A Good Day's Work

by John Demont

  Pierre rummages around in a pile of metal for a piece of flat bar. The one he chooses is eight feet long and five-sixteenths of an inch thick. When it’s hot enough, he nods to Dominique, who has been patiently watching, his hand absentmindedly on the handle of the cross peen beam sledgehammer by his side. It is nearly 4 p.m. They are ready to forge the iron. Pierre smacks the metal with his ball peen hammer. Dominique smacks it with his sledge. Then they’re off, Pierre leading the way, Dominique following a beat later.

  Usually the blacksmith’s helper is supposed to strike the iron in the middle. When Pierre wants that to change, he indicates where the sledge blows are to fall by touching the spot with his hand hammer. If Pierre gives the anvil quick, light blows, it is a signal for Dominique to strike quicker by putting more of his lanky body behind each blow. When Pierre wants him to pound harder, he hits the metal with more force with his ball peen hammer. If he wants Dominique to strike more softly, he lowers the intensity of his own blows. As they proceed, Pierre sometimes uses verbal cues—“Yep, yep, yep” or “Go, go, go” or “Harder, harder, harder”—to get the desired effect. When Pierre places the head of his hammer on the anvil, Dominique strikes the metal one last time.

  They scarf the end of the handle and the edge of the T-shaped piece. They pound them down so that they make a clean weld. Pierre takes a wire brush to the metal to scrape away the scales and then adds borax, a white flux that prevents oxidization, to the two pieces of metal about to be bound. The metal goes back in the coals. The two pieces are placed on the anvil, one over the other, scarf upon scarf, forming an orange cross. They start hammering the metal in the centre of the weld, pushing everything out to the edges. On and on they pound. They pound the metal until the molecules are so full of energy that they jump from one piece of metal to the other. Only then does Pierre lay his hammer down.

  While the handle reheats, Pierre pokes around in the shop some more. He returns with a punch. He pops a trio of holes in the T-shaped handle end and pushes a homemade rivet—three-sixteenths of an inch long with a mushroom cap head—into each hole. Once the rivets are in place he picks up a half-pound ball peen hammer and pounds the rivets down. When they’re flush, he hits each head four times with the hammer to make a diamond shape.

  Dominique lets out a “whoo-hoo.” They mumble some words in French that I can’t quite catch. But I get the drift. It is the spring of 2010. And yet here stand these two, in this time where everything is written in sand and immortality is a tune by Pearl Jam. Pierre and Dominique had to know that there was nothing really at stake today other than doing something well for its own sake. For them that’s enough. So I gaze at this scene—the gloom, smoke and sparks, the elemental tools, the happy men doing work that hasn’t changed in essence since the Iron Age—and try to commit it to memory. They make things to last at a time when everything is obliterated by the click of a mouse and the next thing to roll off the assembly line. The least I can do is bear witness. While someone still can.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  READING THE GRASS

  ONE November morning I got up and got in my rental car in Hanna, the Alberta town closest to Marj Venot’s place. I exited the parking lot where the young guys leave their bull-barred, rocker-panelled pickups running while they have a couple of pops in the bar by the motel. I drove past their parents’ homes: a generation or two back the original Scots, German-Russians and Americans who settled the area. Beyond a new fire hall, a prosperous seniors residence, ball fields sponsored by the Kinsmen and tennis courts covered in early winter snow I discovered Hanna just stops. Then the horizon opens in a way that makes a city boy from a place where everything is crabbed together take a series of deep breaths.

  I lived in Calgary for a couple of years in the late eighties, when the province was in one of those oil-price-related slumps that would pass for prosperity most anywhere else in this country. We hit the highway to Banff and Lake Louise. We went to barbecues in the foothills of the Rockies. Once we drove as far as the Badlands—about forty-five minutes from Hanna—to see a place where dinosaurs had roamed. I’m not sure why, but we never made it to the short-grass country. So I’m quite unprepared for the roll of the flatlands, the scale of the sky, the tapering highway that just goes and goes. I drove up the night before, in fog as thick as I’ve encountered on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. Now it has burned off, leaving a savannah so stunningly empty that it makes me scan the vista for a tree or animal so I could get my bearings.

