I chuckle listening to the winter weather report here in Kentucky with local weather reporters cautioning about the "bitter cold" coming. I've been in Kentucky now for 10 years and my goosedown chore coat is still in the trunk where I packed it the last spring I was in Montana.
Most of my winter memories are a series of images in my mind, vignettes from all of the Montana ranch winters in my life, from going with my father and grandfather as they were feeding cattle with a team and bobsled when I was 5 and 6 to the last winter before I moved to Kentucky, chaining up the Dodge 4 x 4 to get in to the back pastures to take hay to the mares.
I remember my grandfather coming in from chores, stomping his feet, wiping tiny icicles from his moustash and hanging the workhorse bridles beside his coat so that the bits would be warm and not stick to the horses' tongues when they were harnessed the next day.
I remember my father saddling a horse and riding 3 miles to the mailbox at the county road and back during the winter when the snow was too deep to get out with a car. We didn't have 4-wheel drives then, winter travel was restricted to where you could go with chains on your car, or horseback.
As a child, I wore a wool snow suit made by my mother from an old winter coat, to go with Grandpa and Dad to feed cattle. I still hear the team snorting and blowing in the frosty air, trace chains jingling, snow crunching under the sled runners, cattle bawling as they jostled for position as hay was pitchforked from the load.
At school, we kept our lunch boxes in the "cloakroom", a separate little room in the one room schoolhouse for our coats and overshoes. Kept closed so the schoolroom would stay warm with the one coal stove, on the coldest days there were ice crystals in our sandwiches. The teacher would make a big pot of cocoa on the top of the coal stove so that each of us could have a warm drink with our lunch. I also remember being dared to put my tongue on the handle of the pump at the well outside the schoolhouse and trying it ... just once.
I remember my father saddling one of the ranch horses and galloping across the hayfield east of the house, as he towed me on my skis. They have a name for it now, skijoring ... and have wintertime races and competitions. Then it was just fun.
Some winters my father would spread grain in the yard during the winter to feed pheasants that came in from the fields where the snow was too deep to find food.As an adult, I remember all too well getting up every two hours at night and putting on winter gear, to walk down to the calving shed to check 2 year old heifers or foaling mares. It was always a relief when there were no problems because problems mean you have to strip down to your long underwear and work in a shed where the temperature was hovering around zero.
Storms could come up unexpectedly and 3-day blizzards could drift an incredible amount of snow in various places. My Dad's big 4 x 4 pickup was always parked along the fence in front of the house and I can remember one storm that drifted the snow so deep that it not only covered the yard fence, it covered the pickup as well.
Neighbors lost cattle in that blizzard that they had not been able to get down out of the pasture into the valley. The cattle were up on top of a ridge and drifted with the snow and wind to the edge of the sandstone ridge. The pressure of the cattle from the back pushed as many as 20 or 30 head over the rim, the same result as when tribes of Native Americans had used that same sandstone cliff as a buffalo jump centures ago.
When I was in my 50s, definitely old enough to know better, I was back to raising horses. Now, I loaded square bales to feed in the "back pasture" which was three miles from the ranch buildings, cross country. Rear chains were always in place and emergency chains for the front in the cab, not under the baled hay. The trick to winter mobility is to have the 4 wheel drive chained up in the rear, but not the front. If you get stuck with a 4 wheel drive chained in the rear, you get out, dig the snow away from the front tires and put the chains on. This should give you enough extra "pull" to get you unstuck, but you then turn around and go home!
If you get stuck chained up on all four, you walk home to wait for the neighbor with the bulldozer!
In spite of the hard, brutal hours of work, I would never exchange that for the irreplaceable memories that bring a smile even now. I see, again, the mares come charging across the drifted ridge to the pickup at a gallop, the big black herd boss mare in the lead, plowing through the drifts, with snow flying, breath billowing in the frosty air, and powdered snow like sea foam splashing around the legs and chest.
I remember the gleam in my Rottweiler's eyes as she would leap up the hay bale stairsteps to the top of the haystack and launch herself from the top of the stack to the snowdrift beside it, disappearing in a fountain of snow, only to errupt like a black volcano, slide down the drift and back to the haystack to repeat the process.
Priceless memories of a lifestyle that no longer exists.
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