I have just recently returned from a road trip to Austin, TX, where I went to visit my son, Greg, his wife, Michelle, and their two children, Mary and Esther. I had not seen them for quite some time; so the visit was nice, though brief.
The drive is pleasant enough, but a little long, so I stop over in Lawton, OK and visit with my family there. Then I take US 281 south to Lampasas, TX and then US 183 on in to Austin and its environs. The majority of my route is on U.S. highways rather than Interstates; so the trip moves a little slower and passes through numerous small towns and cities.
Out of force of habit I try to keep a kind of mental note of the country I go through. I had left the ranch here during a very light rain and ran out of it completely by the time I crossed into NE. I did not drive in any more rain for the rest of the trip to Austin. But there was plenty of evidence that, from KS south, there had been a lot of rain: rivers and creeks flowing, low spots in KS wheat fields flooded out, water standing in the road ditches, wheat standing two feet tall and fully headed out, the first cutting of Timothy hay laying in windrows to be baled in OK. The list can go on.
South of Jacksboro, TX is a buffalo ranch. I saw the entrance sign just beyond the road ditch filled with beautiful Texas Bluebonnets, a beautiful flower. There were lots of flowers blooming in the southern prairies, but what really caught my attention, almost every time I stopped for gas or something to eat, was the way the buffalo has begun to appear or re-appear in our everyday living and into our culture, which I tend to see as a process of restoration equally as valid and valuable to our lives as the physical restoration of the land and the expansion and growth of the buffalo herds on that land.
It seems like everywhere I turned I noticed buffalo depictions on postcards, and pottery, in art galleries and television commercials and programs. When people learn that I work on a buffalo ranch, they ask questions and want me to dispel or confirm myths and stories they have heard. The buffalo in one way or another seems to have worked its way back into the consciousness of a lot of people. And the good thing is that that consciousness focuses on restoration and health rather than mayhem and genocide.
And that is where this company lives and works, on a ranch fairly new to us, to restore the animals and the land, an excruciatingly slow process, subject to all the caprice of nature and the effects of two hundred years of the nineteenth century’s concept of progress. But now we are in the midst of a different way of thinking, a restoration of consciousness, that sees the American Bison in its rightful places on, and in, this heartland.