhaps solace to those who want to wander there. The components of such a plan are staring me in the face, inherent in the resources of the land. Sometimes the action that needs to be taken, though, is just to ponder, to allow for wise choices. Covid 19 is good for something, it seems.

Spring now envelops us with its roller coaster of weather, and the last snow will soon melt. What actions do I see being taken this year?

Much time needs to be spent documenting and evaluating progress on the restoration. As I wrote in a recent post, “Counting Carbon”, I plan to establish baseline data for what I hope will be a long term study on changes in carbon in the soil as the restoration matures. I have the opportunity of receiving help form a wonderful young Brazilian woman who was recently hired by Arne, and I need to make the most of it. If we establish reference points and get soil carbon data this year, an interested party can continue the study in the future even if I am not able to do so.

There will be twenty new acres to seed down this fall which I need to continue to plan for. That will include gathering seed from my prairies again, a prospect that excites me greatly. I’ve actually been out twice this past week and gathered a couple handfuls of overwintered seed while I took my first spring jaunts in my prairie hills. The twenty acres to be seeded is part of a cooperation with Ducks Unlimited (DU) which will include fencing and water source development to graze more acres than I do now.

Those actions of gathering and spreading seed, taking soil samples, weed control and fencing need to be subservient to the vision. however. My job is to provide a robust and flexible, yet fairly detailed plan the someone else (like my daughter) could follow should I be unable. This doesn’t mean that I believe that anyone has an obligation to follow in my footsteps, rather that I have an obligation to create a vision that has the clarity of purpose and implementation to draw others down the same path.

Life, full and abundant, is my mantra. And this is my manifesto: The land is important. The land can feed, clothe, shelter and heal. It provides meaningful work and purpose to literally billions of people in the world. As the line from “Death of a Salesman” says, “Attention must be paid!” Attention will be paid to my farm; life will flow from it; food will come from it; lives will be improved by it. I will both experience and contribute to life, full and abundant, for as long as I am able.

Hawk Lessons

During the summer of 1972, before I began my senior year of high school, I had several encounters with birds that made an impression on my adolescent brain. Like all teenagers I was floundering my way towards a sense of where I fit, wondering how to take my raw material out into the world and form it into an adult. At various times that year it seemed the universe was speaking to me through the voice of a marbled godwit, a great blue heron, a group of pelicans and particularly through the harsh cry of a red tailed hawk.

Early that summer my task for the day was to get a fence ready for the cattle we would soon put out in the pasture just west of my prairie restoration. I threw some metal line posts, some used wire for splicing, a bag of staples, a post maul, a fence stretcher and a few tools into the back of our old pickup. I packed a sandwich or two and a quart jar of water and left for a day of fencing.

While I wasn’t a lazy kid, neither was I an efficient and driven worker at sixteen. After two or three hours I lost interest in the fencing, dropped my tools back in the pickup, and decided to take my lunch on a walk to Anderson Lake, about a half mile to the west. I ate a sandwich as I walked, first crossing our prairie hayland, then jumping the fence bordering a neighbor’s pasture. I crossed a couple hills and came upon a view of a valley heading down to the lake. Bordering the lake a hundred yards ahead was a large dead cottonwood with a nest in the crotch between the last two sizable branches, about 40 feet in the air. As I approached it a large hawk lifted off the nest, screamed at me and flew into the sky until it became a line drawing, and then little more than a dot. It turned in swirls and spirals, still screaming from perhaps 1000 feet in the air, “SKREE! SKREE! SKREE!”

There was only one choice available to the young man I was at sixteen. I had to climb the tree to see what was in the nest. What else could I do? It is only with hindsight that it seems obvious that climbing 40 feet up the slippery surface of a barkless cottonwood with an angry hawk parent voicing its indignation up above might not be a good idea. A different way to state this might be that I was compelled to climb the tree by a teenager’s need for excitement and novelty, the need to explore and learn In any case, there was no hesitation as I attacked the tree.

At that age I was an accomplished and experienced tree climber, but I found the cottonwood a challenge. Without bark there were no grooves to stick my fingers or the toe of my boots into for purchase. I had to get to the first branch, almost ten feet in the air with the smooth, slick trunk below. I was finally able to reach the branch by using a bump from a long gone limb as an aid, From there I found more good branches to use, until I was about ten feet below the nest. The only branches at that height were both small and beginning to rot. It would take both skill and daring to complete the climb to the nest.

