#The Bunchgrass Edge of the World | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

maggieavatartitan · 5 years ago

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Annie Proulx short collection of stories, Close Range.

The Bunchgrass Edge of the World.

𝒪𝓉𝓉𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑒

Video inspo.

A run-down, abandoned tractor starts talking to Ottaline Touhey, a lonely Wyoming rancher’s daughter. She has started to fix it up when she meets and marries the cattle buyer’s son, and her father, landing a small plane in his field, catches the plane’s wheel on the tractor’s iron frame and is killed. The ranch was started by Ottaline’s grandfather, old Red, who raised first sheep then cattle. When his youngest child, Aladdin, came back from Vietnam, where he flew defoliating planes, he married Wauneta Hipsag and took over the ranch. Their younger daughter and son move to Las Vegas, and Ottaline, with reddish-pink hair, crystal-crack blue eyes, and the physique of a propane tank, helps her father on the ranch. When the work slacks off, there’s nothing to do but stare at the hard landscape and listen to cell-phone conversations on the scanner. Ottaline is walking around the defunct gravel quarry where her father drags worn-out equipment when she hears a hoarse, whispered voice coming from the John Deere 4030: “Sweetheart, lady-girl.”She suspects she is crazy, then that someone is making fun of her, but returns to the quarry several times. The tractor complains about its condition, and the way it’s been treated. Ottaline’s father, the tractor said, had once poured warm beer in its master-brake-cylinder reservoir, ruining it. “If your daddy was a get up here today I would hurt him for what he done a my brake system.” It says that people often fall in love with tractors. Ottaline tells her father that she wants to fix up the John Deere, but before they can dismantle the motor, Aladdin gets sick. He asks Ottaline to meet the cattle buyer in his place. After Ottaline has shown him the cattle and Flyby has offered a fair price, he says, “You are a knowledgeable girl, and a damn good-lookin one, though upholstered. Care for a beer?” Ottaline and Flyby marry, and move into the ranch house. Aladdin is landing his 1948 Aeronca Sedan in his pasture when the left wheel catches the iron frame of the abandoned tractor and the plane crashes, breaking Aladdin’s neck. Old Red, watching from the porch, knows everything that will happen next: They’d plant Aladdin. Ottaline and her husband would run the ranch. Wauneta would pack her suitcase and steer for the slot machines. He intended to move out of the pantry and back upstairs. The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough you’d get to sit down.

#AnnieProulx #Ranch #The Bunchgrass Edge of the World #Close Range #sfs #90s #videoedit #Brokeback Mountain #envy #family #edits #aesthetic #characteraesthetic

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pyjamac · 3 years ago

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school survey asking for suggestions for required texts & i immediately forget every story i’ve ever read

#shah mac #wrote the bunchgrass at the edge of the world bc i think bardians need to read more stuff like that

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fatehbaz · 4 years ago

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Each year [...], the grouse announce the end of the frigid high desert winters through the males’ springtime courtship dancing on their “lek” breeding grounds. They loudly pop air sacks out from their snowy-white chest feathers and spread their elaborate tail fans [...]. “That’s where we learned to dance,” said Perry Chocktoot, the culture and heritage director for the Klamath Tribes, the local federally recognized nation made up of the Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin band of the Norther Paiute Indians. [...]

It’s everywhere [...]. Grass between the lava rocks. Grass between the knee-high sagebrush clumps. Little shards of crispy grass stick in your socks after just a few steps. This grass doesn’t belong here. It’s invasive, brought to North America decades ago and scattered across the landscape by livestock and machinery. [...] Now, a remarkable high desert bird, the sage grouse, is at risk of disappearing forever from this rocky wildlife sanctuary — and elsewhere across the West — because of the unrelenting spread of this [...] grass.

All it takes is a spark to ignite catastrophe.

In the summer of 2019, a motorist’s tire blowout started a fire miles away from the Clear Lake National Wildlife Refuge on a Modoc County highway. The fire roared unnaturally fast and hot through the invasive grass, burning the last remaining nesting area for the sage grouse in this part of far Northern California. The next spring, Chelsea Sink, an Oregon State University graduate student who studies the birds, walked through the charred skeletons of the sagebrush that these birds rely on for every stage of their lifecycle.

“In the moment, I was like ‘It’s over,’” she said. [...] Most of the sagebrush that burned still hasn’t grown back. [...]

A few years ago, biologists counted only six [...] grouse dancing here on “The U” at Clear Lake, a 5,500-acre of rock and sagebrush surrounded by a 20,000-acre reservoir.

The U is the only known sage grouse breeding ground left of the 56 leks that were once spread across hundreds of square miles in Modoc and Siskiyou counties, the sage grouse’s western-most habitat in North America.

