Chapter 58: Caution - Industrial Zone - Heavy Traffic

Actually I didn’t have that much time to worry about those idiots that fall anyway. I had been lucky enough to have the last of the hay cut before Bill McAdam’s murderous attack. Juan and Tom had managed to find time to get it baled before it was damaged by the weather, but after Tom was injured I’d had to hire labourers to help Juan get it off the field and stored for the winter. While they’d been doing that, I’d been involved with funerals and other crap, so it’s a good thing we’d managed to get many of our fall preparations done early. In the long run I was literally ‘missing from action’ for almost three weeks. It was also a good thing that we’d done so much planning and preparation around the farm the previous year, because in many ways we were able to get by on the work we’d done over previous years.

Thankfully Maria was there as well, since she was staying on the ranch and taking grade eleven by correspondence, so she could help if an emergency cropped up. She’d decided that she’d rather do that than stay in town with any of Sandy’s or my friends because she’d seldom be able to come home on weekends. When Jackie had been killed, she lost her ride home each weekend and since Jess and Jean were studying nursing in Calgary by then, she no longer had any close friends to live with in town. So Maria was already filling in as Conseula and Sandy’s second set of hands, besides being my primary rider who exercised the mares and geldings.

I wouldn’t let her work with the stud horses though - I drew the line there. Instead, since we had relatively few stallions that we were raising for sale at that time, I did my best to ride at least one of them each day, but I tried to sell our studs as young as I could, before riding age if possible. As for the herd studs - well let’s be honest, I usually let them save their energy for the mares. I had far too many responsibilities by that time to take the risk of being injured by a fall from a bucking horse. In other words while any horse on the farm was trained to allow us to handle them by the time they were six months old, our herd studs weren’t often ridden. In fact I avoided that job if possible, but I did feed and groom them each day. So while Juan and Maria were both excellent at gentling horses, they had little to do with our studs, but that was mainly because I preferred to handle the stallions myself.

We didn’t attend the fall show and sale in Calgary that year, but we did advertise and we sold a fair amount of stock, so I suppose the Mile High Ranch name didn’t suffer that badly. Actually all things considered we did relatively well that fall, but it was all because of previous good management. There was no way I felt prepared for the first storm when it did come, but with Juan and Maria’s help, we muddled through. In fact by late November we were in decent shape and we were fully prepared for the next storm, but luckily neither of the first two storms was all that bad. By mid December we were fully stocked up for a long siege of bad weather if necessary and we had all of our Christmas shopping done. That was a darn good thing because we had a snowfall a few days later that dumped more than a foot of snow on the ranch and even more on the upper plateau, then the winds came up. Even our caragana hedges didn’t stop the drifts from forming on many stretches of the road across the upper plateau since the hedges there hadn’t grown a lot, so they were virtually buried. That meant we weren’t going anywhere and no one was going to be visiting us, but luckily the phone and the power didn’t die, so I didn’t even bother to try to plow out the roads. I left that job to Charlie Engels and his crew, but I did wonder if I should have tried.

Sandy put in her two cents worth though and told me, “Don’t be an ass! You damn near froze the last time you did that, and the snow is worse this time, so don’t bother starting on the roads. If you absolutely have to go out and plow something, I’m sure there are drifts around the buildings you can work on.”

Once the initial winds died down I did use Sandy’s little garden tractor and snow blower to clear a path over to Juan and Conseula’s house. Then I used the front end loader to clear out access to all the buildings and stock pens, but that was just to make it easier for Juan and I to do the chores and look after everything without having to fight our way through chest-deep drifts.

