Sky Ranch

by Bobbi Phelps

  Copyright © 2020 by Barbara Phelps Chapman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Paul Qualcom and Bob Ballard.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-5107-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-5109-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedicated to

  Georgina and Don Wolverton

  Nancy and Doug Strand

  Without them I could not have survived the rigors of rural life, the challenges and confrontations of Sky Ranch.

  They brought love and happiness to me when I felt as if I couldn’t go on.

  They were my rocks.

  My champions.

  Table of Contents

  Disclaimer

  Foreword

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Meeting Cowboy Mike

  Chapter 2: Introduction to Sky Ranch

  Chapter 3: Cattle Ranching

  Chapter 4: Fly Fishing Honeymoon

  Chapter 5: Making Meals

  Chapter 6: Industrial Farming

  Chapter 7: The Hound Pound

  Chapter 8: Florida Parents at Sky Ranch

  Chapter 9: Duck Hunting

  Chapter 10: Ground Blizzard

  Chapter 11: Pregnancy and Birth

  Chapter 12: Angler’s Calendar Company

  Chapter 13: Failing Brakes

  Chapter 14: Coyotes

  Chapter 15: Spring Floods

  Chapter 16: Mormons

  Chapter 17: Tent Caterpillars and Bathtub Living

  Chapter 18: Airplane Travel

  Chapter 19: Losing Our Toddler

  Chapter 20: My Horse Smoky

  Chapter 21: Grasshopper Infestation and Hay Fires

  Chapter 22: Halloween Snowstorm

  Chapter 23: Smoky in a Blizzard

  Chapter 24: A Guest from Pennsylvania

  Chapter 25: Young Matt Lost during Harvest

  Chapter 26: Bart, the Gardener

  Chapter 27: Kindergarten Party

  Chapter 28: Winter, Spring, and Summer Sports

  Chapter 29: Polly the Pig

  Chapter 30: Hailstorm

  Chapter 31: The Little Farm in the Canyon

  Chapter 32: Fly Fishing Henry’s Lake

  Chapter 33: Twin Falls County Fair

  Chapter 34: Boating, Camping, and Fishing

  Chapter 35: Harvest Time

  Chapter 36: Christmas and New Year’s Activities

  Chapter 37: Deaths All Around

  Chapter 38: Selling Sky Ranch

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Maps

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Disclaimer

  Sky Ranch reflects the recollections of my Idaho ranch experiences between 1980 and 1996: the adventures in a time before camera phones, GPS technology, and social media.

  The conversations written on the following pages have been recreated to evoke the substance of what was said. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Sky Ranch is the fictional name for the Wolverton’s family ranch: Golden Valley Land and Cattle Company.

  While all the incidents described in this book are true to the best of my memory, certain events have been compressed, consolidated, or rearranged to aid in the narrative flow. Sky Ranch is not intended to be an exact duplication but an effective representation of a city girl’s time at a remote ranch in Idaho.

  —Bobbi Phelps

  Foreword

  Sky Ranch by Bobbi Phelps is a series of kindly, authentic, and sensitive profiles of finding herself on a remote Southern Idaho ranch, in love with the cowboy-owner she later marries. As is said, “all is not sweetness and light.”

  If you’re not from the West and not familiar with this part of the country, it might be tempting to see ranch life through an idyllic hazy glow of romanticism and fantasy. Phelps brings us to the place as it really was, and as it remains today.

  This is a woman who—before her time in Idaho—had never ridden in a pickup truck, watched an animal die, touched (only once) an electric cattle fence, survived a howling ground blizzard, duck hunted, or bore and raised a son whom she and her husband nearly lost in a later farm incident.

  Brought up in a tony suburb in Connecticut, Phelps graduated from UC Berkeley and had an early career in the airline industry. Phelps then took a job as an advertising sales representative for Southern Idaho’s area newspaper in 1980. She was in her late thirties, but as the rookie, she was handed sales accounts no one else wanted, including a rendering plant that processed dead animals. (Yep, they advertised.) She was indeed a spunky woman, learning to live in and love Western ranch life.

  Phelps writes with a fine eye for detail, place, and remembrance. She’s particularly good at describing the people around her, miles away on gravel roads yet the closest neighbors. Her accounts are tight and brisk with the clipped definitive of Western common speech. Although she’s no longer in Idaho, Phelps has retained our dialect and phrasing in both her memory and in the vignettes of Sky Ranch.

  This is no fictionalized account, nor is it an exact memoir. Sky Ranch is populated with real people whom Phelps names and quotes. Though she says some conversations are reconstructed, they have the cadence and pace of overheard and yet remembered incidents.

  As the Rockies were settled, there were many accounts, some written years later, of the challenges faced by those early pioneers. It’s a genre of Western writing which has somewhat gone out of style but shouldn’t have. Phelps’s form is conversational and seemingly a bit wistful, as if she is relating how fortunate she was to have been there at that moment. Sky Ranch conveys a crisp late summer evening with a languid harvest moon and the golden wheat and barley shimmering in the gathering dark.

