When the cattle first arrived this year, something was off. I contacted the rancher that had sent me the cattle. I get cattle from him about 50% of the time. As we in Western Oregon are drying out enough that some land is sticking up above the water, central California is too dry to grow grass. It works out. A modern migration, more or less. But this year, something was different.

“Did you do something different with the cattle this year?” I asked.

“No, everything was pretty much the same,” he said. “Why?”

“Well, they’re… just so… calm.”

But no. Nothing was different. But something was different. These cattle, which are usually plenty calm, were docile. For example, I used to struggle and struggle to get them to go over the tide gate. I thought that it looked like a steep cliff, they couldn't even see where to go. But one day I left the gate open and instead of going back to close it, I thought, 'oh they won't go over the tide gate.' Of course... they all went over the tide gate in the night. They were perfectly happy to go over the tide gate, they just didn't want to be forced over the tide gate. If someones trying to force you somewhere, its called a trap. Thats what lions do. This year, I felt calm, I felt like I had plenty of time. I made sure they felt like they were the ones that decided to move. This year I couldn’t even keep up as they went over the tide gate.

As usual, when all else fails, it’s time for self-examination. My mind eventually turned to this blog post I wrote in 2018. You see, we sold the ranch this winter. That was not part of our plan. But plans change. We had the opportunity to make good money, and with that money, we had the opportunity to reevaluate how we wanted our life to look and dust off old dreams.

Since the sale, I don’t get up at 3:00 in the morning anymore. I dance around in the kitchen with the three-year-old and the five-year-old. My mom says that my wife and I are different people, I think she means this in a good way. Without these external queues, I am not sure I would have known how much I was affected by the mortgage. I am an entrepreneur, a rancher. I’m tough, which in this case, means I have learned to be out of touch with my feelings. But you know who is in touch with my feelings? The cattle.

Bud Williams always said that the cattle will know something is wrong with you before you know something is wrong. They are herbivores; they are experts at probing the depths of the carnivore psyche. Evolution gave them no signal for ‘mortgage,’ when my muscles are clenched and I am moving too quickly my intentions are assumed to be impure. For the last five years, the stress of that mortgage was weighing on me every time I was around the animals. 

When we were thinking about buying this property six years ago, I talked with Eunice Williams about it. Everything seemed fine till I told her there was a mortgage. “Well, I know what Bud would say. He would say don’t borrow any money.” Due to the particulars of our situation, I felt like I had no choice but to ignore that advice, and maybe I did. The point that I did not appreciate at the time was this was not financial advice. This was stock handling advice. Bud avoided those things in life because of the impact they had on him as a stock handler.

If I am going to be a better stock handler I need to start seeing my own stress and the things that cause it. Stress in one part of my life bleeds over into other parts, causing stress for others. In this case the others were cattle. But in other areas of my life they were people, some of those people were you guys. I guess you can comment if you agree. You guys passed my stress on, and pretty soon we have made the world into what it is. No struggles to get the cattle over the tide gate didn’t fix the world but its the best I could do today. If you came up with something, leave it in the comments.