Needless to say we anticipated having a quiet Christmas that year. We had only put up a small tree and we didn’t go crazy on the decorations because we didn’t expect that we were going to have a lot of guests. Juan and Conseula didn’t even bother with a tree that year since we’d invited them to have Christmas with us, but I brought in our tree just after lunch on Christmas Eve. The snow was still melting off the branches when Sandy brought down Toby and Kristina fresh from their afternoon nap and our two kids simply stared at the tree that had suddenly grown in the middle of our living room floor. The look on their faces was simply marvellous and I caught it with a quick photo, then Sandy carried them over near the tree, so I got one of her holding them close enough that they were reaching out to touch the branches. After that Maria took the camera and she got one of Sandy holding Toby and me holding Kristina with the tree in the background. That was about the limit of our duo’s patience though because they got fussy, so I think they’d had enough flashing lights from the camera. Besides, they’d seen trees before and the new tree in our house wasn’t doing anything, so they lost interest in it rather quickly, and after all, it was afternoon snack time. In fact by the time they were put to bed that night the tree was old hat and they virtually ignored it.

It was a different story the next morning though, because Santa Claus had come, so the tree was covered in bright lights and fancy decorations. Not only that but there were presents under the tree, many of them unwrapped so they could see their new teddy bears, dolls and toy cars. Then they had their pictures taken many more times as the gifts were unwrapped, but then so did everyone else. Both of the kids even managed to open one or two presents themselves, but like all kids everywhere, the wrapping paper and boxes that the toys came in were much more fun than the toys were.

The grownups got toys and other gifts as well, but for Sandy and me, the most important gift that year happened when Toby started to crawl on Christmas morning. Then we got a second gift late on Christmas afternoon because Kristina took after her mother (Nobody is going to one-up me, dammit!) so she started crawling too. Within a month they could both crawl as fast or faster than I could walk. Two month after that they were toddling and in six weeks they were running, so we had to put up baby gates to keep them off the stairs and out of my office.

Our road wasn’t plowed out until the middle of January and it was a good thing it happened as soon as it did, because by then everyone was just a bit cabin happy. Juan and I agreed that it wasn’t a good thing for both of us to be off the ranch at one time, but Sandy needed to take Toby and Kristina in for a checkup at the doctors, so we went to town first. Just so I could be sure Sandy could make it home again if the wind came up and the snow stated to drift again, I led the way out with my truck and she followed in her car. Then the next morning I handed Juan the keys to my truck and he took his family to town. Both Sandy and Conseula loaded up on groceries when they were in town, then wouldn’t you know it, we had a two day chinook, so on the third morning the roads were relatively bare.

I was darn happy about that because it was Maria’s birthday and she’d turned sixteen. Since she’d been so much help to us around the ranch I’d bought her a birthday present, a five year old two-door Ford that Frank had taken as a trade in from an old lady, so it was in great shape. Unfortunately she never had much chance to drive it right then because two days later another storm blew in and piled drifts even higher than the previous storm had managed. Once again Charlie Engels’ crew had barely cleared the road before we were hit by another chinook.

Actually those first two major storms were a good example of how the next few months went, because the rest of the winter, the whole spring and most of the summer became one weird weather happening after another. We’d have cold wet weather for two weeks, then a week or two of decent weather, but we did our best to work around it. Between the weather and the fact that I wasn’t able to hire any decent workers over the summer, I was almost going nuts. Oh, we worked around the weather, but the ranch wasn’t anywhere as productive as usual. Our hay crops were slow to grow at first, then grew like weeds and we’d barely gotten the first crop of alfalfa baled and off the field before we had a week of rain and a flood in the creek that once more threatened to take out the bridge.

Not only that, but the workers we had that year were just plain strange - okay they weren’t all strange, but if they were decent workers, then their situations were wierd. We had a fellow who knew what he was doing and worked for about a week, then his brother fell off a roof and he had to leave to help his family. The next guy we had working for us lasted three days and then quit because we were too far from town and he missed his girlfriend. A third fellow started work on a Monday morning, but had twisted his leg and cracked a bone in his foot by early afternoon. The fellow after him developed a crush on Maria and began to waste his time trying to ‘court’ her instead of working, then I had to ask him to leave because he got pushy with her, but she wasn’t interested. He’s the only worker I’ve ever told not to come back to the ranch under any circumstances. Actually I phoned the RCMP after he left to let them know that I didn’t think he was mentally stable and warned them he was heading their way.