  When we spoke over the phone, Marj told me to watch out for the stop sign or I’d miss the road to her place. She might have been just screwing with the city boy. Heading east along Solon Road, there’s only one stop sign. It can be seen from a couple of miles away. I flip my blinker on for the right turn. I realized, the moment I did so, that this was stupid: over the ten-mile stretch to Veno Ranches I see a total of three man-made structures. I don’t pass one car. I don’t see a single human being. Marj’s property sits on the uppermost edge of Alberta’s Special Areas, a five-million-acre extension of the Great Plains grasslands that run from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains. It is land that, in Marj’s words, “has not had man messing with it.” Last time someone bothered to count, five thousand people lived in the Special Areas, which works out to one person per thousand acres of land.

  The cow-per-acre ratio on her land is much higher. The woman who owns them does not give them names like Minnie, Dollie or Bessie. Marj, who when I arrive is shooing away Duke, her oldest herd dog, doesn’t need to. In her mind she says, “There’s the one with the short tail” or “Here comes the scared one” or “There goes the rust-coloured one.” A few of the bulls, it is true, have nicknames like “Hustler” and “Grid Iron.” A lot of the cattle can only be told apart by the number on the ear tag: 249, 5440, 47 and so on. Often she refers to them, respectfully, as the “old girls”—although, if need be, she will call them anything necessary to get them to move along.

  It helps that cattle don’t roam far, even on lands as expansive as these are. Marj and her husband, Murray McArthur, have 19.5 sections of land between the two of them. A section is 640 acres. So their trio of ranches contains 12,480 acres of Alberta ranch land. On it they raise three hundred purebred Angus cows for “seed stock” and another three hundred head of commercial Angus cattle for beef. “More than the average,” Marj says of her ranch, “but there’re ones that are bigger.” Particularly these days, when so many ranchers want out and those who stay have to grow to survive. Even so, it’s big enough that Murray is off today in the Cessna 150 two-seater airplane they bought to better keep an eye on their land and herd.

  Marj, who talks in miles rather than kilometres, is old school. When the weather is nice, she gets on her saddle horse at first light. Then she and Duke just ride out into the land. Many days when she returns home after a day of mending fences, checking her herd and making sure the deer hunters haven’t left her gates open, it will be dark. Usually she won’t have seen a single human being since departing in the morning. She does not necessarily see this as a problem.

  Marj is fifty-six the day I arrive. A squarely built woman with a no-fuss haircut. Neither her temperament nor her appearance suggests a humanity-hating hermit. She brings to mind Bob Dylan’s line to an interviewer about being “Exclusive, maybe, but not reclusive.” Marj’s green eyes are level behind wire-rimmed glasses. But her face—undamaged by the elements despite all those days outside—erupts when she laughs, which is often, and a little surprising. For Marj has seen her share of troubles. She has had moments that have made her wonder if there is anything resembling fairness on this old earth. She has stood there with no place to go but forward. Then she has put one foot squarely in front of the other until she is as I find her here today: a woman who has made her way in a man’s world, a third-generation Alberta rancher at a time when a host of difficulties—mad cow, the Canadian dollar, surging feed prices and the developed world’s desire to eat less
beef—are making cattle ranchers an endangered species.

  That she doesn’t make too big a deal of everything she’s had to bear could be because that’s just not done in a place whose story, on the Town of Hanna website, begins this way:

  History is not a term which affixes itself easily to community life which is so much a part of each one of us. In Hanna, and other small communities, we are familiar with the events, the families and the culture which is an intimate part of everyday living. Nevertheless, 85 years of relentless effort under every form of adversity … drought, hail, blizzards, floods, rust, smut, poverty … qualifies as history.

  Her people’s story fits the mould. It really begins in 1909, when her grandfather Hugh Nester took his blacksmith’s forge from an Ontario village called Tara to an Alberta hamlet named Bassano, where there were horses to be shod and land for a man with ambition in his heart. “He built a shack and broke ten acres” is how Marj puts it. “He did what he had to do and married the girl from across the road.”