But what then? I needed to take a minute to think this through. Why was I so determined to reach this nest? The previous year I had climbed to a hawk nest in a box elder in an old farmsite north of our place. As I rose through a tangle of branches to the lip of the nest I met the open gapes of three halfgrown hawks pretending to be badasses by hissing and screaming at me. In my surprise I lost my grip, but caught myself in the tangle of branches a few feet down, The only penalty for my foolishness was a momentary loss of dignity and a few scratches. The penalty of losing my grip on the cottonwood would be far greater. And above the hawk still screamed.

After thinking through the options I decided to retreat. It wasn’t so much a “discretion is the better part of valor” decision as a realization that I was acting like a damned idiot. If I fell I could be badly hurt, perhaps killed. Worse, no one would even think to look for me here, a half mile from my pickup. A mental image of committing to a jump to a rotten branch which snapped in my hands, with me ending up falling through space convinced me to start my way back down. A few minutes later I was on the ground ready to go back to fencing. I gave a last look to the hawk still circling far above and began to saunter back, probably a bit smug in my new found maturity. After I was fifty yards away from the nest the hawks screams seemed louder, so I looked back up to watch it gliding back to earth in a tight spiral, no longer a line drawing, but the image of a raptor. As I watched it circle downwards the realization crept up that it was not circling the nest, but directly over me.

Holy Crap! Normally I don’t spook easily, but I instantly received a very large dose of fear induced adrenaline. I had watched hawks dive on rabbits and mice from the safety of a tractor many times. There would be very little time to react should my aggrieved adversary decide to dive on me. With the strength of my fear I began to sprint, trying to put distance between the nest and me. Though I was running with the speed of youth, I felt like my boots were caked with cement. At the same time, I was yelling at the hawk, professing both innocence and contrition, not caring that true innocence precludes the need for contrition. When I had reached the top of the hill where I had first seen the nest I looked up to see the hawk break off its intimidating spiral, gliding back to the nest where it sat and screamed its final indignation towards me: “SKREE! SKREE! SKREE!”

I walked a ways farther and then dropped to the ground, deflated like a spent balloon, the adrenaline wearing off. My heartbeat became less of a machine gun and I thought about what had just occurred. Never before or since have I been frightened in that primal manner, though I have been in several situations much more dangerous. I felt that life had given me a powerful message.

The message was to be mindful; to be intentional; to show respect for the decisions I made. It was to look at the world as a place to enter and be a part of, not a toy to manipulate. The opportunity to retool my outlook can only be called “grace” by this old Catholic altar boy. I tend towards linear thought and cold logic, and can be a bit dismissive of mystical interpretations of events. My wife is the shaman in our family, not me. Yet it pleases me to imagine that in a moment of heightened consciousness, fed by fear, I entered the fierce, unyielding world of a red tailed hawk. To the hawk, the world and every action is serious, with life and death consequences. I am humbly grateful for that lesson.

Valkyries

When my mother, Marian, was 90 years old she decided that she needed a new hip. The pain from the arthritic joint was turning her into a recluse. In her words, “What the hell good am I to anyone like this?” She had no intention of living the rest of her life as a shut-in, so action needed to be taken.

There were two barriers, however. First, there was an irregularity in her EKG, something that had first shown up several years before in preparation for hernia surgery. Her second problem was high blood pressure, though the readings were only high when taken at the clinic. They seemed to be stress induced, the main stressor being the worry that she would be unable to get her new hip with high blood pressure. These were significant issues to overcome, but my mother had worked as a nurse for twenty years after she and my father had retired from the farm, and she knew her way around the health system. Soon she had a plan to overcome the barriers.

The EKG blip was mitigated by finding a doctor who wrote an opinion minimizing the importance of the abnormality, a “bundle branch block”. In addition, she had lived with no problems since the original EKG, so that barrier was overcome. To combat arguments regarding the high blood pressure reading she was certain the nurse would measure, she brought in a voluminous log of much lower blood pressure readings she had taken at home over the past two weeks. Thus buttressed, and with me along as a witness (she had me watch her take two readings earlier that day), she talked the orthopedic surgeon into performing a hip replacement.

The surgery went well. Afterwards her spirits were high, despite the inevitable post surgical pain. My older brother, Leon, came to be with her, and after a couple days brought her back to the tiny hospital in Webster, her home town, to convalesce a few days before going home.