But, just when I didn’t think my year could get any stranger, I started getting calls about renting, selling or leasing the two places up on the ‘Frenchmen’s’ half section again. However the McAdam brothers still didn’t know what they wanted to do and legally I had still had a tenant leasing Carissa’s old place, since John Coulter insisted on maintaining the lease payments. By that time no one had lived in those two houses for a year, but since I didn’t know what was going on myself, I told anyone who called that both places were in legal limbo at the moment.

Besides right then Juan and I were up to our eyebrows in work, trying to get the second crop of alfalfa mowed raked and baled, so I really didn’t have time to even think about that. Once more the two of us were literally working from sunup to sunset and my patience with people was not exactly equitable. If we had been able to hire one decent worker who had stayed all summer long, life would have been so much better.

Then one Sunday in the late summer or early fall, John and Wilma, along with Frank and Jennifer Dolens, came out to the ranch for a visit to discuss those dang leases. I was surprised that they brought Art Dumfries and Debbie Yarowski along with them, but Frank and John explained that Art and Debbie were getting married and were going to need a place to live. Debbie was a nut about Thoroughbred horses, and she knew that both Frank and John had previous experience at buying and racing horses. She wanted to keep and breed two of the mares that Carissa had bought, then raise the colts, and both John and Frank were willing to back her financially if she wanted to expand her herd. Of course Art was drawn to the area because it meant he’d live much closer to his brother’s ranch in the foothills. They weren’t worried about being snowed in either, since Art was working on a contract basis at Frank Dolens’ shop. He only worked for Frank when there was a car that needed body work or painting, so it wasn’t going to be a major problem if he was snowed in for a few days during the winter.

Sandy and I both got along well with both Art and Debbie as well as Frank and John, but there was another complication. The group wanted to lease another twenty acres of land as pasture for their horses, which meant reducing the acreage where I’d planned to grow hay.

“Oh, don’t be silly!” Sandy snapped when I mentioned my reluctance. “You haven’t even taken a decent crop of hay off that land yet, so you don’t know how much you’d make if you did grow a crop there. Besides, the amount of hay you might get wouldn’t be worth anywhere near as much as the lease will bring in and the rent from the lease isn’t dependent on the weather the way a hay crop would be. All you need to do is have them sign a long term lease and while you shouldn’t overcharge for it, you should make sure you tie in any possible tax increases and other costs of that sort. That way if they build another barn or add fences and improvements you’ve covered your butt concerning any possible increase in your expenses just like you did on the original leases. As well as that if they raise very many horses you’re going to have a ready customer for any extra hay you do grow.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I nodded, then couldn’t help grinning.

“Okay, what’s so funny now?” she snapped.

“I was just thinking what Grampa Bender would have said about my reluctance to lease out more of his ‘dry dirt.’ Then I was remembering that he paid taxes on that acreage for years just so he could have a road across it.”

“Yeah, but just think how proud he’d be that you’re making money on the place,” she smiled as she hugged me, but I could see a tear in her eye and I knew she was thinking of Grampa Bender.

A few seconds later she developed a calculating look in her eye and she grinned, “Besides, if Art is living there, you could have him come down here in his spare time and repaint that ugly coloured car you bought for me.”

I just nodded and left it at that for the time being, but I’ll admit that comment lightened my mood.

So I called up Mark Jackson, my friendly surveyor, and talked to him along with John and Frank, then had him lay out an additional twenty acres to add to the lease. Art was so pleased about the fact that I’d leased the place to him and Debbie that he repainted Sandy’s car for the price of the supplies. Then he even gave Juan and me a hand around the ranch for a few days, but I insisted on paying him for his help. Art and Debbie were married on October 2nd and moved into the house on the 16th. In other words they moved in the day before we got hit by our first major blizzard of the winter - at least being snowed in gave them lots of time to unpack their possessions and arrange the furniture they’d brought with them.