  Her remembrances of ranch life are in and of the region. They’ll remind readers of the genre of Western literature of Lonesome Dove, O Pioneers!, Little House on the Prairie, and English Creek. These are all set in a past time, but the Rocky Mountain life is still extant in regions like Southern Idaho’s windswept high plains and among the hardy, resilient people who live there. Phelps’s challenges seem no less real.

  Sky Ranch puts Phelps clearly in two groups of Western life: those who have lived it, and those who have told its story well.

  —Rep. Stephen Hartgen, ret.

  Idaho House of Representatives

  Preface

  All I could see in any direction was sagebrush and prairie grass. In the far distance rose the mountains surrounding Golden Valley, a large section of South Central Idaho. It was August 1980. Somewhere on the endless expanse, Sky Ranch spread over the rough grassland, four thousand acres zigzagging across six by ten miles, almost the size of my hometown in the Northeast. Although I had traveled the globe as a flight attendant, this was a world I had never experienced. In my late thirties, I enjoyed life to its fullest. I gained information abo
ut farm and ranch life from a good-looking cowboy, a man who later became my husband.

  Raised near New York City, my life appeared typical of those living in American suburbs. But it was not. My life was only typical of many of us living on Connecticut’s “gold” coast, a land of movie stars and business executives. My mother stayed home and enjoyed the trappings of a successful husband. She played tennis and bridge, became president of our town’s garden association, and chaired my school’s annual fair. My father worked in New York City’s real estate industry, belonged to the University Club in Manhattan, volunteered at the local fire department, and was a charter member of the Darien Country Club. He lived the classic, corporate lifestyle.

  Before I started kindergarten, my mother enrolled me in piano, horseback riding, and gymnastics. During summers, my family vacationed on Cape Cod where we swam in the warm Atlantic Ocean and collected colorful shells on white sandy beaches. My sisters and I attended camp in New Hampshire, beach parties on Long Island Sound, and debutante galas at elaborate homes throughout Fairfield County.

  I was lucky to have two wildly different but loving parents. My father kept me somewhat grounded and my mother encouraged me to be curious, to challenge, and to explore. I identified more with my exuberant mother, oscillating between elation and fear. In my early twenties, my feelings of fear dissipated. I became an international flight attendant, taking troops in and out of Vietnam during the height of the war.

  After completing six years in the airline industry, I retired and married my college sweetheart. Using previously purchased airline passes we traveled the world for eighteen months, camping and fishing. He was a writer for Fly Fisherman Magazine and I illustrated his articles with my photographs. When we returned to the States I began selling my fishing photographs to sport magazines. They were well received and I started the Angler’s Calendar Company in 1975, the first fly-fishing calendar on the American market.

  Following a divorce and my marriage to Mike Wolverton, an Idaho rancher, I discovered what it was like to live in rural America. New adventures awaited me as my life turned upside down. The contrast between my suburban background and my farming future created amazing differences, both challenging and rewarding. I observed and learned, ready to change just like the seasons. But I was a stranger in this incredibly strange land. There were no native trees, just prairie grass and sagebrush; no oceans, just mighty rivers; and no rain to speak of, only powerful winds and violent snowstorms. My Connecticut family lived two thousand miles to the east, and my ranch neighbors lived far away—down dirt roads that often became impassable from winter storms or spring runoffs. I felt like an interloper on a giant learning curve, facing each challenge with reckless innocence.

  Chapter One

  Meeting Cowboy Mike

  “Are the boxes packed? Is there space for more?” I asked Alanna, my assistant at the Angler’s Calendar Company.

  “We’re jammed full. Just enough room for Ronni and her suitcase.”

  “Here she is,” I said as she parked next to my yellow Mini Cooper, a tiny station wagon with bucket seats in front and a bench seat behind.

  “Good timing, Ronni. We’re packed and ready to go. There’s a small spot for you in the back.”

  She came closer, bent over, and peered in the car’s window. Straightening, she brushed her blond bangs from her face and asked, “Where? There’s no room.”

  “Sure, there is. Right behind Alanna. Not to worry,” I said as I opened the passenger door and pushed the front seat forward. Ronni, one of my best friends from our airline days, wedged herself between cardboard boxes that had been crammed to the roof and squeezed into the available space. Alanna took the seat in front and I walked around to the driver’s door.

  Once we hit the road, driving from Berkeley, California, through the Sierra foothills to Wells, Nevada, we began to talk. The first leg of the journey to Jackson, Wyoming, took eight hours, and we told story after story. Ronni and I mesmerized Alanna with tales of our working as stewardesses between the Orient and Europe. She told us about growing up in Chicago.

  When we woke the next day, the sun had announced itself in a bright blue sky. We continued on our way to Jackson, just south of Grand Teton National Park. I had contracted a booth at the annual fly-fishing event and would be marketing my calendars to individual attendees and fly-fishing corporations. On the first day of the show, a good-looking man approached my booth. I immediately noticed his muscular build, blond hair, and blue eyes. He was a tall, striking figure in his Western-cut corduroy jacket and cowboy boots. As president of the Rocky Mountain Council for Fly Fishers International, Mike Wolverton wanted to buy calendars for fundraising favors. While showing him the latest edition of the Angler’s Calendar, we talked about our love of the outdoors, especially camping and fly fishing. I told him of photographing and backpacking in New Zealand, Africa, and the British Isles. He stared at me in surprise and simmering heat flushed my face. I turned from his penetrating eyes, wondering why I had reacted like that.

