Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • S P R I N G 2 0 1 6 34 LITERARY LODE LITERARY LODE DEPARTMENT LITERARY LODE I was a poor risk. e ranch was nestled up against the mountains on the east side of the Madison Valley. If you stood up from the seat of your tractor, you could look out at an uninterrupted expanse of ranchland stretch- ing 50 miles north and south and 10 miles across to Ennis and Virginia City on the west side. is ranch was home to 100 steers, 500 cow-calf pairs, a dozen hired hands, and four incompetent college students — soon to be labeled as "the College Cowboys." Our main job was to make sure the livestock had plenty of hay for the winter. A lanky and dour-faced field hand, with the inevitable name of Bill, was in charge of this process — and therefore the four of us. Bill would begin our day by driving a tractor-mower into the fields, all whirling and flashing blades. It would cut the hay and leave it in lines of parallel rows as neatly spaced as if an architect had drawn them there. Next, another ranch hand would drive a hay baler into the field, scooping up the windrows and binding and regurgitating the hay into rectangular bales left scattered throughout the field like so many children's blocks. Our job was to assemble the hay bales into enormous square stacks, each as big as a house. is was before the arrival of the machine-made round bales so characteristic of the West today, so you either stacked the 80-pound bales by hand or, better, you used a Farmhand tractor equipped with a 10-pronged forklift. If done gently and delicately, as a weight-lifter might arrange sugar cubes into a neat pile, it was an art form. We did not choose that option. Instead, we climbed into trac- tors with wheels higher than our heads, revved up the engine, and drove straight at the hay bales at full speed, with the forklift's steel teeth protruding like spears in front of us. At a distance, we would have looked like deranged Don Quixotes, charging not at windmills but at hay bales. If we did it right, it worked; we scooped and gathered the bales in groups of 12 and delivered them to a stack, where our waiting companions would arrange them in an intricate jig-saw pattern to prevent them from toppling over. But more of the time we would careen at the bales, with the forklift aimed too high. Its steel teeth would impale the bale athwart, in its mid-section, exploding it into a shower of hay and broken twine. Even worse, if we aimed too low, the steel teeth would gouge into the dirt and then snap off with a sickening crack. e ranch had a fulltime employee whose job it was to hand-weld new teeth into the forklifts. e teeth cost F ifty years ago this year, I spent the best part of a summer wrecking ranch equipment. at was not my immediate purpose, but it could have been predicted. I had been hired to work as a hand on a cattle ranch outside of Ennis owned by my college roommate's uncle, even though I had never worked on a ranch, ridden a horse, driven a tractor, or even been to Montana. by LANDON JONES BAD COWBOY Ranch photo collage by Todd Klassy: www.distinctlymontana.com/badcowboy162 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL Lanny Jones and Chris Uihlein in field at Cedar Creek Ranch, Madison Valley

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