cattle – Ken Rodgers

Tuesday last was tax day and as I usually do around April 17, I ponder taxes, money, accountants.

All of this, of course, fuels imagery that erupts from the past: characters, events, some funny, some sad, some unwanted, some I am glad I remembered.

In 1979-1980 I worked for a big corporation in the ag business; cotton, lettuce, ranches, feed lots. I was part of a team who ran a feedlot on the Gila River Indian Reservation at a place called San Tan, southeast of Phoenix.

When somebody from the Phoenix corporate office called and said “Audit,” images of three-piece suits came to mind. Imagine a suit (an auditor) on a cayuse. A twirling lasso cutting the breeze, stirrups, chaps, saddle (an auditor?).

When you work outside at a feed yard you fight manure dust biting the eyes, the ears, the nose. Flies, sweat, cattle wild with fear. Frightened cattle don’t eat. That stops them gaining weight. It costs money when they don’t gain weight.

Not making money…hmmm…the thought of an auditor causing loss of money seems an oxymoron, but a lot about the cattle feeding business is strange. Somewhere the task of providing protein for a hungry world gets caught up with the drive to make a buck. We all understand making a buck, but when keeping track of making bucks hinders the efficiently production of a t-bone steak, it causes a buckaroo to pull off his Stetson and scratch his head.

They’d be out on Saturday morning. That’s what they said. “Saturday.” It was going to be 105 degrees so that meant a dawn start. We’d need to chouse the cattle before they had time to eat.

My cohorts, Robert, the manager, and Ed, the cattle boss, showed up before the sun sliced the eastern horizon. We copied lists and lot numbers and waited for the auditor.

A dark blue BMW pulled up. Two men, one whom I recognized as the corporate controller and who was wearing fancy orange and gold Nikes, and another whom I had never seen, got out and stomped up to the front door. Both looked rough…hangover rough, pallid skins. A day’s dark whiskers glooming their faces. When the controller walked in, those orange and gold Nike’s cut the dim like the glint of coin in a counting house. I thought to myself, those shoes are a bit brash for knocking around in cow manure.

Robert said, “It’s going to get hot fast. And it’s hard on the cattle. We best be moving now.”

Two cowboys showed up on horseback. Flies began what flies do: eat, lay eggs, die and bother horses, cattle and humans. The sun grew surlier as the day swelled.

As soon as the auditor and Mister Controller picked a pen of cattle (we were trying to see if the actual count matched what the records said) the cowboys drove the lot into an alley between the pens and we’d count. Dust rose with the temperature. The auditor broke an early sweat and Mister Controller complained about everything: the heat, the flies, the dust.

If the count was off, we’d run the lot out into the alley again and count them a second time. The cattle didn’t like it. Once or twice, big hump-backed smoky-gray south Texas steers hurdled the sucker rod fences which dismayed the auditor, messing with his tallies. Ed and the cowboys cackled. Mister Controller spent a lot of time pontificating on cattle, especially south Texas, half wild smoky-gray hump backs. It sounded like a bunch of…how should I best say it?…like a bunch of manure.

We had eight or ten lots to tally and were keeping pretty close on our counts which made Robert happy…less chousing the cattle. It was hard to tell what the auditor thought. He looked to me like he needed a cool place to vomit up his hung-over guts. Mister Controller kept babbling about cattle this and cattle that.

On the last lot, we drove the steers out into the alley and threaded them back in. In the middle of the pen, a big wet spot about ten feet across marked the tan dust a dark brown. All of us, the cowboys, Robert, Ed and me, avoided that spot. There was a leaky water line down below the four or five feet of dried manure.

Robert and Ed told everyone to stay clear of the wet spot. As we finished the count, Mister Controller crossed the pen, wiping his hands like he’d just finished a big chore.

He yelled at the auditor, “What’s the count look like?” as he stepped into the big wet spot. Ed yelled, “Hey, don’t go there.” Mister Controller frowned and said, “I don’t take orders from…” and he began to sink. As if it was all a fantasy, he walked on into the middle of the spot with a look on his face like he couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He sunk past his knees. Robert yelled, “It’s like quicksand.”

Mister Controller stopped and glanced down as he sunk an inch at a time. He stuck out his hand. “Help me.” The auditor looked at me and I shrugged. Mister Controller looked at me, too, but I shook my head. He almost sobbed, “Why?” One of us, I don’t remember, said, “Because you’ll pull us in.”

One of the things a cowboy loves to do more than anything is build a loop and rope something. They will rope anything…a dog, a goat, a horse, a set of horns on top of a saw-horse. I don’t know if one of us suggested it, but before you could slap a blow fly off the side of your face, the two cowboys had their ropes in their hands building loops. Mister Controller sank deeper, his face paralyzed by the realization he was caught in the nefarious grip of cow shit.