  “Why don’t you and the girls join me fishing tomorrow? I’ll be with Ernie Schwiebert. You’ll get some great photos.”

  “We have the morning off. Sounds like fun, but I’ll check with them first.” My co-workers agreed to join me while I photographed the two fly fishers on a trout stream beneath the majestic Teton Mountains. Two days later, we returned to California. Another successful selling event was now behind us. We began packing calendar orders and shipping boxes the very next day.

  Chapter Two

  Introduction to Sky Ranch

  “Where’re we going?” I asked.

  “I want to show you the ranch,” Mike said over the phone.

  When I moved to Idaho the year after the Wyoming convention, my friendship with Mike Wolverton continued. I first managed Henry’s Lake Lodge, near Yellowstone National Park, and then settled in Twin Falls and began working for the Times News, a local newspaper. Before long we started dating. On one of our first get-togethers, Mike asked me to meet him at the Murtaugh Cafe on Highway 30.

  As I drove to the building, I saw Mike leaning against the passenger door of a blue pickup, his tight jeans embracing long legs, a rodeo belt buckle glistening in the sun. His boots, an off-white snap shirt, and a beige cowboy hat completed the look. He had an athlete’s build, physically impressive from lifting heavy fertilizer bags and bales of hay. I parked beside his vehicle and walked to face him.

  “It’s a beautiful day. You’ll enjoy the ride,” Mike commented as he circled his arm around my shoulder.

  He steered me toward his pickup and looked at the sky. Cumulus clouds meandered high beneath the blazing sun and cast moving shadows across the landscape. Mike drew deeply on a cigarette, its tip glowing before he flicked the butt to the ground. He crushed the cigarette with the toe of his boot and then opened the truck’s door. I had never been inside a pickup. My high school and college friends only had cars, station wagons, or VW buses. No one had pickups, or trucks of any kind. This was another “first” for me.

  Sitting next to Mike on the drive to Sky Ranch, I felt a warmth wash over me. How special he was as we traveled into a new setting—one that was so different from anything I had ever experienced. Mike pointed to a vast valley, a flat expanse of land rising to meet the massive sky. Hence, the ranch’s name. He explained that besides owning a few hundred cattle, which roamed the corners of three states (Idaho, Nevada, and Utah), the ranch consisted of industrial, row-crop farming. The Wolverton family farm raised potatoes, its number one cash crop, along with wheat, barley, peas, beans, and alfalfa.

  On our way east along Highway 30, I remarked about the difference between these farm lands and the tree-laden countryside of Connecticut. We passed cultivated fields, desolate prairies, and several farmhouses, but almost no trees, except those planted near houses or as pasture windbreaks. Tall silos, stationed near weathered barns, reminded me of New England lighthouses. Before long, I saw snow-covered mountains in the distance, far t
o the north.

  “What’s that?” I asked as I pointed my finger toward the horizon.

  “Those are the Sawtooth Mountains. About eighty miles from here.”

  “Wow! We can see eighty miles,” I exclaimed. “The air is so clear, no smog or haze.”

  “That’s until harvest. Then the sky is covered with dust.”

  “Look at that,” I exclaimed as I pointed to a nearby house. “The lawn is covered with water. Their pipes must have broken.”

  “No,” Mike said. “They’re flood irrigating. They opened a ditch and diverted the water over their lawn. Once it’s flooded, they’ll close the ditch. Very few places around here have lawn sprinklers.”

  “So, they flood their lawns and then wait a week or so to flood them again?”

  “Yup. It’s pretty easy to do and is much less expensive than sprinklers.”

  About fifteen miles past Murtaugh, we stopped at the ranch headquarters, a large, vinyl-sided building at the junction of four dirt roads. Inside, he showed me three maintenance bays, each large enough to handle the enormous grain and bean harvesters, known as combines. He pointed to one bay the ranch used specifically for painting vehicles. His employees accomplished this never-ending chore during the slow months after harvest and before spring planting. From there we sauntered into a rectangular office, a modest room with two grease-stained, swivel chairs and two small oak desks in the middle of the room, six feet apart, each with a black telephone resting on top. A cord curled from a rotary-dial phone to a plug in the wall. In the 1980s, only landlines existed. The office looked relatively sparse as Mike and his brother, Don, handled most farm business from their individual homes.

  A storeroom on the side of the maintenance area amassed an assortment of parts. Row after row of cubby holes filled the walls. Each cavity held a variety of nails, screws, bolts, wires, tubing, and pipes in all sizes and shapes. On a pegboard hung countless tools and electrical instruments. Because the ranch existed so far from town, it had to be as self-sufficient as possible. Employees needed to repair items quickly and not spend three hours driving to and from Twin Falls, dropping off and then waiting to collect restored machinery.