Leon went home, and I went to check on her the next day. I found her slumped in the recliner in her room, looking for the first time in her life like a frail old woman. “What happened, Mom?” I asked. “You look like hell!”

She looked down and to the side, deciding how to spin her reply, and finally said,”I had a little upset last night, Bobby.” Then there was a short pause to decide how honestly she would answer my question. “The doctor thinks I might have had a small heart attack.” She looked down at the floor while she said this, not wanting to make eye contact.

“What??? What are they doing about it? Why are you just sitting here? What actions are they taking? What does the doctor say?”

She raised her head, looked at me with steely eyes, and said, “They’re not doing anything. He wants to send me to a hospital in Sioux Falls, but I told him I wouldn’t go. Talk to the doctor yourself. He should still be on call.”

I went to the nurses station to page the doctor, and when he came I asked, “What happened last night? My mother says that you think she had a heart attack, but there are no measures being taken. She is just sitting in her recliner. Are you all right with that?”

“I am NOT all right with that!” he indignantly replied. “I want her to go to the Heart Hospital in Sioux Falls, but she categorically refused. She practically kicked me out of her room. We just can’t do much for her here.”

His plaintive tone told me that Marian had cut him off at the knees when he had suggested an ambulance ride to Sioux Falls so I left him at the nurses station with an aggrieved look on his face and went back to confront my mother.

“The doctor still wants to send you to Sioux Falls. Why won’t you go?”

“Bobby, I already know what they will do with me down there. I’m an old woman who just had surgery, so they won’t do anything. They will put me in a bed with an IV and just stare at me. After a few days they will tell me to go home. I can do the same thing here. I feel better now and would just like to spend the night and talk in the morning. If I have a bad night I will consider it again. What’s the worst that could happen? I have a heart attack and die.”

After dismissing the worst case scenario with a metaphorical wave of her hand she sent me home. She was much better the next day, excited because my younger brother, Jim, was flying out from California to stay a few days with her. My wife went to get Jim, dropped him off with Marian, and left them to visit. After a couple days Marian seemed perky enough to go home and her first day at home was great. She spent the day regaling my brother with all her ideas of activities possible now that she had the new hip, thrilled that her baby boy was home to see her. As I remember, she wanted to go see the renovations done on the diocesan Cathedral in Sioux Falls, and she wanted to plan a trip to Wisconsin to see her younger sister.

Late that afternoon she tired of talking, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. Immediately she called for my brother, “Jimmy, come here, I need you!” He found her slumped on the floor, confused. Jim dragged himself away long enough to call 911, returned to her, and held her while her life ebbed away after a heart attack. She passed away a couple days after her 91st birthday.

A day or two later I was back in Webster making funeral arrangements. The funeral home was only a couple blocks from my mother’s house so I welcomed the walk to clear my head. My mood matched the weather, black swirling clouds buffeted by a strong wind. I stood looking at the turbulent sky, trying to make sense of my turbulent emotions.

And then the vultures came. A lot of vultures. Perhaps two hundred vultures were taking advantage of the strong south winds, swooping and circling just above the treetops on their way north. The Valkyries had come for my mother, the warrior, to take her to Valhalla. In my fey mood, walking with one foot on each side of the great divide, I momentarily wondered if they also were there for me. My place, however, was still on earth, and after a few minutes they were gone, leaving me there with my mouth agape.

My mother had grown up speaking Kasuby Polish, a dialect from near the Baltic Sea. Her arc began with horse teams and hard labor, and ended in the twenty first century. Though there were many aspects of Dakota farm life that frustrated her, she always shaped her environment and crafted her own path. “What’s the worst that could happen? I have a heart attack and die.” She knew that, unhesitatingly moved forward, and lost her bet, getting to die in the arms of her son. Pretty damned cool. If anyone deserved to feast in Valhalla (or it’s Polish equivalent) Marian did. A lot of lessons and a lot to live up to. If I can live my remaining years with half the courage and strength as my parents I will be satisfied. And if I am lucky, maybe the vultures will come for me as well.

Postscript:

About two weeks after my mother’s death I was back in Webster cleaning up some of her business when I received a phone call from her surgeon. “Bob, I just heard that Marian had a heart attack and passed away. I’m so sorry. I feel responsible for her death.” Wow! The surgeon had both the balls and the humanity to speak from his heart, quite a gift in our litigious society. I returned the gift, telling him that while the surgery probably did lead to the heart attack, Marian went into the surgery with her eyes wide open. I thanked him for the call and for trying to give my mother the opportunity to lead a richer and happier life. It felt very good to be able to tell him that. We need to go forward bravely; the worst that can happen is that we die.

