From the Pastures: Tornado clean-up

The Alaska trip was fun. I didn’t see any cows or sheep, but I could have gone to a musk ox farm and decided not to. Now two months later I read an article about how they “reintroduced” the musk ox to Alaska in 1930. Thirty-four musk ox calves from Greenland were shipped across the United States to Seattle by rail and then by ship up to Anchorage in south-central Alaska. Read about it because it’s interesting.

Anyway, I passed up my opportunity to see them. The lesson here is “don’t pass up opportunities no matter how weird they might seem.” And I thought it was a waste of my time to see musk ox.

Now the reason I didn’t write an article last month: We had a wee bit of a storm here in the Bloomington-Normal area in central Illinois. The tornado uprooted trees, broke trees in half and laid them across whole streets, pulled power lines off of houses, laid power lines and their poles onto the road, ruined many acres of corn and put tree branches into house roofs — just to name a few.

This happened Thursday, Aug. 13, and with the help of two strapping 30-year-old men and a very good wife, the four of us and two chainsaws had my part of this mess all cleaned up by Saturday, Aug. 15.

The town of Normal even had their maintenance crews out Sunday afternoon cleaning up the storm debris. That’s how bad it was. The streets were lined with trees, tree branches and flooded things from the basements. From the sidewalk to the curb was filled and in some places it spilled into the street. But we got ‘er done and cleaned up and the town is back to semi-Normal. That’s a joke.

I ended up with 7.5 inches of rain out of that storm, and by Sept. 3, three weeks later, I had cracks back in my ground. I could use a rain.

The lambs are weaned, their moms are a few miles away “landscaping” my neighbors’ farms and won’t be back to my ranch until November. Now I start stockpiling my grass for winter feeding because the lambs only get the succulent annual forage that won’t make it through the wintertime.

It will be cold pretty soon. Brrr.