Sunday morning, after chores
Calvin Returns for a Visit
Calvin came back from Osage County to visit for a few days. How nice! I've missed him. He brought with him Theresa, a nice young woman with whom he has, I suspect, a sinful relationship. She's about half as tall and one fourth the weight of Calvin but I can't see as how that harms her appearance in any way. It looks to me like Calvin is growing up and a nice young woman has elected to do the same thing with him. An outstanding arrangement, supported by 5,000 years of written history.
According to Calvin, two year old unbroke mules are selling for $30 at some of the area livestock auctions. The same mule would have sold at the same price a century ago. It looks like a good time to trade in mules, buying low and selling high. Nowadays, in agribizz, the key expression is “value added.” Calvin and I need to buy some cheap mules and then add some value to them.
Cows are much more valuable as edible beef products than they are on the hoof. Why can't we buy mules and make edible mule products? No reason whatsoever, as far as we are concerned, all ethical or legal concerns being trumped by the silliness of the whole project.
The result is, we are preparing to make and sell The Old Geezer's Magic Mule Jerky--Kicks Your Ass Into Gear. To make this jerky we will butcher only the same kind of mules originally bred to pull Medicine Show Wagons, plus an occasional pony to add a better finish to the flavor. This rare High Plains Delicacy is available only on the internet through a beautiful blend of traditional and modern technologies: you can order your own five pound bag of The Old Geezer's Magic Mule Jerky by sending an email to Farm News.
Boy, you get the two of us together and you can't hardly find a smarter pair. This should make us a lot of money and fame.
Ducks
I had twenty ducks, about fifteen too many, so I sold six of them to Calvin. These ducks all have their adult feathers so it is possible to tell their sex, not by looking at them, as they all have the same feathering as adult females, but by their voices. Male ducks have a low, quiet voice. Female ducks have higher pitched and louder, voices.
We put all twenty ducks into a stall in the barn, a procedure that was simple after months of training the ducks to go into that stall twice a day for high protein feed, and then Calvin sorted them. He made one, or, if you care to count it that way, two mistakes. He picked up one duck which he thought, at first, was male, and later decided was female. He recognized the error as we loaded the ducks into the truck. Not bad, for a teenager in love.
Our original agreement was that he was to take all but two of the male ducks to the auction, sell them, and then give me 85% of the sale price. He's young and dumb enough to fall for scams like that, so I gave him a break and told him to sell only two of the ducks, give me the full sale price, and to keep the rest. He fell for that one, too, and thought I was doing him a favor. Geezers sure have to think up a lot of scams in order to educate young men.
There were eight male ducks and twelve female ducks in the flock of twenty. Calvin took eight male ducks, he thought, but one was actually a female. Now, the question is, do I have two or three male ducks? Time will tell, if I bother to keep track.
To the Continental Divide
From here to the divide we live on a slightly tilted table with the high end against the mountains and the low edge at the Mississippi River. Erosion, glaciers, and other processes have wrought a few changes in the basic flat table. Every so often most of this area has been under an ocean, too, which tends to lay down a layer of limestone. Next thing you know a glacier comes roaring down from the north over the next thousand years or so, scraping off the topsoil from the rocks, then leaving the debris somewhere when it retreates.
From the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to Oakley, Kansas, the land tends to be flat, except for that slight tilt. This is the High Plains, what most people consider to be flyover country. The High Plains produce ecstatic sunrises and sunsets, except for the lines streaked across them by people flying over. The High Plains are the natural home for center pivot irrigation systems. Some of the systems are a half mile in length, sweeping a circle with a one mile diameter. By the way, no matter how you play with the geometry or try to pack them, circles on a flat plane will cover about 78% of the area, or pi/4%, to be more precise.
If one flies over the area of the High Plains underlain by the Oglalla Aquifer, a huge, water-holding, gravel bed under part of the High Plains, then one can clearly see the extent of the center pivot irrigation systems. I once heard a fellow say that he had over 22,000 contiguous acres of irrigated corn along the Kansas-Colorado border. That is a little over 34 square miles of corn, big enough to be clearly visible from a jet airliner. Jet airliners generally fly five to seven miles up. My guess is that the entire 34 square miles of corn would be visible all in one piece from seven miles above it, looking out the window of a jet airliner. Except for those in the seats over the wing.
In western Kansas, somewhere along a very irregular line, parallel to the divide in only the most general of terms, the flat High Plains break off into the eroded Smoky Hills. Much like the Flint Hills to the east, the Smoky Hills are what was left after all the soil around each hill eroded away. When all that occurs in an area where there is very little top soil underlain by a thick layer of gypsum and gravel, features like the Badlands and Monument Rock are created.
(Dr. M., didn't you study Geology as an undergraduate? Please let me know if I am way off base here.)
The Smoky Hills seem to be made up mostly of a reddish sandstone with a layer of limestone on top of that. What that says is that at one time there was a beach of red sand. The beach sank under the water and a layer of shells was deposited. The the beach lifted out of the ocean, or the ocean dried up to below the beach level. Green plants began growing here and there, quickly spreading like weeds, catching blowing dust and letting it settle under them. Next thing you know there was a layer of soil with grass on top of it, pressing down on all the stuff underneath and turning it into rocks.
Given a few thousand years, a river can do an amazing amount of land forming. The Arkansas and Platte are two major rivers flowing out of the mountains and out onto the plains. They created great fields of sand dunes, places with both arid and marshy areas, places that now provide stopovers for migrating birds on the Central Flyway. Niobrara, Oglalla, and Quivira are names given to some of the great marshy places where birds congregate in the millions. I've been at the Quivira National Wildlife Preserve, here in Kansas, when it was estimated that more than 300,000 Sandhill Cranes were there. Quite an experience.
Then a glacier comes and sits on it for a while to press as much as possible into stone. The glacier melts back, leaving behind rocks it had scraped up in the north. Nature abhors constants, so the pattern breaks up frequently, but the basic forces structure the landscape. Fire makes grasses, rain makes trees, time makes landscapes.
I picked up Ian Frazier's book, Great Plains, after writing this story to this point. Now I'll wait until I've read more. This looks like a very good book for someone crazy enough to enjoy the High Plains.
Help! Millie!
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