Contingency

During the summer of 2018 there was a phenomena which illustrated how much there is to learn if you keep your eyes open. About the end of June I started to see some regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) butterflies. It seemed a bit early, but May and June had been warm. The black samson (Echinacea angustifolia) they like to nectar on was beginning to bloom already, so the phenology was appropriate to the year.

The next week when I returned to my prairies all hell had broken loose. Everywhere I looked I saw regal fritillaries. They were feeding on a variety of blooms; they were wafting around at eye level, flipping past my head as I walked around; they were all through the sky as far as the eye could see. At any time I could look up and see twenty or thirty fritillaries across my field of vision. Where the hell did they all come from? What were the important weather events to allow excellent egg deposition and survival the previous fall, allow overwintering of early instar larvae, allow sufficient violet growth to feed those larvae during the spring and allow efficient pupation to create the clouds of butterflies I enjoyed that summer? What was the ultimate cause of the population explosion?

The cheap answer is that the flapping wings of a butterfly ultimately causes a typhoon in the Pacific, the chestnut from chaos theory. Everything is contingent upon everything, a chaotic system impossible to fathom. The other extreme we are prone to is to attribute a phenomena to a single, simple cause. A facile oversimplification is almost always wrong. The fritillary outbreak was undoubtedly due to more than one factor. So let’s go through the list.

First, late summer and fall weather was pretty gentle in 2017. There was enough rain and a warm enough fall for good plant growth. The winter was fairly open and gentle until a cold wet April added 20” of snow. While there are always some violets (Viola pedatifida and Viola nuttallii) in our hills, neither I nor my neighbors (I do a little trespassing to look around now and then) had an unusual amount. If you had asked my opinion that spring on the potential for a fritillary outbreak I would have guessed that populations would be down because of a lack of snow cover in midwinter and the crappy April. What happened?

Well, here’s my guess. What stood out in 2018 as unusual was that when it finally warmed up at the end of April it stayed consistently warm in May and June, with good moisture. Cool season plants that had been languishing on April 25th absolutely detonated in May. Temperatures at the nearest weather station near Watertown were 6.3 degrees above average in May and 4.5 degrees above average in June. Add in the moisture from the April snows and the spring rains, and even the gravel hills looked like gardens. Certainly other factors were important as well. Perhaps disease or parasitism or predation were less significant than average. Maybe the warm weather limited fungal disease of the larvae or the pupae. I don’t know. What I do know is that the weather conditions of 2019, when another cold, snowy April turned into a cold damp May, led to a dearth of regal fritillaries. They were hard to find this past summer, though I saw a few. Where did contingency lie? It is fun to consider

Postscript

As I have written earlier, one impetus for this project was to provide habitat for Dakota skipper butterflies. Providing habitat for regal fritillaries was not something I had considered in designing my seed list. After the fritillary outbreak I purchased prairie violet (Viola pedatifida) seed as well as whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) seed (I had noticed adult fritillaries nectaring on whorled milkweed) to spread last spring. While the future for Dakota skippers is pretty dicey, regal fritillaries seem to have more resiliency, or perhaps less specificity in habitat requirements. It pleases me greatly to add another species of conservation concern to my habitat plan. Perhaps, if it is a better spring, I will see one using the restoration this summer.

Again and again it strikes me how much I have to learn, and that much of learning is simply spending time in the prairie with my eyes open. In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while you could miss it.”

Roots 2

Continuing the theme of the last post, here is a bit on the other end of my father’s life:

After they retired from the farm, my father found a way to live for 28 more years. Most of the credit goes to the informed and watchful care of my mother, who went back to school at 57 to get a nursing degree. He spent his retirement much as he had spent his teenage years, minus the drinking. He walked downtown every day to play cards and play pool, mowed the lawn and watched television. I am almost the same age as he was when he retired and that sounds horrible to me, but it suited him. Finally, in his mid-eighties, all his health problems caught up to him, till his world revolved around the dining room, which held his lift chair, the commode, his hospital bed and the dining room table. Once a week I would get him into the bathroom to sit for a shower. The demands of his care became more and more onerous till we worried for my mother’s health. She was losing weight, not sleeping well and developing a hernia from helping my father.

