And In The Beginning

CRYSTAL CURLS

By

Kalli Deschamps

            3:35 P.M. Almost time to feed. I took off my glasses, closed the yellow pad and looked out the window. Ed had finished plowing; twelve inches of snow on the level. It took a while to clean it all after last week’s storm. Maybe this was the end. Not an easy job with a twenty-year old John Deere tractor. We’d never had a real plow; just a blade on the back and a loader on the front. As I watched, he headed toward the shop; our winter home for the Kawasaki. We had traded our oldest tractor for an ATV. This was our first year to feed with it; an experiment that seemed to be working.

            After twenty years it was still hard to believe we had built all this; the buildings, corrals, fences. It spread before me as I looked from the deck, through the yard and across the rolling hills. This was our home. But more than that – it was our life. Its beauty is hard to describe. Deep umber buildings poked from cornices that seemed to cut holes through the brilliant snow. Cerulean blue was the color of the sky streaking toward amethyst as it outlined the crest of the hills. Late afternoon sun gave lie to the sub-zero temperatures, but the air was calm on this typical winter day in Western Montana. I smiled and stopped as my foot touched the upper stair. A shadow passed the corner of my eye. A bird? No. Smoke? There it was again. A curl. That’s what it was. A small curl that rose with a lazy insolence from the surface of a top-heavy cornice. I wondered how that mountain of snow could sustain its precarious grip on the edge of the barn roof. There was a second curl. This one seemed to mock me. His shrill voice drifted through the placid air. “You think I’m alone. I see you there watching the sun glint through the placid air. Does it form a halo as my particles curl and drift into the blue? Fool’s gold. You just wait. I’m not alone. More are following. We’ll turn your pristine world into a first-class nightmare.”

            I shuddered, then tore my eyes from the fascination of the curling feathers to the undulating acres of blanketed snow. The curl had called it pristine. Not quite. Slashing the snow in the near alfalfa field was a network of diverse gashes, some wide, some narrow. These were the roads and trails we had made to bring feed and bedding to our herd of pregnant cows. We were moving through the month of January. The girls would start calving the tenth of February. They were starting to show; making bag, relaxing their membranes and softening their eyes. Ed thinks I’m nuts, but I know they’re close when their eyes start to glow. They’ll have their babies. Some for the first time. The companionship and the comfort of motherhood; the fulfillment that abounds in the rearing of the young. All this will be theirs.

            I had daydreamed and I was late. I could hear the rising wind as I reached for my coveralls.

            Ed struggled to open the storm door and slide into the mudroom as I searched for my boots. “Whew. That damn wind! I need more clothes. Dress warm. It’s colder’n hell out there!”

            I started over. First the down vest, then the coveralls, the felt lined boots, silk scarf, down bonnet. I felt like a brown marshmallow.

            “Better wear your mittens. Your hands’ll freeze in gloves.” He shook his head. “I’d sure as hell like to know where this wind came from.”

            “I don’t know where it came from, but I saw it start. Kind of neat, really.”

            “Yeah, well you’ll think it’s neat if it drifts us shut. Ready?”

            In the ten minutes of our preparation the blowing air went from a wind to a gale. The snow was beginning to move – horizontally.

            “Grab the hay hooks from the barb, wouldja? I’ll start the machine and pick you up.”

            Behind our four-wheel drive ATV we pulled a small trailer. It hauled the amount of hay we needed to feed our limited herd. Every afternoon about four we loaded it from the shed and headed to the field. I drove. Ed walked at the side cutting strings, dividing the hay bales in quarters and dropping them on the snow. It was important to nourish budding mothers carefully, but not to make them fat. Easy calving, healthy calves; these were our goals.

            Today we had a problem.

            “We can’t leave these girls in the open tonight. God only knows when this storm will end or how cold it’ll get. We’ve got to get them in.”

            “What about the bulls?”

            He thought a moment. “Push the heifers across to the AI corral, I guess. Put the bulls where the heifers were. That way they’ll have protection. Open the gate, bring the cows in and feed’em in the big corral. If this keeps up we’ll have to feed everything under the loafing sheds. I’ll check the light bulbs in the waterers. Got any extras?”

            “I’ll check. What about the grain feeders?

            “That’s the least of our worries right now. Better plug in the John Deere and leave it overnight.”

            By the time we were back to the barn with our load of hay my fingers, in their down and leather mittens, were already numb. My face felt pitted and scarred from the frozen points of the wind-driven snow. My body was beginning to fight the penetrating cold with sloth and apathy. All of this at the end of an hour with so much left to do.

            And so the nightmare began with the fight to keep our animals alive and the water open. The heated automatic tanks were already frozen. We kept warm hoses in the basement for filling the open tanks and kept them free of ice with the old auxiliary heaters. But that was only part of it. Thank God for electricity. It kept our gas and diesel engines warm, supplementary heat in the house and water hot for the baths necessary to thaw our frozen bodies. Two wood stoves ran day and night providing heat for three dogs and three cats who shared space at their perimeters. Thresholds were plugged with blankets and thermostats were opened. I pushed thoughts of the electric bill to the back of my mind; a mind filled with wonder at the continuing force of the storm. Where was it coming from? When would it leave? How could those tiny curls cause such pain? The snow changed patterns every hour. The wind seemed to lose its mind as it whirled from all directions at once. It was always cold. The wind chill hit 80 below. A first for Western Montana! It was almost too much.

            To plow snow was a waste of energy and fuel. We moved only enough drifts to feed. We had more cattle than space, so we hauled bedding and shoveled frozen manure to keep them comfortable and prayed for no early calves. We couldn’t leave. We were too tired to care. Finally, Ed gave voice to the ultimate horror. That is if you’re a rancher marketing purebred bulls. . “You know, Kal, if those calves freeze their testicles, they can’t breed.” He murmured the words, almost as an after thought on day five of the storm. The hour was late. We were rubbing our stockinged feet with fingers stiff from the cold. Would that heat never penetrate?

            “When will we know?”

            “Not ‘til we can get them tested.”

            “Well…when?” My bookkeepers brain was calculating the difference in price between a purebred bull and a steer, the bills to be paid and the reputation to be maintained.

            “Won’t do much good ‘til the end of February.”

            There was nothing more to say. Only to hope the storm would end, hope the bulls were staying warm, hope we could continue to cope.

            It was three days later or rather night. I woke with a start. The digital clock on our nightstand read 2:37, My middle of the night waking was not an unusual phenomena. Sleep, it is said, is the breeder of creativity and my best ideas seemed to come hard on the heels of these nocturnal interludes. But that wasn’t it. Then I realized what woke me. I poked my snoring mate. “Ed, the wind has stopped!”

            “Huh?” He opened an eye, its exhaustion viewed clearly in the light of a brilliant moon. “Wha’d you say?”

            “The wind. It’s stopped.” I jumped out of bed and raced through the house. Even without my glasses I could see the added length of the thin blue line. I squinted; then almost sang the joyous words. “It’s 31 degrees!”

            The storm of the century was history. For nine days my pen lay dormant; my mind too exhausted to think. Now, if I could find the words, I had a story to tell. A story about snow and ice and cold and human grit; but mostly about crystal white curls filled with beauty and with pain that mocked the tenuous deeds of man.