When Baseball Reigned

“We all had baseball teams. We played each other at our schools and had home games and away games.” Neighbor Jim Martiny was telling me about when he grew up on his family ranch in May, Idaho. He’s in his 70s now and is 4th generation in Idaho’s remote Pahsimeroi Valley. His great-grandfather was among a handful of the first white settlers of this mountain-surrounded valley.

“There were three schools in the Valley; one was here in May, another was up in Patterson and there was one more in Goldburg,” Jim said. 

I was dumfounded, but I knew Jim was telling me the truth, because right across the table from me was Robert Whittier, now a PhD geologist living in Hawaii. He was visiting our Pahsimeroi Valley for a few days on vacation and had joined us at the May Firehall for a meeting to discuss historical river flows in the valley. Robert (Bob) had grown up here, and Jim and he had played on opposing ball teams in grade school.

Bob attended the Goldburg school. 

The reason I was a little speechless is because the entire town of Goldburg is gone. It’s not a “ghost town,” by the definition of such. Where the town of Goldburg once stood, there is a blank slate of featureless sagebrush. Nothing.  

“I could show you the foundation of the schoolhouse. I’m pretty sure you can still see it,” Bob told me. 

None of those schools, or even towns, as they were, exist today. There still is a Patterson school, but it has stood empty for several years. The town is gone. The scattering of buildings and a few homes called May still exists, but the store, cafés, filling station, school and post office are no more. There’s still the Grange Hall (daughter Abby puts on community dances there) and the firehouse. The log church is still there but stands unused and empty.

You probably are thinking what I’m thinking. Where did all the people go? The fact of the matter is that the 40-mile length of the Pahsimeroi Valley had a lot more human inhabitants as recently as the 1950s than it does now. Now, there’s only about 300 people here. Then, numbers certainly varied seasonally, but there were often more than 2,000.

Are there less ranches or farms in the Pahsimeroi than then? There are certainly fewer individual owners of ranches, but the land in agriculture has generally remained the same. And there weren’t and aren’t subdivisions in the valley. 

One of Alderspring’s long-term cowhands, Webb, is leaving the ranch today for another cowboying job in California. It’s a new place for him, and he’ll learn new skills. The crew all got together in the bunkhouse to send him off last night. There were about 15 of us gathered to send him off. Several gals on the crew cooked everyone a nice dinner, and there was a beautiful chocolate cake and ice cream to enjoy for dessert. Cow dogs happily joined in on the festivities, and stories and laughter were shared by all. 

There were a lot of people. Some of them were former Alderspring hands who journeyed long distances by air and highway to join us for the fall gathering of cattle off the ranges. Many of them were returning for the second or even third time. 

Our seasonal range and ranch crew at times exceeded 20 people this season. Is it because Alderspring is a huge ranch? Absolutely not. Our scale is moderately sized for our country—it’s probably about average. 

So why all the people?

My friend, Ken Price, lives in an apartment above our beef fulfillment warehouse near Salmon, Idaho. He really helped me capture at least part of what I think the difference is. 

Scott, our longtime ranch-hand and point man on our North Ranch, near Tendoy, Idaho was in the fulfillment center unloading a fresh shipment of dry ice on Monday while Ken and I visited. Ken is about my age and was brought up on a ranch in Southern Idaho. He often remembers back to a time when he was a young buck on the ranch, handling draft teams to do some of the work on the place with his family. It was a different time; actual horsepower and human power got most of the work done.

As Scott was unloading ice, block by block by hand into a waiting dry ice holding cooler on our packing floor, Ken right away asked me why we don’t just buy a forklift to unload the pallet of dry ice from the truck to save all that time unloading 180 ten-pound blocks of dry ice by hand. 

It was a good question. Scott had to not only lift them out of a palletized cooler onto the bed of his truck but then had to jump down and handle the same blocks again to carry them over to our waiting floor cooler. It was quite a bit of work. Ironically, Scott built up a sweat handing dry ice that runs at a cool negative 109 degrees below zero.

As we watched Scott, I told him “It’s the same reason that we feed 1300 tons of hay (that is 2.6 million pounds) of hay by hand every winter. Each flake, stem, or blade of grass hay is fed by human hands to the waiting cowherd. It might be 20 degrees below zero when the crew feeds it, but they are out there, with the cows, feeding them their sustenance.” 

Ken got it, because as a youth, he was doing just that.

It was the same reason we ride horseback over 650 miles a year with our cattle with 3 or 4 people saddled up for the entire summer from a remote cow camp, or why we have humans string up well over 200 miles of temporary electric fence to put our beeves on the best grass, rather than feeding them in a feedlot. 

The reason is simple: husbandry is always human hands-on. Where we can have a human work on the ground with the cattle, or with a horse, or even do other work equally as efficiently as a machine, I’ll take the human every time. 

You might say that forklifts are more efficient and that Scott wasn’t working with animals. That’s valid, until I pencil what the amortization and depreciation of a forklift requires over time. We simply don’t need one enough to replace a human to unload ice an hour a week. So, I’d rather use Scott; it keeps him from the sedentary life, and the ranch even saves money. 

When we work with animals, feeding them, living with them, riding horseback with them, we always learn from them. Wearing a T shirt in a 200 horsepower John Deere tractor, warm cab, feeding hay with a hay unrolling or chopping machine when it is 30 below zero sounds nice; you can listen to your favorite podcast, too. But when I’m out there, on the ground with my animals in the cold, am I not more inclined to feed them in a circle to keep the wind off them? Or take them to a willowy windbreak to get them out of the cold?

I feel what they feel. I might hear that isolated wheezing or coughing calf out of 400 that may be suffering from a little early pneumonia infection. Or I can hear that calf bawling trying to look for their mother in whiteout conditions. 

Before the machine age really dawned, all those things I mention above simply happened as a matter of course. As late as the 1950s, there were few machines—tractors and the like—in the Pahsimeroi. Most of the work was done with human muscle, associated with horse and mules. It simply needed more people. 

Many more people.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against using equipment. We have some heavy equipment: a larger John Deere tractor, a backhoe and some haying equipment. We like technology, but not when it steals from an attitude of husbandry, or when human muscle actually saves us money. Sure, labor is a high cost, but equipment is sky high, and depreciation by rust is rapid. 

But I would argue that an even greater cost is in the younger generation that no longer knows the experience or value of physical labor for both man and beast and no longer understands that working closely with one’s animals is the true way to wellness and relationship with the land. 

Perhaps we can change that culture and bring people back to the land. After all, our ranch alone could have fielded at least one baseball team. One day, in my perfect world, baseball teams in our valley would once again challenge each other on the sandlot. 

Unlikely perhaps, but for us, this is right as we see it. It’s the way we believe the Maker of it all has asked us to practice agriculture. 

And for me, that makes all the difference. 

Happy Trails.

Glenn