Once you get used to it, it feels OK to accept that the ranching operation is no longer our (my wife and I) primary responsibility. Things will be done differently, perhaps better, than in our heyday.
A new generation running the ranch may just want to accept and excel at the “continuous improvement” model of management. Good enough is no longer good enough. Being in the top one quarter of the cattle producers by any of the accepted measures of best practices in the industry may still be necessary to show a return for the investment one has.
To say that having successors on the ranch which has in part been their inheritance is to say that legacy is expressed by next generations building upon the foundation (management knowledge and motivation) that they have acquired from the passing of previous generations. I look back on what my grandfather and grandmother did, then their offspring and now the great grandchildren of those generations.
No one accomplished everything that was in their dream.
As I look out my office window on the second floor of the log house that replaces two other generations of log cabins and houses, I see a log yard and the roof of the sawmill that feeds the timberframe construction business. That business itself overlooks the store my dad built at the 150 Mile where I was brought up and where my grandfather died still ranching. I see the small log barn whose roof the last big snowfall caved in.
When built the roofing of that structure was first aluminum printer plates from the Efteen, then replaced with used corrugated steel which had a few holes in it that were inadequately filled, thus allowing water to rot the superstructure below.
Now as I recall the real first roof was a winter’s supply of hay placed on top of the walls and loft floor. Haying overtook the barn construction and one of the pioneering manuals put out the idea of temporary roofing with hay. Stacking hay itself so it sheds rain and snow is no mean feat for beginning homesteaders.
Then there was the day again from my same office desk I saw a black bear run across the field to where the sawmill workers were bucking logs. By the time I got out there to warn them the bear was long gone. What self respecting bear would attack a person with a chainsaw in hand, blaring its two-cycle engine.
Too, I see a small field that we inherited from the previous homesteader one hundred years before us. It grows substantially the same crop as it did back then as war vets were settling the land. And this was long before any recognition that there was no legal accommodation with the decedents of the indigenous” caretakers” as they are now recognized by the Supreme Courts of this country Canada.
And we pick the same species of saskatoons, high bush cranberries, fiddleheads and much more.
And I can see the modest orchard that provides apples and applesauce, sour cherries and failed plum and pear trees.
My vision blurs a little looking at it all, but the dominant spectacle is that of generations unfurling their leaves and growing into trees of life, all of it as it should be, adapting and inventing new ways of doing things seeking the trust and approval of us.
