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| A jumble of memories |
Uncle Bob was not my uncle. He was my dad's cousin, but the closest thing to family we had. He also was not a
cowboy, but if you saw his slow, bow-legged saunter, his cowboy hat, his blue jeans and western snap-fasten shirts, that's what you might think. You wouldn't know by looking that he was the canniest dry-land farmer in the
Great Plains of Eastern Colorado. He was born and raised in the part of Colorado without
mountain peaks and
rich soil. His landscape was wide and flat and dry.
Dirt roads with
thistle in the ditches marked the edges of native
grassland pasture and
wheat fields. Uncle Bob had a deep understanding of the land he farmed, never succumbing to "
the grass is greener" mentality of irrigation. He was a dry-land farmer whose
harvest depended on the land and the weather. There were good years with enough moisture, and plenty of years with
dust devils and
tumbleweeds before the rain came...or didn't come. In the summer, many a
cumulonimbus cloud appeared on the horizon, only to take its rain elsewhere, but perhaps also its hail. A winter
blizzard was a mixed blessing of wind that carried topsoil away and brought moisture that did or didn't cover the fields to nourish the winter wheat. Uncle Bob secured his success by collaborating with the land and the climate, but he allied with another of the vast natural resources of Eastern Colorado for his final venture -- harvesting the wind with graceful lines of enormous turbines.
In my mind, it is night. I stand in the dusty yard where I played as a child,
rusty tractors along the fence, the
Milky Way a bright smear across the impossibly dark sky. Uncle Bob is in it all -- land, sky, and wind.
