Sometimes I just don’t believe it. I mean the things we seem to accomplish and mostly within the time we have, which is never enough, to accomplish them in. During the last two to three months the landscape here has literally changed.
The ranch has expanded into some contiguous land, requiring new fences, new animal watering systems for the new pastures, clean up of an old ranch headquarters, complete with remodeling the old house, removal of old, unused and broken farm implements and lots of scrap metal, etc. Like I said the landscape has changed–and is still changing a little.
Here’s what I really like about being on this ranch–it’s the vision that is the foundation for Wild Idea Buffalo, that was the foundation for the Broken Heart Ranch and now for Broken Heart Buffalo Leather and Sustainable Harvest Alliance. That vision requires my old friend to put his money where his heart is. So, for example, consider the concern and love and respect for wildlife and for prairie restoration and buffalo ranching at its finest (read minimally confined, grass fed, free range buffalo) and consider the new system by which to water the buffalo within previously arid and newly fenced pastures and add to that a way to fill two small, but life-giving playas with water. It is only seasonal water but vital to wildlife and vital to an understanding of the differences between a rancher who extracts all he can from the land and only returns minimally to it and a rancher who returns the maximum to the land and MANAGES to eke out something from it, a rancher who sees and believes and acts in such a way that the land and ALL its occupants thrive and grow together because they are together.
So this Cheyenne River Ranch becomes, as it has always been for us, a thinking, planning, balancing act, an evolving from a small ranch outside of Edgemont, SD to The Broken Heart and on to the present location where you can now see a hydrant out in a field with a hose running into a small playa so that it might just stimulate a pair of ducks to raise some offspring. Who else would do a thing like that?
To many eyes around here such a thing as that is a sure sign of folly, madness with no method; but for those of us who share this vision, there is no madness, only the folly of those who choose not to see the wisdom.
I am here reminded of the scene in Shakespeare’s HAMLET in which Hamlet and Gertrude, his mother, meet in here chambers. He attempts to show her the truth about his father’s murder, but she refuses–perhaps because of her stake here, in that she has married her husband’s murderer. She has the opportunity to see the very real ghost of her former husband, and chooses not to see. She favors her immediate and present situation over the wisdom and truth of her son’s vision. But, oh, the cost to her.