The three brothers had a good talk as we walked off Christmas dinner, 2005, to discuss the matter. What could we do to help our mother more, or get our father to the nursing home he needed for his advanced care? Earlier during the fall of that year I had been visiting when my father had broached the subject, “Marian, you need to put me into a nursing home. Taking care of me is killing you,” he said in an anguished voice, and then he looked to me for support. He had waited until I visited so that he would have a chance to make his case. Though he was obviously scared at the prospect of a nursing home, he felt he needed to take a shot at lessening the load on my mother.

My mother looked as if she had been slapped in the face and responded before I could say anything, “Why in the hell do you want to go to a nursing home? They won’t take half as good care of you as I do. You’ll just lay there wishing someone would help you. No one can take care of you the way I do!”

“I know that, dear, but taking care of me is wrecking your health. You have to put me in a nursing home so you can get a break and get some sleep,” he said with tears in his eyes.

Not a chance. My mother’s life was made normal and meaningful by caring for Lester, and she was perfectly willing to shorten her life to do it. She gave six or eight reasons why the nursing home was a bad idea, from poorer care, to the expense, to how it would really be harder on her to drive back and forth to the nursing home. Neither Lester nor I could say a word. With that background to our Christmas conversation all the three brothers could come up with on our walk was that we would all try to help my mother more. It was her right to shorten her life to take care of Lester.

A few weeks later I got a call from my mother about 6:30 in the morning. Of course the first thing you say after an unexpected phone call at that time of the morning is to ask, “What’s wrong, Mom? Is Dad all right?”

” Bobby, get in your vehicle and come here right away. Your Dad had a (very short pause while she weighed her response) a kind of seizure. Come now!”

I kept asking questions while I threw some clothes on but continued to get evasive replies, so I hopped in my pickup to drive the 35 miles to Webster, where my parents lived. About halfway there I called back to ask whether the ambulance was there yet and my mother replied: “Just don’t have an accident! We will talk when you get here. Hang up the phone and watch the road.”

I drove 80 mph in the early morning light without seeing another vehicle the entire way and burst into the house breathlessly, “Where’s the ambulance??? Where’s Dad?”

“Just sit down Bobby, so we can talk.” And as I walked over to the hospital bed to sit down I saw my Dad in the lift chair, deader than a fucking doornail. He was a greenish gray color as the blood was draining to lower points in his body. My mother handed me a stethoscope and instructed me to listen to his chest.

I did, of course hearing nothing, and turned towards my mother, “He’s dead, Mom, there’s nothing there.”

“Nothing at all? Ok, now we can call the ambulance. A few weeks ago he went into a diabetic coma. I revived him, and he was more angry at me than I can ever remember. He said he was ready to die; I needed to be able to let him go, and he made me promise never to resuscitate him again If there’s no sound from Lester’s heart the coroner will just pronounce him dead peacefully and the ambulance crew won’t feel they need to perform CPR. Dial 911.”

The ambulance crew bustled in a few minutes later, and sure enough they immediately pronounced him dead. They told my mother and me to wait in the kitchen to spare us the sight of them manhandling him on the gurney, but it was unnecessary by then. My father’s spirit was gone and he was a sack of potatoes. My mother and I did the business we needed to do, called the immediate family and sat down at the kitchen table in exhaustion.

“That’s done. But now what will I do?” my mother asked.

I can only dream of being as tough as they were. It’s a lot to live up to.

Reflections on Entering Winter

I have a treasured memory of a sparkling winter day with the temperature hovering near zero and absolutely no wind. Anderson Lake was about a mile west of the farm, so I drove as close as I could, about a half mile away. I then spent the rest of the day wandering on the lake, listening to the deep booms caused by the expansion of the ice, a disconcerting sound until you realize you are walking over at least 30″ of solid ice. It was also the rare winter where the ice surface was smooth enough to skate and slide across, even in winter boots. For several hours I slid, observed the shoreline along the lake and investigated the pattern of vertical cracks extending through the mass of ice. I ended the afternoon laying on my back listening to the ice music and feeling the deep vibrations.