When Mark had come out and asked me to help him with the survey, it was just one more reminder of the reasons I missed having the McAdam brothers living close by though. I was not only missing those guys as friends and neighbours, but I had really missed John and Matt’s help on the ranch that fall. They had been my extra labour when I’d needed them previous years and during main haying season that year I’d felt almost lost without them. Oh, we’d managed to get through the winter and had even made it through that summer by hiring temporary help, but I’ve already mentioned the problems we’d had. Besides the men I’d been able to hire weren’t accustomed to using our equipment or familiar with our methods, which meant they’d had to be trained and taking the time to train people slowed us down. It seemed to me that the haying season was almost finished before we’d trained our last helper to be a decent worker. It was quite plain that I needed to find more reliable help and I needed to find it soon. So I spread the word that I was looking for reliable, year-round workers, but let’s face it, it was coming on toward fall and every reliable farm or ranch worker in the area already had a job.

Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t unhappy with Juan in any way. My problem was that fact that the work on the ranch had increased exponentially and I was missing the reliable workers that Matt and John had become before they were shot. Those two brothers were the people I needed to replace, not Juan, not since he had become so much more than just a helper around the ranch. He was a good friend and an energetic helper, as well as a dependable observer who noticed problems before they grew too large to handle, so there was no way I was going to replace him. He had become an exceptional ranch hand and an excellent workman who helped out with almost all the jobs on the ranch, but he was much more than that to me because he loved the job. Both Juan and I were involved with the cattle and horses, but I think our horse herd was Juan’s second love at best. While he had become absolutely marvellous at gentling a young horse and working with the mares, his first love was obviously split between Sandy’s goats and his donkeys. Once Sandy and I became involved with raising Toby and Kristina, he took over the care and breeding of the goats, but he still made time to lavish care and attention on his donkeys and my horses.

While Juan had virtually taken over raising the goats, Conseula and Maria had taken charge of combing, cleaning, carding and selling the Cashmere wool from them each year. Sandy did work at the job part of the time, but she just had too many other duties now with Toby and Kristina still needing constant care and attention. As well as the Cashmere business, Conseula looked after her family, helped out with our family and still found time to work in Sandy’s garden and greenhouse, but after all that she still spent hours in her own garden. Meanwhile Maria seemed to be involved with everything on the ranch, but she loved being around horses and liked driving a tractor in the fields, so she’d been involved with one or the other almost every day that fall.

Actually one of luckiest things to happen to Sandy and me since we’d lived at Mile High Ranch had been having Juan’s old truck die in our driveway. But then, I suppose we were good luck for Juan and his family as well. He had lived much of his life as a ‘bracero, ‘ but he became my ‘capataz’ and he regarded me as his ‘jefe’ or even his ‘patrón’ - in English that sentence means he’d been a migrant worker, but now he grew to be my foreman and I became his boss. (At least I think that’s the approximate translation, but even after several years I’m still not comfortable with my attempts to use Spanish.)

Still our herds of cattle and horses had grown so our work load had increased, then we’d lost the help of the McAdam brothers, and I knew we had to find some decent permanent workers. By mid September of the second year he was there, Juan was working with me for fourteen to sixteen hours a day just to get ready for winter. As a result we’d head to our houses at night so tired that we’d almost fall asleep at the supper table. Consuela, Maria and Sandy weren’t in much better shape though, because they were working just as long and probably almost as hard as Juan and I were. Tom, Wil, George and Beth were just as busy with work or school, so they couldn’t help out, but something had to be done about finding and hiring more help and everyone on the farm knew it, not just me.

When Conseula casually mentioned that her brother and his family were going to lose their jobs in Manitoba at the end of the month and that they were looking for work, my ears perked up instantly. In fact since I assumed that her brother and his sons were good workers, I just handed her the phone and told her to call her brother to tell him that I was offering them jobs and I’d build them a house in the spring. I’d even pay their moving costs from Manitoba, in advance if necessary. Her reaction was priceless, because she gasped, then hugged me so hard it hurt. Seconds later she was releasing me, then grabbing the phone and dialling her brother’s phone number.

