SEVEN
ONE November morning I got up and got in my rental car in Hanna, the Alberta town closest to Marj Venot’s place. I exited the parking lot where the young guys leave their bull-barred, rocker-panelled pickups running while they have a couple of pops in the bar by the motel. I drove past their parents’ homes: a generation or two back the original Scots, German-Russians and Americans who settled the area. Beyond a new fire hall, a prosperous seniors residence, ball fields sponsored by the Kinsmen and tennis courts covered in early winter snow I discovered Hanna just stops. Then the horizon opens in a way that makes a city boy from a place where everything is crabbed together take a series of deep breaths.
I lived in Calgary for a couple of years in the late eighties, when the province was in one of those oil-price-related slumps that would pass for prosperity most anywhere else in this country. We hit the highway to Banff and Lake Louise. We went to barbecues in the foothills of the Rockies. Once we drove as far as the Badlands—about forty-five minutes from Hanna—to see a place where dinosaurs had roamed. I’m not sure why, but we never made it to the short-grass country. So I’m quite unprepared for the roll of the flatlands, the scale of the sky, the tapering highway that just goes and goes. I drove up the night before, in fog as thick as I’ve encountered on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. Now it has burned off, leaving a savannah so stunningly empty that it makes me scan the vista for a tree or animal so I could get my bearings.
When we spoke over the phone, Marj told me to watch out for the stop sign or I’d miss the road to her place. She might have been just screwing with the city boy. Heading east along Solon Road, there’s only one stop sign. It can be seen from a couple of miles away. I flip my blinker on for the right turn. I realized, the moment I did so, that this was stupid: over the ten-mile stretch to Veno Ranches I see a total of three man-made structures. I don’t pass one car. I don’t see a single human being. Marj’s property sits on the uppermost edge of Alberta’s Special Areas, a five-million-acre extension of the Great Plains grasslands that run from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. It is land that, in Marj’s words, “has not had man messing with it.” Last time someone bothered to count, five thousand people lived in the Special Areas, which works out to one person per thousand acres of land.
The cow-per-acre ratio on her land is much higher. The woman who owns them does not give them names like Minnie, Dollie or Bessie. Marj, who when I arrive is shooing away Duke, her oldest herd dog, doesn’t need to. In her mind she says, “There’s the one with the short tail” or “Here comes the scared one” or “There goes the rust-coloured one.” A few of the bulls, it is true, have nicknames like “Hustler” and “Grid Iron.” A lot of the cattle can only be told apart by the number on the ear tag: 249, 5440, 47 and so on. Often she refers to them, respectfully, as the “old girls”—although, if need be, she will call them anything necessary to get them to move along.
It helps that cattle don’t roam far, even on lands as expansive as these are. Marj and her husband, Murray McArthur, have 19.5 sections of land between the two of them. A section is 640 acres. So their trio of ranches contains 12,480 acres of Alberta ranch land. On it they raise three hundred purebred Angus cows for “seed stock” and another three hundred head of commercial Angus cattle for beef. “More than the average,” Marj says of her ranch, “but there’re ones that are bigger.” Particularly these days, when so many ranchers want out and those who stay have to grow to survive. Even so, it’s big enough that Murray is off today in the Cessna 150 two-seater airplane they bought to better keep an eye on their land and herd.
Marj, who talks in miles rather than kilometres, is old school. When the weather is nice, she gets on her saddle horse at first light. Then she and Duke just ride out into the land. Many days when she returns home after a day of mending fences, checking her herd and making sure the deer hunters haven’t left her gates open, it will be dark. Usually she won’t have seen a single human being since departing in the morning. She does not necessarily see this as a problem.