  She was a Holcomb from North Dakota. Evelyn Holcomb’s people may have seen one of the posters advertising “The Last Best West” or “the flour barrel of the world,” a country offering “homes for millions” and “free land.” They may have even sat gape-mouthed in some prairie hall or auditorium listening to an agent hired by the Canadian government—hell-bent on populating the West now that wheat sales were booming and a bout of railway building was underway—who was paid a commission for every man woman and child he persuaded to settle in western Canada.

  The great arc of history had pretty much emptied out the place where the Holcombs ended up: by the 1890s, buffalo hunters had killed off the large herds of bison that had once roamed southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Starving and marginalized, the Bloods, Cree and Siksikas limped onto reserves. As the North West Mounted Police marched west, ranchers—many of them from the United States, where the frontier had been closed off—moved into the prairies and foothills. For a while a powerful compact of ranchers kept the homesteaders at bay. But, desirous of open settlement, Ottawa had its mind made up. The winter of 1906–07 helped things along: those same ranchers saw at least half of their herds starve to death in the bitter cold. The ranchers went bankrupt, or they just up and left. In 1908 Ottawa amended the Dominion Lands Act, giving a quarter section of free land to newly arriving immigrants, opening twenty-eight million acres in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta.

  Though many homesteaders, like Hugh Nester, came from eastern Canada, the government pitchmen really wanted immigrants from Europe and the United Kingdom. Clifford Sifton, the Canadian minister of the interior, saw midwestern American farmers as the perfect recruits: they knew how to farm the prairie soil. Mostly they spoke the same language and shared the same values as their counterparts in western Canada. They were also desperate: the good American land was gone. In 1890 the American West was officially closed. Though the numbers were unreliable, between 1896 and 1910, it is estimated that close to six hundred thousand Americans poured into the Canadian West in search of cheap land.

  “Grandma’s people ended up in a dry, arid place called the Palliser Triangle,” Marj tells me. We’re in her living room, looking at old photos of her predecessors. The frontier where they landed was so called because a British aristocrat named John Palliser had passed through there in 1857–58 and declared the area “desert, or semi-desert in character, which can never be expected to become occupied by settlers.” Other later visitors felt much the same way. Colonel G.A. French, who led the North West Mounted Police’s great trek west in 1874, noted he had expected, for some reason, to encounter a “luxuriant pasture, according to most accounts, a veritable Garden of Eden.” Instead, he found “for at least sixty to seventy miles in each direction … little better than a desert, not a tree to be seen anywhere, ground parched and poor.”

  It rarely rained there. The thin topsoil compounded the problems. The winds out of the Rockies came “soughing across the land, howling through the fences and telegraph lines, aligning small coulees,” in the words of historian David Jones, “lifting the typical thin brown regional soils and piling vast sand dunes.” In the Badlands around present-day Drumheller the winds cleaved away all vegetation and carved out strange formations called “hoodoos.” Everywhere, Jones wrote, the blowing was all-powerful. “It was as if King Aeolus, ruler of the winds, had hatched a foul plot high in the Rockies and had set the west wind and the south wind, those normally gentle and compliant breezes, against each other in a struggle of influence and dominion.”

  Newcomers like the Nesters and Holcombs, knowing nothing about this, came anyway. Idyllic images of free land and bountiful harvests danced in their heads. “Southern Alberta,” gushed a writer for the Canada West magazine, was “a land blessed of the Gods—a land over which bending nature never smiles and into whose cradle she emptied her golden horn.” Before the influx, southeastern Alberta was home to around nine thousand residents. Within ten years, the region’s settler population increased eightfold. Almost all of them lived on new farms where wheat was the principal crop.

  EVELYN Nester was about Marj’s height, five foot two. Back in Carrington, North Dakota, she played the piano for silent movies and in a dance band. Life in a prairie farm town would have prepared her for the drought that hit the Prairies soon after her marriage. But perhaps not for the successive years of rainlessness and crop failure that followed right through the 1930s.