One loop, then two, whirled in the hot air. Somebody chuckled, and then laughed as one loop, then two, flopped over the torso of Mister Controller. Drawn tight, trapping his flailing arms. He yelled, “Hey, wait a …” We laughed, even Mister Hung-over Auditor, as the cowboys pulled Mister Controller out.

I don’t know how much weight gain was lost as a result of the audit. But there were other rewards, wastes and squanders. Mister Controller lost one of his fancy orange and gold Nike’s. Sucked right off his foot into that manure sinkhole. I have often wondered what else he lost.

Recently Betty and I journeyed to the Southwest to show our film and visit family members who live there. On the way back to Idaho, we visited a few places that we had not seen for many years as well as a few places that were on our wish list.

One of the destinations was Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. I was born and raised in Arizona and yet had never ventured there. My father often talked about us visiting Canyon de Chelly. (He pronounced Chelly, as Shelly, instead of the Spanishized word “Chelly,” which has been incorporated into English so that it is pronounced “de shay.” The Navajo word for the canyon is “Tseyi” which was borrowed by the Spanish as “de Chelly” and incorporated into English from there.) But we never went and I suppose it was because my father did not like to go anywhere too far from his house, his job, his business, and I also think he didn’t really want to go much of anywhere with me. My saying as much isn’t to rebuke my father, because I was a handful when young, always getting into messes in places I had no business getting into. I talked incessantly and asked a lot of questions. I had opinions—strong ones—which when expressed, often made my father’s face turn the red color of the cliffs in northern Arizona.

In the summer of 1963, I worked on the Navajo Nation in a little slaughter house that killed dry ewes. The packing plant sat on a small piece of private land outside of Window Rock, not really that far from Canyon de Chelly. But I never ventured to the canyon, just hung out trying to see if I liked smoking cigarettes, getting trucks stuck in the snotty clay of a wet summer, dreaming about sex and being scared near to death about the sin of it all, the chilling thrill.

But two days before Christmas of 2011, Betty and I met Leon Skyhorse Thomas, a Navajo guide, musician, filmmaker and native ceremonial officiate, at the visitor’s center of the canyon. We climbed into his beat-up white Jeep with our camera gear and drove into the heart of Canyon de Chelly. The walls are the color of terra cotta when the light is right, and almost orange when the light is right a different way. They shoot right up like someone cut them with a cross-cut saw, then used an adze to shape them. It was early and cold and the breeze was like Kit Carson’s saber when he drove his U S Army troops into the canyon in the 1860s to destroy the native strongholds and their beloved peach tree orchards.

The ride in was rough along roads that seemed to change like the tracks of sidewinders in a wind- driven sand. The walls were narrow and Chinle Creek was mostly frozen. I asked about the notorious quicksand of the canyon and he laughed and told me he’d buried three vehicles in the canyon. After hearing that, I seemed to sit lighter in my seat as we jounced and bounced and battered our way down the track between the narrow walls. Several times Leon stopped, got out, and surveyed which route might be the best.

There are still farms in the bottom of the canyon, and people live there in the summer. The way the light lit up the warm, south-facing walls of the canyon played against the dark walls of the cold side and we were rocking and reeling back and forth between the dark and the light.

Leon spoke Navajo to us. A lot. He sang to us in Navajo, too, and he chanted a prayer. And he took us to First Ruin and White House Ruins and to natural alcoves, one where Navajos had scratched pictographs in charcoal that documented a Ute Indian raid into the canyon. We saw Anasazi petroglyphs and Hopi petroglyphs and both ancient and more modern native pictographs. Petroglyphs are art sculpted into rock. Pictographs are painted with pigment onto rock. And the wind knifed through the bare limbs of the cottonwood trees. And the cold pelts of the resident cattle and horses were fluffed up to deflect the cut of the morning.

Once, parked next to some rock art, Leon began to explain the Navojo sensibility vis a vis the canyon. As he spoke he changed from English to Navajo. We didn’t know what the words meant but we understood the emotion of them as they flew away from Leon and married the sculpted and concave walls of the towering cliffs. His words began to echo, around and around us, through the trees, along the fence lines, and back against the walls.

Canyon de Chelly Pictograph of Ute Raid Into the Canyon

For visitors to Canyon de Chelly, there are motels with clean rooms and good food. The Navajo people are friendly and attentive. I suspect summertime is very busy and very hot. The fall might be the best time to go, because as Betty likes to say, the fall is always the best time to travel.

Tag: cattle

On Tax Day, Auditors and Cow Manure

Canyon de Chelly