Marj is fifty-six the day I arrive. A squarely built woman with a no-fuss haircut. Neither her temperament nor her appearance suggests a humanity-hating hermit. She brings to mind Bob Dylan’s line to an interviewer about being “Exclusive, maybe, but not reclusive.” Marj’s green eyes are level behind wire-rimmed glasses. But her face—undamaged by the elements despite all those days outside—erupts when she laughs, which is often, and a little surprising. For Marj has seen her share of troubles. She has had moments that have made her wonder if there is anything resembling fairness on this old earth. She has stood there with no place to go but forward. Then she has put one foot squarely in front of the other until she is as I find her here today: a woman who has made her way in a man’s world, a third-generation Alberta rancher at a time when a host of difficulties—mad cow, the Canadian dollar, surging feed prices and the developed world’s desire to eat less beef—are making cattle ranchers an endangered species.
That she doesn’t make too big a deal of everything she’s had to bear could be because that’s just not done in a place whose story, on the Town of Hanna website, begins this way:
History is not a term which affixes itself easily to community life which is so much a part of each one of us. In Hanna, and other small communities, we are familiar with the events, the families and the culture which is an intimate part of everyday living. Nevertheless, 85 years of relentless effort under every form of adversity … drought, hail, blizzards, floods, rust, smut, poverty … qualifies as history.
Her people’s story fits the mould. It really begins in 1909, when her grandfather Hugh Nester took his blacksmith’s forge from an Ontario village called Tara to an Alberta hamlet named Bassano, where there were horses to be shod and land for a man with ambition in his heart. “He built a shack and broke ten acres” is how Marj puts it. “He did what he had to do and married the girl from across the road.”
She was a Holcomb from North Dakota. Evelyn Holcomb’s people may have seen one of the posters advertising “The Last Best West” or “the flour barrel of the world,” a country offering “homes for millions” and “free land.” They may have even sat gape-mouthed in some prairie hall or auditorium listening to an agent hired by the Canadian government—hell-bent on populating the West now that wheat sales were booming and a bout of railway building was underway—who was paid a commission for every man woman and child he persuaded to settle in western Canada.
The great arc of history had pretty much emptied out the place where the Holcombs ended up: by the 1890s, buffalo hunters had killed off the large herds of bison that had once roamed southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Starving and marginalized, the Bloods, Cree and Siksikas limped onto reserves. As the North West Mounted Police marched west, ranchers—many of them from the United States, where the frontier had been closed off—moved into the prairies and foothills. For a while a powerful compact of ranchers kept the homesteaders at bay. But, desirous of open settlement, Ottawa had its mind made up. The winter of 1906–07 helped things along: those same ranchers saw at least half of their herds starve to death in the bitter cold. The ranchers went bankrupt, or they just up and left. In 1908 Ottawa amended the Dominion Lands Act, giving a quarter section of free land to newly arriving immigrants, opening twenty-eight million acres in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Though many homesteaders, like Hugh Nester, came from eastern Canada, the government pitchmen really wanted immigrants from Europe and the United Kingdom. Clifford Sifton, the Canadian minister of the interior, saw midwestern American farmers as the perfect recruits: they knew how to farm the prairie soil. Mostly they spoke the same language and shared the same values as their counterparts in western Canada. They were also desperate: the good American land was gone. In 1890 the American West was officially closed. Though the numbers were unreliable, between 1896 and 1910, it is estimated that close to six hundred thousand Americans poured into the Canadian West in search of cheap land.
“Grandma’s people ended up in a dry, arid place called the Palliser Triangle,” Marj tells me. We’re in her living room, looking at old photos of her predecessors. The frontier where they landed was so called because a British aristocrat named John Palliser had passed through there in 1857–58 and declared the area “desert, or semi-desert in character, which can never be expected to become occupied by settlers.” Other later visitors felt much the same way. Colonel G.A. French, who led the North West Mounted Police’s great trek west in 1874, noted he had expected, for some reason, to encounter a “luxuriant pasture, according to most accounts, a veritable Garden of Eden.” Instead, he found “for at least sixty to seventy miles in each direction … little better than a desert, not a tree to be seen anywhere, ground parched and poor.”