While she was talking to her brother, I was considering ways to convince the McAdam brothers to rent or sell their house so I’d have a place for her brother’s family to live that winter. It turned out I didn’t need to do that though, because her brother and his family lived in a mobile home and they planned to bring it along when they came. We headed to town that afternoon and I bought a traveller’s cheque for fifteen-hundred bucks and had Conseula mail it to her brother. Then I kiddingly told her to write a note to send along with the cheque that if they could find Juan and Sandy a Cashmere billy goat to buy it and bring it along - I’d pay them a bonus for that.

Marco and Antoinette Chavez, with their sons, Édouard and Emmanuel, as well as their daughter, Gabrielle, arrived on Mile High Ranch in mid October, just in time to be snowed in by a three day blizzard. (Actually it was the very same blizzard that greeted Art and Debbie Dumfries when they moved onto the lease.) The Chavez family had driven all the way from eastern Manitoba in two old trucks and an even older four-door sedan. The first truck was a pickup with a canopy on the back which was loaded with a large portion of their belongings. The second truck was a two ton with a fully enclosed box on the back and was loaded with their furniture and more belongings, but that second truck was also towing a thirty-six foot long house-trailer.

Not only that, but there was a horse trailer being towed behind the old car and it was full of Cashmere goats and miniature donkeys for Juan and Sandy. I’d only been teasing Conseula when I’d suggested to write that note, but it seemed the joke was on me! I still found it funny though, even if we had to herd five goats and two miniature donkeys in high winds and blowing snow to get them into a pen in the barn for the night. Juan didn’t mind that job at all though, not since Marco had found five Cashmere goats, four Xinjiang does and a Zhongwei buck. As far as Juan was concerned the two pregnant female donkeys were icing on the cake.

Needless to say moving the goats and donkeys was the easy job, because it was no fun getting that trailer moved over near my machine shop during a blizzard, then hooking it up to power and water, but we managed. I got out the little front end loader and cleared a path first. Then while Juan and Marco shifted the two trucks into the machine shed to protect their contents from the weather, the boys and I hooked the tractor to the trailer and moved it near my shop. Then we had to level the dang thing in freezing weather and laying on ice and snow to set up blocking was no picnic. Only once we had it set up, we discovered that the pipes in the trailer hadn’t been properly drained, so they had frozen solid during the trip, then on top of that the propane heater in the trailer wasn’t working at all. The Chavez family obviously weren’t going to be sleeping in their trailer that night or any night in the near future, at least not until we could thaw out and repair those pipes, not to mention getting the heater to work.

But what the heck, Sandy and I had a big house with several spare rooms, so we’d make do for the time being. However, by the time we’d moved and set up that house-trailer, it was time to do the evening chores. Marco, Édouard and Emmanuel joined Juan and me as we set out to look after the animals and we left it to our women folk to decide who was sleeping where. In only a few minutes the new men were digging in and helping with our evening chores as if they’d worked on the ranch all their lives. Marco went nuts over our cattle and the boys were completely enamoured with the horses, but all three of them were experienced farm workers, willing to tackle any job that came to hand. Inside of the first hour they were on the ranch I was extremely impressed with those three men - all I had to do was mention a job and they were working on it. I didn’t have to explain the job, I didn’t have to explain how the equipment worked and I didn’t have to check that the work was finished properly when they said it was done.

Meanwhile in the house, Sandy was getting to know Antoinette, who fell in love with Toby and Kristina the moment she met them. It turned out that Antoinette had been working as a teacher when she met Marco and she had home-schooled their three from the time they were old enough to read. In just minutes she had our two lying in front of her on the carpet before the fireplace, listening attentively as she read them a story. Now eighteen months old, those two kids were extremely active, so having them stay in one place and remain relatively quiet for any amount of time was a miracle. Besides, Sandy was pregnant again, but this time she was having minor bouts of morning sickness so her patience with Toby and Kristina suffered to some extent. Needless to say Sandy was overjoyed at the way our two little monkeys reacted to Antoinette, so Sandy happily left the kids in her care while she and Conseula set out to prepare a big meal for everyone.

