Diamond – Ken Rodgers

It seems like whenever I think it may be time to move on from Idaho and experience some other part of the world that moment of indecision coincides with a trip to the one-hundred-five-year-old Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding environs in southeastern Oregon. The country there is a mix of high sage and bitterbrush flats, juniper dotted ridges, and to the north and east, mountains. And in the spring, the Malheur country, or Harney County, is a place full of birds. Great Horned Owls and Burrowing Owls and Short-eared Owls.

Every year, Betty and I hit our personal high spots, the roads and fields around Crane and the Pete French Round Barn, Diamond and the Diamond Loop, the P Ranch, the Central Patrol Road that meanders parallel to the Blitzen River. Yellow Warblers and American Bitterns and Northern Shovelers and Yellow-rumped Warblers and Cinnamon Teal.

We go south of Frenchglen and check out the road into the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Area and look for the herd of mustangs that rove there. Cassin’s Finches and Vesper Sparrows and Warbling Vireos.

We go along The Narrows and into the refuge headquarters where the cottonwood trees tower over the old masonry buildings and Coots graze on the grass and the Lewis’s Woodpeckers haunt the treetops. Cassin’s Vireo and Northern Goshawk and Dunlins and Forster’s Terns and American White Pelicans.

American White Pelicans on The Narrows — American White Pelicans at The Narrows by Ken Rodgers 2013

This year we did something different, as we do every year. For instance, last year we went around on the east side of Steens Mountain and checked out the arid Alvord Desert and then climbed up into Crane passing numerous small lakes, seeing lots of mule deer and pronghorn (or antelope as the locals call them). And of course, birds; Canada Geese and Sandhill Cranes and Cormorants. Osprey and Bald Eagles and Northern Harriers.

This year we asked around to see if anyone was working cattle since it was time for branding calves, and lo and behold, we were invited to a branding which we stood and photographed, shooting picture after picture after picture. Shooting something like a branding is different from landscape or portrait or still life photography…it’s kind of wild, the buckaroos building loops to head and heel the calves, the cows on the prod (folks are messing with their babies), the vaccinating, the branding, the tagging, the cutting. It goes on with the smoke and the dust boiling up and the scent of burned hide from the branding and the loops of lassos that float on the horizon just before they snake in and capture a calf. The shouting and laughing, the bellowing of the animals, the cutting horses twisting and turning, digging in their heel bulbs when necessary, and this is all going on at rat-a-tat machine gun speed, and if you wish to photograph this you are on your toes, so to speak, with the zoom going in and out and in and out, finding those moments when the action gets caught, like a packaged explosion just about to ignite. Vavoom! Wow!

At the Branding, Diamond Loop By Ken Rodgers 2013

What a comedown, but not a sorry one, after that experience. Then on to the tiny burg of Diamond where the poplar limbs still stood naked as if they didn’t trust the warm breaths of the breezes. We photographed old buildings and big trees and hunted for sign of White-faced Ibis and saw Sandhill Cranes and Great Egrets.

Then on to the Buena Vista ponds in search of signs of Black-throated Sparrows and Sage Sparrows. Instead, it was the haunting mating call of a male Sora from the marshes below, and Western Kingbirds darting from sage to sage catching the little creatures whose short, flitting lives come and go in the course of a few days.

Camera 360 — Buena Vista Ponds by Ken Rodgers 2013

From there it was back to Burns, and the following day we took that drive south of Frenchglen and located over forty mustangs. A lot of the Harney County ranchers hate these creatures and I understand that, for the mayhem they create on the range, but still, there is something that gets up inside my throat when I see them out there lazily grazing on the new grass down in the swales. Something primitive speaks to me about freedom and all that stuff that often gets stuffed when we start thinking in terms of dollars and cents.

While in search of mustangs we found Warbling Vireos and Cassin’s Finches and an ambiguity of sparrows that left us perplexed as we thumbed through our Sibley…is it this kind of sparrow or that? We think we saw Lark Sparrows and Vesper Sparrows and Savannah Sparrows. We know we saw White-crowned Sparrows.

Then we traveled down to the P Ranch and hiked along the Blitzen River. Two Caspian Terns circled us like fighter jets, squawking as if berating us. One showed up with a fish as it swept by and then abruptly veered overhead as if to show off the latest morsel of piscine paradise. At The Narrows again, Ruddy Ducks, Ruddy Ducks, Ruddy Ducks.

The next day, on the road home, we cut off the macadam and bumped down some dirt roads. Pickup trucks pulling trailers loaded with saddled horses sped up behind us, and we pulled over multiple times to let these earnest travelers get on their way and soon we found out where they were hurrying. A branding, but not so formal in terms of corral and pens and headquarters structures as those we encountered earlier in the week. Here, the corral was makeshift, mostly trucks pulled up end-to-end and some portable panels wired together.

A hot fire crackled in a fifty-five gallon drum turned into a fireplace. Branding iron handles stood out from the sizzling orange-red and the smell of burning calf hair filled the air, along with the dust, and the voices talking local cowpoke gossip, or the boss-man barking orders about where to drag a calf, or comments on the quality of the calf crop or who was going to be the header and who was going to be the heeler. Wild action, back and forth, and loops built and caroming off the sky and onto the dusty ground, caught on the camera screen like something you might see in a Charlie Russell painting. Yeehaw! And Mountain Bluebirds…so bluebird blue.