It rarely rained there. The thin topsoil compounded the problems. The winds out of the Rockies came “soughing across the land, howling through the fences and telegraph lines, aligning small coulees,” in the words of historian David Jones, “lifting the typical thin brown regional soils and piling vast sand dunes.” In the Badlands around present-day Drumheller the winds cleaved away all vegetation and carved out strange formations called “hoodoos.” Everywhere, Jones wrote, the blowing was all-powerful. “It was as if King Aeolus, ruler of the winds, had hatched a foul plot high in the Rockies and had set the west wind and the south wind, those normally gentle and compliant breezes, against each other in a struggle of influence and dominion.”
Newcomers like the Nesters and Holcombs, knowing nothing about this, came anyway. Idyllic images of free land and bountiful harvests danced in their heads. “Southern Alberta,” gushed a writer for the Canada West magazine, was “a land blessed of the Gods—a land over which bending nature never smiles and into whose cradle she emptied her golden horn.” Before the influx, southeastern Alberta was home to around nine thousand residents. Within ten years, the region’s settler population increased eightfold. Almost all of them lived on new farms where wheat was the principal crop.
EVELYN Nester was about Marj’s height, five foot two. Back in Carrington, North Dakota, she played the piano for silent movies and in a dance band. Life in a prairie farm town would have prepared her for the drought that hit the Prairies soon after her marriage. But perhaps not for the successive years of rainlessness and crop failure that followed right through the 1930s.
Yet they hung in. They endured, even as their lands became the prairie dust bowl of history and the very symbol of the Dirty Thirties. Even when Evelyn, in Marj’s words, discovered that Hugh was “quite dead one morning” in 1933. Picture, if you would, her predicament: in midst of the Great Depression, living on a prairie farm that, after a decade of drought and every other kind of misfortune, must have seemed godforsaken. Did I forget to mention that she had seven children ranging in age from twelve years to eighteen months?
Marj’s dad and aunts and uncles would tell how Evelyn played the piano at country dances for a few dollars, then ride home alone on horseback or in a buggy across the empty Alberta landscape to face her brood and more hard work. They mentioned how her fingers bled from playing so long and always being so cold. And how, while Marj’s dad and his older brother looked after the livestock, she sold homemade butter and bread to neighbouring bachelors to scratch out a living for the household.
“They talked about her sense of humour,” recalls Marj, “her ability to make a meal out of most anything that was available and her determination to keep them all in school as long as possible so they could make something of themselves.” Evelyn Nester died old before her time, when a brain tumour took her at age fifty-three. Marj wasn’t born until six years later, so her memories of her grandma are second-hand. But, she says, “I’ve often thought of her and what she endured with seven kids, no running water or indoor plumbing, no vehicle or any of the other modern conveniences that we have now.”
Marj thought about her grandma a lot after her first husband, Greg Veno, died in 1991 following a long, spirit-sapping fight with cancer. The parallels were cruel: Marj owed the bank half a million dollars. She had 2,500 acres of cultivated land to work and a herd of two hundred commercial cows to raise. She was a single mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter, left to her own designs in a land where life, even at the best of times, has never been easy. “I was angry,” Marj says in that matter-of-fact way that you feel she might use to report a global apocalypse. “But I knew that I could get it done because she had before me. I owed that to my daughter, her dad, myself and my family before me. Then I just put my head down and went to work.”
ALMOST noon now, and Marj is in her Yukon, one of seven trucks I count. They, along with the various tractors, skidders and trailers, make up the vehicular fleet of Veno Ranches and McArthur Livestock. The vehicles are stored in a big metal Quonset hut in the farmyard. I discover there’s a whole world out there. Off to the right, big metal granaries hold pellets of cattle feed. To the rear, half-ton bales of hay that don’t last as long as you’d think in a place where each cow eats thirty pounds per day for feed. Farther yonder, a corral made out of discarded Alberta Energy poles, a cattle scale for weighing livestock and chutes for loading the cows into trucks and trailers.