As recently as 1970, there were close to 14,000 grouse in this portion of Modoc County alone. Less than 1,900 remain statewide. [...]

Clear Lake was once the marshy headwaters of the Lost River, a 60-mile “closed basin” stream that snaked from the mountains of Modoc County through Klamath County, Ore. to Tule Lake in California where it dead-ended. Early during the last century, the federal government built the dam that forms Clear Lake as part of the Klamath Project to irrigate farms. Clear Lake was designated a National Wildlife Refuge in 1911, but during World War II, the military commandeered the area to practice strafing attacks and bombing raids.

The local grouse, known as the Devil’s Garden population, managed to survive in this bombed, dammed and grazed landscape.

The altering of grouse habitats from 150 years of development and agriculture is undoubtedly contributing to the declines. But the most pressing threat stems from [...] that sea of yellow grass choking The U.

The grasses, which infest 100 million acres across the West, have dramatically altered the sagebrush ecosystem. They suck up what little moisture that falls, degrade the Great Basin soil, and choke out the native perennial bunchgrasses. All that crispy fuel in the dry months causes fires to explode with an intensity that’s far more destructive than the fires that burned through the sagebrush from time to time for centuries after the last ice age. The [invasive] grasses were a mix of three types of “annuals,” meaning they germinate from seeds each spring: Medusahead, cheatgrass and Ventenata dubia. Medusahead and cheatgrass, native to Asia and Europe, began showing up in North America in the 1800s. Ventenata, native to Africa, western Asia and southern Europe, arrived as recently as the 1950s. [...]

Much of their efforts in Modoc County have revolved around removing thousands of junipers, the evergreen trees that are common on the edges of high deserts. Juniper trees have over the past few decades increasingly encroached into America’s sagebrush steppes, including at Clear Lake. They compete with other vegetation like sagebrush for water. They also provide ready perches for keen-eyed predatory birds like ravens to be able to scout for an easy meal of sage grouse eggs and hatchlings.

Scientists say the juniper encroachment is due primarily to a century of fire suppression in Western forests. The policy of trying to quickly extinguish every wildfire to protect timber stocks, rather than allowing fires to burn naturally, is a big reason why so many destructive fires have burned in California over the past few years. Before settlers arrives and brought with them invasive grasses, the low-intensity fires that periodically swept through the forests kept the juniper in check. For decades, the federal government’s fire suppression policies allowed junipers to grow without limits. [...]

“It’s a microcosm of what’s going on in the West,” [...]. Invasive grasses and fires aren’t the only threat to the grouse. Development, overgrown forests and a warming climate have collided with bureaucratic vapor-lock, litigation and a political fight over livestock grazing and fossil fuels extraction in the West. [...]

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Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Ryan Sabalow. “A remarkable high-desert bird may go extinct in California. What must die to save it.” The Sacramento Bee. 30 December 2020.

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mcbex · 2 years ago

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**4 am thoughts**

Coming across Arizona on I40, there is a junction with AZ route 17. Taking this highway you'll drive south toward the truest American southwest. At some point on this highway everything changes. The landscape transforms from beautiful pine forests to desert puffs of bunchgrass and sand. I've been up and down this road several times often trying to spy the fluctuation point in the scenery, or the temperature differences that would make the landscape transform. Mathematically it has to be there. But realistically I will never find it.

With this in mind, I woke up this morning thinking about my goals and my needs. Wide awake at 4am the thought has beset me through the day. At what point do we thrive at the thing we've been working so hard on? When we pray and ask and reach for all the things God has for us, how do we know when we've acquired success? It's not always obvious. Sometimes I think maybe I should want for something else. Maybe then I would see the impact I am looking for. But that is someone else purpose, isn't it.

I think the truth of this is that we don't ever just arrive. That Arizonian landscape if the road is followed would soon change to Central America then to South America and so on around the globe taking many junctures. Ever changing. Always becoming what the planet needs, when and where it is needed. I think we humans are very much the same. Always filling the requisite of the world around us.

So many times I have felt immovable. I've been lacking what feels like the action I want to take. Or worse getting inverse results I feel I so critically deserve. But what if I only take 1 step toward my goal? That amount is easy to achieve, isn't it? What if in just the motion toward my hopes is all that it takes to start the journey that leads to the biggest chain reaction of all? I guarantee those mountains move, those goal are met and the impenetrable objective is achieved, by 1 step.

I don't think we ever just arrive at the end of the journey. If we did I have a feeling it would be anti-climatic in someway. No, I think the joy is in the constant push toward something. The rigorous need for a life well lived can only come from tackling the obstacles along the journey. The journey where we cannot see the edges of change until the change has passed and then we can look back and see, what wasn't always there is now a beautiful life.

Proverbs 16:3 Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.

Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.

#godthoughts

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