It is a New Year. Already. The mountains outside my window don’t care much for time. I wonder when the revolution will come. Feels like it’s brewing. Like a landslide, clearing the brush, making new tracks, slopping off the weak. What an imagination I have! Armageddon is a story man wrote, which may be proof enough that man beckons it.

Rivers, left to their own devices, are levelers of the landscape; scouring the highlands and depositing alluvium, usually fertile, in the lowlands. The Rocky Mountains are hardly leveled after millions of years of river flow because sequences of uplifts have kept the highlands high. In between the uplifts, the rivers do their leveling and depositing of topsoil. Thus our valleys are lined with mesas along their sides, the oldest being the highest. Across from the Shale Bluffs are three benches: Starwood at the top, McLain Flats, and a lower bench used for the sewage sludge. The mesas of Woody Creek are roughly at the same elevation as McLain Flats.

I log onto the Internet and see that the stock market has crashed yet again, oil has hit $100 a barrel, and the next day, a black man has won the Iowa caucuses. What provisions has the global economy invented to prevent a complete meltdown? My advisor on such matters, my father, is not worried, and for a generally anxious man, this is calming. That America wants change is hopeful, he says, and, Citigroup will rebound by the end of the year.

Put a large mining camp in a remote mountain valley and it is a certainty that agriculture will follow on the closest level lands. The first thought might be food for miners, but no, that was largely imported by pack train. Timbers were needed for the mine tunnels and hay was needed for the burros. Clear the bottomlands and mesas of their trees, largely oak, and plant the fields to hay – a double crop.

My parents’ coupling has beaten all odds. They were never supposed to last six months, but because they were all each other had, they had to make it work. That my parents, siblings and I have faced our own devils together, reemerged still united, we are a camp, even when we each have tried to build our separate tents. They are surely a source of strength for me and my own family, and love Ruby as if Life is redeemed through her, but often my adhesion to them leaves my marriage unleveled. My husband cannot rely on his own family. They abandoned him as soon as he pushed them away; they are in competition with his successes, and distanced from his failures. My family has adopted him, my mother his staunchest defender, and yet, they are still my allies, what remains. It is the trouble with marrying into a family rather than to just a person, especially when the spouse wears a different uniform.

We know that many of the miners were northern Italian and Eastern European. Those that left the mines to take up agriculture left their names with the irrigation ditches which they built.⎯Bionaz, Cerise, Duroux, Trentaz, Vagneur; names still found in the phone book.

Mining collapsed with the demonetization of silver in 1892; the miners left, the farmers stayed with their recently cleared land and looked for a new market. It was a natural transition to continue growing hay and to feed it to cattle instead of burros. The rail line had been built⎯too late for silver shipments, but perfect for getting cattle to market.

And then, later today, my husband loses his newly acquired job. It was a risky venture, entering a mismanaged roofing business and charged with turning it around. In a month and a half, the owner, pressured by his office, realized that he could not afford to pay the significant salary and benefits he had promised JP. He also could not disrupt the comfortable dysfunction he had worked for years to ignore. For eight months, he had begged JP to work for him, since they met on the remodel of the health club at the Aspen Institute, and kept upping the ante until JP could no longer refuse.

During the Quiet Years, from the end of mining to the beginning of skiing, agriculture was the economic engine of the Valley. It evolved into what we call cow calf operations. During the summer the cow and her calf eat grass on the public lands⎯range⎯ for a below market pasture rent. The level and cleared lands are irrigated and grow hay. In the fall the pairs come down, the calves weaned and sent to market. The cows, now pregnant again, remain for winter, calve out in February and March, and eat the hay. By June the calves are big enough to accompany their moms back to the range. It’s pretty efficient, grazing all summer on public lands and feeding only pregnant cows during the winter.

It is time for JP to do his own thing. It’s all been leading up to this, and now it’s here, a couple of years earlier than I had projected.

Crop rotation becomes necessary. Alfalfa is a wonderful high protein hay, but needs to be reseeded roughly every eight years. The rotation became 6 to 8 years of alfalfa, 2 years of oats (Barley works too) as a cash crop, 1 year of potatoes, both cash and a root crop to loosen the soil for replanting to alfalfa, which likes a fine soil.

A new house. An unsold condo. Three mortgages. A small child. A pending recession. One automobile. Record snow falls. I couldn’t imagine any better conditions for starting a new business! Jesus.

Alfalfa likes 6 inches of water and our climate offers but 3 during the summer and 17 during the winter and stored as snow to be melted throughout the summer and keeping creeks filled enough to fill the irrigation ditches during the summer. The whole system makes some sense; uplifts leave level mesas and bottomland, melting snow provides irrigation water, summer pasture on public lands is a grand subsidy; trucks and trains moved the calves to their next stage of life, grazing in winter wheat crops, on their way to southern New Mexico and Arizona spring grasses, and then to the feedlot.

And so, within hours of ruminating on the division between spouse and the family I was born into, I am forced to find faith in my union, above any doubt my parents and siblings may have in JP’s talents. We are a team. What choice do I have? And there is talent there, tons of it, that has been waiting for its fertile crop. I am its rancher.

I spent 18 years or so in this business and it’s a good outdoor lifestyle and pretty entertaining trying to figure out how a baling machine can tie knots. The economics were about a couple of acres per cow for their winter hay and spring pasture, one calf per year per cow at a gross of 400 pounds times whatever the current price, now [in 2004] about $.60 per pound, minus the costs, and the net was a few tens of dollars per acre.

I’m at a crossroads in my life, and I’m not afraid. I feel stronger than ever before, more secure, with two feet on the ground. I know that George and this project have something to do with my emerging confidence. I also know now that the river has a place in keeping the highlands high and in depositing the topsoil. And that, in the Rocky Mountains, there are uplifts that protect us from a leveled landscape. Should a crop rotation be necessary, we can handle it.

Grow your own vegetables, do your own repairs, and it was a living, probably not much harder, or easier, than hard-rock mining.

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