The latter is next to the red barn that was here when she and Greg bought the place. Built in 1918, the structure was the handiwork of the ranch’s original homesteader, Gottlieb Knopp. When the old fella and his wife died, the ranch went to a daughter, who married badly—a drinker and poker player who let the place run down. They eventually sold it to a rancher named Jack Jager, who let things slide even more, until he sold it to Marj and Greg in 1980. “The place was a rundown mess,” says Marj, “but with lots of enthusiasm and hard work we cleaned it up and built new buildings and corrals and fences when we could afford them.” Marj, Greg and her dad straightened the barn themselves. Now the barn loft’s floor is plumb enough for their annual square dance and cattle auction. When they were done with the barn renovation, a neighbour said that old Knopp would sure be proud of it, as he was a proud, hard-working man.
In short-grass country endurance and fortitude are treated with a reverence akin to an ability to profitably flip a condo among city folks. Calling someone hard-working—along with saying they are honest and have integrity, which matters in a place where deals are still done on a handshake—is the highest praise you can have for a person. Being a survivor is something to feel good about too. The number of cattle farms in Alberta shrank from eighty thousand in 1941 to under twenty-nine thousand in 2006. Farms are getting bigger. But farmers are getting older—Alberta had 16,660 farmers under the age of thirty-five in 1991 versus 6,290 by 2006. It’s harder to get out of the business when land prices are so high and there’s less and less appetite among the young for the kind of labour that cattle ranching requires.
Marj has always liked a daylight start: because she’s fondest of the world at that hour but also because cattle ranching is what economists like to call “labour intensive” toil. Toil is my word, not Marj’s. That’s simply not how she sees things. Spring, when the two-year-old heifers calve, may mean a parade of eighteen-hour days wrestling with half-ton animals out in the calving pasture. It may mean checking every head of cattle daily and new calves twice or even three times in the run of twenty-four hours. (“No daylight,” she tells me, “is wasted.”) But she thinks of it as “a time of rejuvenation. The air smells so fresh, the crocuses are growing, everything is new and fresh and young.”
Don’t expect her to complain, either, about the summer days, which also start before light, since it’s the easiest time to check the cattle and the mosquitoes aren’t buzzing yet. To hear her tell it, no better time can be had on this earth than when dozens of family members descend on the ranch for the annual ritual of branding the calves in June. Things get easier in the fall, when they get the hay in, fix the corrals, vaccinate the calves and wean them from their mothers. The rest of the time is spent preparing for winter, during which she says the cows “pretty much take care of themselves”—a statement that I discover is not quite true.
It is, by Alberta standards, a balmy minus two farren-heit by the time we set out. Normally Marj would have her rifle propped up in the passenger seat. Since I’m there, we’re unarmed as we take a right past the grey mailbox that just says “R.R. 1 Hanna, Alberta.” We pass her two saddle horses—Yikes, who is reddish, Vegas, mostly black, and a donkey that goes by Jenny inside a fence close to the road. Marj hangs a left and stops. In a greenish canvas jacket, yellow work gloves and pull-on rain boots, she gets out to open the gate.
This is the “West Place” ranch, since expanded from the original Jager land, where she, daughter Janet and son-in-law Steven run three hundred pairs of cows and calves year-round. To keep predators out and the cattle in, their three ranches have sixty-nine miles of three- or five-strand barbed wire fencing, strung between wooden posts sunk sixteen feet apart. At sixty-nine cents a foot, that’s one of their biggest costs. So part of every day is spent splicing damaged fence or, when it’s beyond repair, rebuilding the entire section.
A dozen or so scattered heifers and calves give us the eye. And well they should: in time the good-quality ones, along with young yearling bulls, will be sold to other ranchers for breeding. Steers (castrated bulls) and older heifers go to feed-lots to be fattened for slaughter. It’s a Darwinian world on a cattle ranch; producers need to get rid of animals that lower the genetic quality of the herd. So Marj is always examining the cow-calf pairs to see which ones are doing well and which ones aren’t. “That time pays off when it is culling time,” she explains. Each year around 10 percent of her breeding herd is sold at an auction.