By the time I and the other men came into the house to eat, the women had a meal ready and waiting on our fully extended kitchen table. They’d also made up their minds who was sleeping where and Sandy had decided that we’d call our new workers by their family nicknames. In other words using a mixture of French, Spanish and English, we men were soon given our household orders by the women in our lives. Antoinette was being called Netty, Édouard and Emmanuel became Eddy and Manny and Gabrielle was being teased and called Gabby, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. The one confusing issue for me concerning their names was that Netty and Marco often called Conseula by the nickname; Connie. Both Sandy and I refused to call her that though since both of us liked the sound of her full name.

Since Juan and Conseula hadn’t seen Marco and Netty for almost two years, Marco and Netty were going to be sleeping over at Juan and Conseula’s house. Only since Juan and Conseula didn’t have a bed in the spare bedroom, they’d be staying in Maria’s room. That meant Maria and Gabby were going to be sleeping in one of our upstairs bedrooms, the one with two single beds, which also happened to be the furthest from the master bedroom. Eddy and Manny were going to be sleeping on the main floor in Grampa Bender’s old bedroom. Surprisingly, that arrangement worked out relatively well and for the next few months the four kids lived with us. Of course being teenagers there was some fuss and bother, but we handled it. In the first place Grampa Bender’s old bedroom only had a double bed and the two boys weren’t accustomed to sleeping in the same bed, so they complained about it. Sandy and I handled that quickly by having them carry that bed upstairs and swap it with the two single beds the girls had been using. Of course the girls weren’t happy about sleeping in one bed either, so Sandy split them up and put each of them into a bedroom of their own.

Actually the Chavez family settled in and worked out so well it was nearly unbelievable. In the first place all three men knew Canadian farming practices and since they’d lived in Manitoba they knew how to manage their jobs in cold weather. Then too they accepted Juan as my ‘capataz’ or foreman, so there was no conflict on that front. If I wasn’t handy to show them my methods of handling a job, Juan was able to guide them, which meant I had much more time to plan essential work and manage finicky details while they handled the day to day labour. Even more important to me was the fact that all three men were mechanically inclined and could help Juan or me to repair damaged or worn equipment over winter. For once I had the time to be fully prepared for tax day and was able to account for almost ever dollar of the former year’s expenses. By early December I already knew that while we would still be in the black, that year was not going to be anywhere near as profitable as the previous two years had been.

Meanwhile Netty and Gabby fell into the routine around the house as if they belonged there, but I will admit that our meals sometimes took me by surprise as they grew to have a distinct Mexican flavour. With the added help around the house, Sandy had both the time and inclination to pull her loom and spinning wheel out of storage and soon she even had Maria and Gabby knitting and weaving up a storm. Of course that took second place to their schooling, because both of the girls were taking their grade twelve courses by correspondence. Maria had easily finished grade eleven by correspondence the year before and she couldn’t see why grade twelve would be all that much more difficult. For Gabby, her mother had made the arrangements for the correspondence courses while they were still living in Manitoba, so Gabby’s books and course work were waiting for her when she’d arrived. The only times either of them would be attending school in town was to take a few tests and their final exams. Neither of those girls were slouches either because Sandy and I kept track - they each averaged only about four hours a day on their studies and yet they’d aced any tests they had taken. That blew me away, considering how much time I had spent taking virtually the same courses in high school.

Before long both Sandy and I had decided that hiring the Chavez family had worked out extremely well for everyone involved. By the end of the first major snowstorm of the year, Marco, Netty, Eddy, Manny and Gabby had adapted to our lifestyle so well that it almost seemed as if they’d been with us for years. They never did move back into that trailer because of all the damage it had suffered when the pipes froze, instead they sold it the next spring. That’s because shortly after they came to the ranch, actually in the first week of November, I’d called up Clarence and told him to order another log house kit so the Chavez family would have a permanent home.