Betty and I drove away and headed home and she commented to me, “Pretty darned western.” And it was, and it was more, and just a part of why we stick around.

Betty and I recently spent time in south-east and south-central Oregon with friends, looking at the rippling water, the green-gray sage, the juniper, the snow-covered mountains. While driving between Pete French’s round barn and Diamond, we heard a particularly melodic bird song. I stopped the car and rolled down my window and the sweetest sound carried over the cold spring ground, the sagebrush, and flitted off towards the hills. I looked through a set of binoculars and saw that the bird was a male sage thrasher, a bird whose plumage so blends in with the hard land it was a surprise, nearly a shock, to hear such a beautiful tune come from its beak.

I don’t know what it is about me, always trying to equate beautiful sound, beautiful other things—art, music, pies and cakes, most anything with what I consider to be the 21st Century’s archetypal, human, physical beauty. I don’t know if it is just me or if all of us think that successful, creative people look like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt. I am old enough to know better, and intellectually of course, I do, but I still find myself tying physical beauty to intelligence and talent.

The sage thrasher is the color of the land he lives in and should be judged beautiful in his or her own right, and not by some standard we have developed due to movies and photography. What’s that old saying? “Beauty is only skin deep” and I know this subject is probably a bit hackneyed, but then it is clichéd for a reason, I suspect. We do judge people by how they look. Don’t you see it everywhere: clothes make the man, you are how you dress, the squared-away Marine is a good Marine.

Montana Poet and songwriter, Paul Zarzyski, has written a poem that ponders the notion of what we expect from people based on how they look.

From Montana Second Hand

Down’s syndrome can’t hinder the Saint
Vincent de Paul thrift store
troubadour of the shoe department,
John Jasmann, singing his pedal steel guitar
love songs into his rhapsodical
job—sorting used footwear……

In his poem, Zarzyski immediately identifies the “type” of individual he is going to write about. I say “type” because we categorize, segregate, allocate people into groups so we can deal with them, think about them, define them, stereotype them. In this case, the poem’s subject is categorized with “Down’s syndrome,” a condition we had more crude words for when I was younger. Zarzyski goes on, in the middle of the poem, to describe the subject and setting and ends his poem with these words:

Listen—as each shopper.
gawking with awe toward Shoes,
pictures some rockabilly god,
some rhythm-‘n’-blues aficionado,
maybe Saint Vinny himself,
rolling a ruby-ringed finger
over the solid gold dial
tuned to Angelic Debut.
May grace taking shape
tangibly in a single line of singing
draw us all one lonesome day
toward the mysterious
display of white shoes
staggered with black boots
across wrought iron racks. There, may each shelf
holding the notes, sharps, flats,
show us how the maestro—excited
by the infinite, cued to the unique
movements we make
arranged together in perfect time—writes
out of all our used lives
one sweet music.

Through the use of shoes, music and references to the spiritual, Paul Zarzyski shows us how we can find beauty in spots we normally are ashamed to look for it, or spots where we mask our fears with pejorative comments and language.

Beauty, talent and ability come in all kinds of shapes, forms and packages. Back in the early 1970s I worked at a big cattle feeding outfit half-owned by John Wayne. There was a young woman who hung around in retro gabardine western suits like cowpoke babes (or want-to-be cowboy babes) wore back in the late forties and early fifties. You know the kind of clothes, with the bright poppy or lime colored piping at the tops of the pockets, and the embroidered yokes, with vivid images of bucking broncos and bull riders, sagebrush and western scenes. She was a reporter for one of the local agricultural magazines and was always looking for an interview. She stood around and looked at us a lot, just stared and little did we know, at the time, she was autistic. We laughed at her strange ways and guffawed at the way she came to the feedyard all decked out in the Hank Williams-era get-ups.

Little did we know that inside that mind was a person who understood as much about cattle and their feelings, yes, I said feelings, than the best waddy or buckaroo around. She just didn’t look the part, as we thought the part was supposed to look. To us she was strange and frightening—yes, I said frightening; her difference frightened us. And then, as the years went by, she created cattle handling systems that mitigated the jagged corners, the bang-clang blare and jangle of livestock pens. Out of her knowing she made architectural things of beauty, elegant art, practical, but yes, elegant, yes beautiful.

That’s something about life I have discovered, that beauty resides in almost every person and every thing as does beauty’s antithesis, whatever you want to call it—ugliness, hate, bilious behavior, fear. These are the things that battle beauty and sometimes the beauty cannot be seen because of our own ugliness, hatred or fear. We can’t see beauty, artistic panache in an autistic architect and expert on animal behavior, because all we can see is how that person is different from us, and we can’t see it in a Downs syndrome man because what that man has, what makes him different from us, scares us. And we don’t like to be scared. And when a bird sits on top of a sagebrush bush and warbles out the sweetest tune in the Steens Mountain watershed, we are surprised, because in the midst of that dry and drab land, a masterpiece wafts to our windows on the strands of the afternoon wind.
There is beauty there, in most everything, the music from a Down’s syndrome baritone, a desert dwelling bird, an autistic architect….in the good, yes, and in the “ugly.”

1 Paul Zarzyski, from “Montana Second Hand,” from 51, Bangtail Press, Montana, 2011, pp 183-184. By permission from the author.

Tag: Diamond

On Mustangs, Mountain Bluebirds, Ruddy Ducks and Buckaroos

On Sage Thrashers, Music and Autistic Architects