As we walk around, Marj tells me that she’s looking for other things too. “You’ve got to know, are they satisfied?” she says. “Are they wandering too much? If they’re wandering too much, they’re looking for something. They need minerals. They need salt. They need grass. Maybe the water is dirty.” She fiddles with a siphon, capable of moving eleven to twelve gallons of water from a coulee to a water trough every thirty seconds when wide open. Then she scrambles down an incline, shovel in hand. She keeps talking as she chops a water hole in the ice for the cattle. Marj has got a bad back and on days like today feels the chill in her bones, several of which have been broken in on-the-job mishaps. But ranches die without water.
They also need grass. It takes two years for a calf to reach full size, which is 1,200 to 1,400 pounds for a cow and a little less for a bull. Cows, as we know, have a fairly narrow range of activities. They sleep, they stare, they move their bowels, they wander slowly around. Occasionally, when scared, they take off with a little gallop. Mostly, in their own distinctive way, they eat. They swallow grass. The food comes back up into their mouths as cud, which they chew again. Because Marj’s cattle spend most of the year out on the pasture, it takes thirty acres of grassland to raise a single head of cattle.
Back on dry land she uses her hand to ruffle snow off the ground cover. At the “Home Place,” a trio of creeks meet on a large flood plain that is naturally irrigated during spring runoff or during large rainfalls. The 2000–2009 period brought droughts, complete with associated grasshopper infestations, rivalling those seen by her grandparents. The past three years, though, were characterized by better-than-average rain and decent winter snowfalls. Consequently, her cattle have had lots of prairie wool, a hardy and nutritious native grass for grazing.
Some things have changed a lot since her grandparents first broke ground in this area, Marj says. Being able to “read the grass” is 100 percent the same. “You have to understand what time of year cattle prefer what kind of grass. Tame grass, the stuff reseeded by man, is typically at its best in the late spring and early summer,” she says. “You’d better be using that then if you’ve got some and then save your prairie grass for this time of year, because that’s when it shines. It’s great stuff to winter cows on. They stay healthy. There’s lots of minerals and lots of nutrients in it. It’s just something you learn.”
WE’RE back in the truck, heading east, then north, then east again. From the looks of it we could turn southward and, except for the occasional cross fence, not hit a single thing until we reached Cessford, where the Nesters still farm. Shifting down and up, Marj tells me how her dad, Jack, stayed in school until grade eight, then began driving teams of horses and pitching bundles of hay like his brothers. His first trip to Calgary was to enlist in the Canadian army after receiving his conscription letter. He served in Britain and northwest Europe from February 1943 until he was discharged three years later. Then he came back to work the family farm.
On the way home he passed ghost towns, abandoned homesteads and shells of grain elevators. So many people just up and left from southeastern Alberta during the Dirty Thirites that the provincial government moved in to administer vast regions of the dry belt that no longer could sustain themselves. In 1938 three “special areas” were created to be administered by the provincially run Special Areas Board. Newcomers with the stomach for it could purchase twenty-year leases for abandoned lands. In the early 1950s, Jack acquired 2,560 acres on the Berry Creek, which was in Special Area 2.
“It was just a dot,” says Marj. “There was a grain elevator. A little country school where fourteen was the biggest class ever. I still remember being amazed at all the other school buses and kids on my first day of grade one. But you are who you are and it was a great place to grow up.” When opportunity knocked, Jack added to the farm. Marj remembers her mom Lillian’s big garden on the ranch homestead, the parade of family dogs and the saddle horses—Sandy, Dixie and Starr—which were the main mode of transportation for her and her brother.
There were only two other girls in the area. So Marj grew up rough and tough, doing what the boys did. “Chasing cattle, feeding cows, butchering beef, chickens and pigs, helping get the milk cow in so that Jack could milk her.” They fished in the creek beside their house. The kids taught her how to play fastball and hockey and to go tobogganing. “I would go and check cattle with Dad on horseback, always watching the wildlife, learning to respect the weather,” she says.