Another memory is of the only time I brought a girl home from college to meet my parents on the farm. Patty was a town girl from Rapid City, an area disparagingly referred to as “the banana belt” for its comparatively warm weather. Weather forecasts were not as accurate 45 years ago as now but I am certain the forecast was not good. At the age of 19, though, I doubt any forecast would have mattered to me. Our journey began in a driving snow and steady wind, but soon we drove into a full scale blizzard, fighting low visibility and snow drifts on the road. First we tried to drive into our farm from the east, but had to turn around two miles from home when we found three foot drifts across the county gravel. “No worries”, I said, “we will just backtrack, swing around to the west and come in on the tar road which runs a couple miles west of our farm.” This try ended six miles southwest of our place when we ran into a stretch of drifts behind a long shelter belt. I was a little concerned now, but backtracked once more, found a passable highway which took us north of the farm, gunned my boat of an Impala through many drifts, and finally buried my car in snow only a quarter mile from home, just in time to be picked up by the neighbors out running around on snowmobiles.

We were home, safe and dry, and I hoped I had impressed Patty with my resourcefulness and bravado. Unfortunately I think Patty didn’t see this so much as a grand adventure, but more an example of suicidal stupidity. I was unaware of this, though, as she spent the weekend in the house with my mother sewing a dress, while I spent the weekend shoveling out the car and the farm. A young man is invariably clueless, and I was wondering why she had no interest in joining me outside to learn about our farm. She seemed to have no interest in the dairy cattle, the snow or anything I was doing with my father and brother outside. She was pleasant, though cool, as we drove home in brilliant winter sunshine on Sunday. but I thought little of it, Then, before our relationship got any farther, she decided to return to her old boyfriend. He was going into the military, which obviously was much safer than being around me, and we drifted apart. “Ses la vie”.

I used to truly enjoy the power of winter, but damage from my cancer treatments has taken such experiences away from me. My trachaeostomy doesn’t allow me enough air to expend the energy needed to tromp through deep snow or to fight against a bitter wind. The exhilaration of being out in a blizzard is lost to me forever. I have become a “weenie” who shrinks from the challenge of majestic winter weather, and it has become difficult to know what to do with my time through a long, tough winter.

This has made the opportunity to enjoy truly nice winter days more sweet. I am compelled to make the most out of any day gentle enough to allow me to spend time out in the world. I had such a day the last week of November. The temperature was near 50 and the wind was light. There might not be another such day until April, so even though I was on antibiotics fighting a lung infection I headed west up on to the Prairie Coteau. Deer season had just begun, an event I no longer participate in, but I like to see who is out hunting by my farm.

I parked near the prairie which had a prescribed burn in 2018, and walked to the top of the nearest hill. My only goal was to view the vista and smell the air. It turned out that I should have had a deer license, as I immediately kicked up a doe and a large buck from a bedding area on the next hillside. I hunted this farm for 30 years and this would have been the best chance I ever had to get a deer on this prairie. The young lovers pranced gaily away, ready to produce another generation to bound over these hills, which pleased me greatly.

That was inspiration to continue my walk. I am considering a land swap with a neighbor, trading 20 acres of farmground bordering the south side of this prairie to 20 acres to the east. I would then restore the prairie on the land to the east, which would provide connectivity to grass on the next quarter and set up a more practical grazing unit for future management. As I sauntered around I considered the possibilities. The land I would trade has been in my family about 120 years, and it will take several more walks to get used to the idea.

With the afternoon going so well I then went down to the linear wetland in the prairie to the patches of sawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus) that I had found the past summer. I gathered a gallon of seedheads in an old plastic grocery bag I found in the pickup which I spread on my restoration when I felt better. And with that I decided that a sick old guy needed to wrap up his excursion and head home to rest. There is a long winter ahead, but I was able to be out this day. If experiencing joy provides sustenance to one’s immune system (and I believe it does), good health was sure to follow.

Postscript, January 13

This text above was written in early December when the landscape looked like this at the restoration:

Though the temperature has broken 32 a couple times since then, the post refers to what was the last nice day of fall/early winter. I have had few days since where the weather has allowed me to go for a good walk. Thus, there have been too many days of incarceration in the house and I once more am fighting a bronchial infection. Opportunities of all kinds in life are legion, but precious nonetheless; any day that the intersection of my health and the weather allows a sojourn in nature must be grasped; hell, it needs to be leapt upon and throttled. I will never again get to spend several hours on a cold clear day listening to the music of the ice, and I hope to hell I never fight a blizzard for hours in my vehicle, but someday soon I will walk in the prairie again. In three months the pasqueflowers will bloom and I will be there.