  Yet they hung in. They endured, even as their lands became the prairie dust bowl of history and the very symbol of the Dirty Thirties. Even when Evelyn, in Marj’s words, discovered that Hugh was “quite dead one morning” in 1933. Picture, if you would, her predicament: in midst of the Great Depression, living on a prairie farm that, after a decade of drought and every other kind of misfortune, must have seemed godforsaken. Did I forget to mention that she had seven children ranging in age from twelve years to eighteen months?

  Marj’s dad and aunts and uncles would tell how Evelyn played the piano at country dances for a few dollars, then ride home alone on horseback or in a buggy across the empty Alberta landscape to face her brood and more hard work. They mentioned how her fingers bled from playing so long and always being so cold. And how, while Marj’s dad and his older brother looked after the livestock, she sold homemade butter and bread to neighbouring bachelors to scratch out a living for the household.

  “They talked about her sense of humour,” recalls Marj, “her ability to make a meal out of most anything that was available and her determination to keep them all in school as long as possible so they could make something of themselves.” Evelyn Nester died old before her time, when a brain tumour took her at age fifty-three. Marj wasn’t born until six years later, so her memories of her grandma are second-hand. But, she says, “I’ve often thought of her and what she endured with seven kids, no running water or indoor plumbing, no vehicle or any of the other modern conveniences that we have now.”

  Marj thought about her grandma a lot after her first husband, Greg Veno, died in 1991 following a long, spirit-sapping fight with cancer. The parallels were cruel: Marj owed the bank half a million dollars. She had 2,500 acres of cultivated land to work and a herd of two hundred commercial cows to raise. She was a single mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter, left to her own designs in a land where life, even at the best of times, has never been easy. “I was angry,” Marj says in that matter-of-fact way that you feel she might use to report a global apocalypse. “But I knew that I could get it done because she had before me. I owed that to my daughter, her dad, myself and my family before me. Then I just put my head down and went to work.”

  ALMOST noon now, and Marj is in her Yukon, one of seven trucks I count. They, along with the various tractors, skidders and trailers, make up the vehicular fleet of Veno Ranches and McArthur Livestock. The vehicles are stored in a big metal Quonset hut in the farmyard. I discover there’s a whole world out there. Off to the right, big metal granaries hold pellets of cattl
e feed. To the rear, half-ton bales of hay that don’t last as long as you’d think in a place where each cow eats thirty pounds per day for feed. Farther yonder, a corral made out of discarded Alberta Energy poles, a cattle scale for weighing livestock and chutes for loading the cows into trucks and trailers.

  The latter is next to the red barn that was here when she and Greg bought the place. Built in 1918, the structure was the handiwork of the ranch’s original homesteader, Gottlieb Knopp. When the old fella and his wife died, the ranch went to a daughter, who married badly—a drinker and poker player who let the place run down. They eventually sold it to a rancher named Jack Jager, who let things slide even more, until he sold it to Marj and Greg in 1980. “The place was a rundown mess,” says Marj, “but with lots of enthusiasm and hard work we cleaned it up and built new buildings and corrals and fences when we could afford them.” Marj, Greg and her dad straightened the barn themselves. Now the barn loft’s floor is plumb enough for their annual square dance and cattle auction. When they were done with the barn renovation, a neighbour said that old Knopp would sure be proud of it, as he was a proud, hard-working man.

  In short-grass country endurance and fortitude are treated with a reverence akin to an ability to profitably flip a condo among city folks. Calling someone hard-working—along with saying they are honest and have integrity, which matters in a place where deals are still done on a handshake—is the highest praise you can have for a person. Being a survivor is something to feel good about too. The number of cattle farms in Alberta shrank from eighty thousand in 1941 to under twenty-nine thousand in 2006. Farms are getting bigger. But farmers are getting older—Alberta had 16,660 farmers under the age of thirty-five in 1991 versus 6,290 by 2006. It’s harder to get out of the business when land prices are so high and there’s less and less appetite among the young for the kind of labour that cattle ranching requires.