She finished high school and got a job for a while in an accounting office. (“I learned what I didn’t want to be,” she says. “I was inside all of the time. I felt like a gopher.”) At nineteen she married Greg Veno, who grew up about forty miles northwest of the Nester place, but went to high school in Cessford. He and Marj met on the school bus. “We had similar backgrounds,” she recalls. “We both knew how to laugh and have a lot of fun while we worked or whatever we were doing. We were best friends before we were anything and remained best friends through thick and thin.”
For five years they managed a feedlot near Bassano. It was enlightening to be around the owner, Bud Stewart, who showed them how to feed cattle to butcher weight, how to deal with meat packers and how to hedge cattle stocks on the commodities market to protect against prices heading the wrong way. Marj calls what they learned a “university-class education that no school could offer at the time.” But they were kids with dreams. They wanted to keep the family narrative moving forward. And then they heard about this land.
WHEN Greg died, Marj knew she couldn’t keep raising cattle and growing wheat by herself. So she bought some grass and hayseed. That first spring her dad, nephew and brother-in-law helped her seed all the farmland to hay and grass for the cattle. The rain helped: twenty-one inches the first year and eighteen each for the next two years. Getting rid of the crops allowed her to trade in her combine for a new haybine, a baler and a baler-mower. She bought Angus bulls to crossbreed with the two hundred Limousin cows she already owned. Then she used the resulting crossbred heifer calves to build her herd up to three hundred cows. Marj called the result “cattle that work for me, not me for them.” For the next five years she and her daughter, Janet, worked the range, cutting and baling the hay and raising the cattle. “The days were long—daylight to dark,” says Marj. “But hard work kept me sane. Or at least, I thought I was.”
Her focus, besides keeping the farm afloat, was ensuring that Janet got to play sports and do the other things teenage kids got to do. That meant a major dose of empty nest syndrome when her daughter—often the only person Marj saw during the workweek—headed off to college in Lethbridge. Worried about becoming “some kind of kooky eccentric,” Marj found a young guy who wanted to learn, please excuse me, the ropes of cattle ranching. She put him on the payroll and gave his family and him a place to live. That took the pressure off Janet to come home on weekends to help out. It also gave Marj the leeway to have a life. At a bull sale in 1995 she met Murray, a cattleman from Ontario who had taken to raising Angus beef in the Chauvin area of Alberta. “As time passed he became a permanent fixture” is how Marj sums up the courtship. They married in 1998.
Our feet make a bubble-wrap noise as we traverse East Place, where the ground is sandy and covered with lots of natural bush. The water table is uncommonly high for this country: the dugouts are spring fed; the water wells are about a hundred feet deep but never run dry. That allows Marj and Murray to raise 180 cow-calf pairs and a hundred yearling heifers for nine months of the year here. Marj knows what she can get for her cattle: $3,500 or $3,600 for a breeding bull, sixty to seventy cents per pound for a slaughter cow and $1,200 to $1,500 for a heifer. She also knows that profit margins are variable depending upon a whole range of factors: the world market for beef, how much supply is out there, the public perception of her product. In other words, they are price takers rather than makers, in economics-speak. So the easiest way to maximize profits is by keeping costs down and timing the market so that she sells on the price highs, not the lows.
Marj checks the gate—the start of deer season is days off—and considers the water holes. Then she looks northward, stands straight and says, “I think that’s a bull moose.” Marj gets out her binoculars, scopes the animal a couple of hundred yards away. She says, “Oh yeah, that’s a bull moose,” then hands the glasses to me. There turn out to be two of them. We trade the glasses back and forth, watching them grapple using their antlers for dominance. Marj tries to get their attention with a moose call. We can’t tell, from this distance, if they notice or not. But after a while they saunter off.
This isn’t the sort of thing I see every day. For Marj, who likes the wild better than cities, it is. “You get to see nature from the perspective of how it really is,” she says of her life. “It isn’t in a zoo or a book. It’s out there. It’s pretty easy to drive by at sixty miles an hour and not even see that stuff. Just slow down and take your time and you see that little three-point buck that was standing at the gate.”
