Chores take longer in snow, mud, and cold.

It is difficult to manage gates, keys, hydraulic levers, buckets, lead ropes, and latigos while wearing insulated gloves. Heavy boots and deep footing provide resistance leading to later aches. Diesel motors don’t readily start until the block heater has been plugged in for several hours. Tires lose traction. Items dropped fall too deeply to be recovered.

But we adapt.

As Dad and I prepared for cattle chute work one frigid day years ago, he asked me to step on the scale for a calibration. He was dismayed to see 172 on the readout. At that time, I weighed 125 in normal clothes. I said, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m wearing two pairs of long johns, oversized jeans, two pairs of wool socks, insulated chore boots, six shirts, a hooded sweatshirt, a heavy coat, a wild rag, a fleece scarf, a thick stocking cap, my insulated coveralls, and your old insulated coveralls. The scale is probably accurate.” Before we commenced the work that day, he placed a space heater in the bottom of a fifty-gallon drum and a grate over the open top to create a way to keep my hands, pen, and syringes from freezing.

One of the reasons I moved to Western Kansas was weather. Most people who have experienced two straight days of seventy mile per hour winds on the wide open High Plains would scoff, but the drier climate means less mud and fewer days between rain and fieldwork. Fewer days of rain also leads to the need for 8-10 acres per cow-calf unit instead of 1.5 where I grew up in Southwest Iowa, but I’ll take it. In the drier climate, sweat provides a method for self-cooling. In Iowa, sweating is merely a recreational activity.

As I write, we have just emerged from a two-week cold snap during which temperatures dropped to double negative digits (Fahrenheit) at night and ascended to near-zero during the day. Maintaining water sources was the greatest challenge. The pump pit at Headquarters froze sufficiently to disable the system. Before the barn pit could follow suit, we put heaters in both. Fortunately, the bulk of the cattle herd and horse remuda had access open water by means of a spring-fed pond. However, we had to daily run water for the herd bulls and one breeding remuda and carry water for dogs, cats, and chickens. Though the weather meant additional work for us, our electricity remained functional which wasn’t the case in much of the country. We are fortunate.

Instead of viewing the hardships of ranching in a negative light, I use the experiences to add flavor to my stories. When I re-read a section of any of my novels, I may be transported back to the day I helped build fence up the side of the cliff or artificially inseminated heifers when it was a hundred four degrees or walked a mile and a half to do chores because I couldn’t drive through six-foot drifts on the road or winced when I had to reach into the icy waterer to adjust the float or limped for days after being run over by a post-partum cow.

Every day is an adventure. And every adventure is seed for another story.