At which point I ask myself—what little three-point buck? For that reason, I vow to try paying attention when we get back in the truck. Whether it’s the focus or just coincidence, all of a sudden animal life is everywhere: an owl sitting on a big rock, a weird little bird that Marj tells me is a prairie chicken, a coyote that lives another day because Marj doesn’t have her rifle with her today. The three ranches, she tells me, support mule deer, antelope and, during the last ten years or so, more moose and elk. Marj says the Hungarian partridge, which I gather is some kind of pheasant, finds good habitat to thrive there regardless of coyotes and foxes. Her land is also on the main migratory flight path of the Canada goose and millions of ducks, which like to drop in.
In a copse of trees near the road she slows down to point out a pair of white-tailed deer. They freeze for a minute, then bound away as others join them. By the time the last one disappears I’ve counted twenty-seven. I realize that could be more than the total of all the deer I’ve glimpsed in the wild in my lifetime.
WEST Place, which Marj owns herself, is twenty miles off. The occasional gas well—ugly, black and often fenced off—breaks the ice-frosted grassy plain. Ranchers only own the surface rights of the land; what’s underneath is the possession of the province of Alberta, which auctions off the mineral rights. Gas wells are a real pain in the ass if something goes wrong, Marj says. Most of the time, the ranchers are happy for the royalty the well operator pays them.
Once your eyes get accustomed you can tell that it wasn’t always so empty around here. Some of the old homesteads—the ones abandoned when their owners gave up hope, were starved out or went broke back in the early thirties—are just a remnant of a wall, a foundation or a corral now. In others, abandoned more recently, it’s like a set for The Walking Dead: skeletons of old trucks in the yard, pigeons flying in and out through broken windows. Some people just couldn’t take the isolation, the economic uncertainty. They blew their brains out with dope or booze or their guns. Or, in most cases, one day they just left.
When she and Greg moved into the area thirty-two years ago, it wasn’t exactly Yonge and Bloor in Toronto. They had neighbours. But a lot of them were getting up there, wanted to retire and had no kids interested in the farming or ranching life. Or they had financial issues that forced them to sell out and try something else. All told, forty families who used to live on or around her land have packed up and vamoosed since she arrived. “Leonard and Martha Faupel sold to us and another neighbour to retire in 1989,” she says, running through the list. “Clarence Heggen wanted to retire 1988. Ed Housch retired sometime in the late eighties. Hector Lloyd moved on to other things in 2002 or 2003. Eric Walper moved on to other things 2000. Wayne Faupel moved to another area to farm in 1996.”
It’s about 3 p.m. The sky is darkening and the temperature dropping as we make a little detour. There’s nothing remotely derelict about the Senkiw Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It’s white, small and wooden, with a gabled roof topped by a small cupola bearing a mounted cross. The windows are glassed in, the small cemetery next to it neat and orderly. Senkiw is the surname of lots of settlers from the western Ukraine who settled in Alberta and Manitoba. Someone somewhere still looks after the church, which I’m guessing still holds services when a Ukrainian cleric makes his way to these parts. Also well maintained is the graveyard next door, where I imagine a lot of those Senkiws are buried, which adds a mournful quality of the scene.
When Marj and Greg bought West Place from old Leonard Faupel in 1989, it was about a third of the size it is now. It was also mostly a wheat farm. “I knew what I knew best,” she says, “and it wasn’t farming.” Now the prairie grass from the seed they planted feeds two hundred cow-calf pairs year-round. The ranch is gently rolling prairie with some bluffs of poplar and willow trees. Marj shows me coulees and one heck of a dam, which we look at for a minute before hustling back to the truck.
We zig and zag. Eventually we hit a long stretch of straight road on which something moving approaches from the other direction. It turns out to be a friend of Marj’s named Sue who is clad in a snowsuit. Her husband, John, is away hauling in hay for the winter, so Sue is heading to a friend’s place for dinner. She’s on foot even though the friend, whose place we passed, lives some five miles away by my reckoning. We chat for a moment. Then she picks up where she left off, long strides chewing up the road, a singular figure heading cheerfully into the open prairie.
Back at the Home Place, Marj shows me the inside of the barn, which is patrolled by eight comical border collie puppies that slip and slide on the upstairs loft floor like it’s a sheet of ice. When she and Murray hold their spring bull sale, the proceedings take place here, where the guests look at videos of the bulls penned outside. At other times, an old-style country and western band sets up in the loft. Friends, neighbours and family two-step into the night.
Tradition, like history, matters to Marj. From the walls of the loft, it’s obvious that she’s proud of her people, how they’ve carried on and what they’ve done. In a place of honour hangs a 2009 poster celebrating “100 years of ranching in the Special Areas by the family of Hugh and Evelyn Nester.” There are old black-and-white pictures of the Home Place as it was in 1954, long before Marj owned it; of her dad hauling loose hay in 1949 with a four-horse hitch. Over there is Hugh Nester’s homestead, circa 1912, before he married Evelyn. (A cousin of Marj’s still owns and operates the original property.)
I come upon a more recent, colour photo of Marj’s people: her mom and dad with Marj and Murray, along with daughter Janet and son-in-law Steven. The couple have a farm in Gleichen, Alberta, where they maintain a feedlot for fattening calves for market, run 250 cow-calf pairs and grow barley, canola and hay. Steven’s dad is dead. His mom lives nearby on her own land. Janet and Steven also own some grassland that attaches to Marj’s West Place. The couple consequently farm and ranch in conjunction with their family on both sides.
Also in the photo are Janet and Steven’s two boys, the apples of their grandmother’s eye. Tate is eight. He sounds like a chip off the old block: roping and riding in kid rodeos, riding along with Marj as she works, asking the same type of questions she used to ask her daddy. Wyatt, two years younger, is quieter and takes a bit of a back seat to his older brother. He’s more interested in a ranch’s machinery and building things than the livestock. But Marj can see the pair of them with her and Murray’s land when they are done. “Family traditions run deep,” she says, “and there is a lot of pride in keeping those alive.”
Youngsters like that are getting rarer and rarer in this day when most Canadian kids think that milk comes from a carton in a store. Canuck boys and girls don’t put chin in hands, peer at the cereal bowl and reflect that the Cap’n Crunch wouldn’t be there if not for some Saskatchewan grain farmer working his ass off in the blazing sun. Just as their parents probably don’t remember that some time ago among their people existed someone growing something on a country farm.
Marj understands that people don’t necessarily want to live close to the land anymore; she really does. “Young couples today—and I see it with my daughter and her family, who want to go to the show, want to take the kids to hockey games every week—they don’t want to put the time in,” she says. “They work hard. But I don’t think most people have the dedication and the drive to stick to it to get through the rough spots and ride it out.”
She’s at the table in the ranch house kitchen. The kettle is on. Marj, by her own admission, is cash poor but asset rich: they don’t have hundreds of thousands in the bank. But they do have a lot of land that has soared in value in the thirty-two years they’ve owned it. In 1982 they paid fifty-five dollars an acre for the leased grassland and two hundred dollars an acre for the cultivated farmland. Now the leased grassland would easily go for three hundred dollars an acre and the cultivated farmland four-fifty to five hundred dollars an acre. There are areas, in fact, where those prices would qualify as a bargain.
Which goes a long way to explaining why young people no longer dream of getting themselves a ranch. “It isn’t fiscally responsible for a young couple to borrow the kind of money they would have to borrow to buy an outfit that they could make a living off of and raise their family on. They will never on God’s green earth pay the debt off.”
She goes on, “You really have to want to do it. There’s ups and downs, but you’d better figure twenty years. That’s the reality. The best work years of your life—that’s what it is going to take to come out the other end and be sitting where I’m sitting.”
Marj, on the other hand, never really wanted anything else. She had a dream. It’s not a dream that speaks to new starts. Or, even in the early years of the twenty-first century, a dazzling future. Her dream was simple: to have a family. To honour her lineage as an Alberta cattle rancher—and follow the forward-ho example set by her parents and grandparents. To rise every day and ride out into this hard, beautiful land. To endure.