Prime Cut
You know what is all kinds of good? Getting out of the city, buying a ranch, rolling around in a new Dodge Ram blasting Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country.” Oh yeah. That’s the kind of thing that just doesn’t feel as good sitting parked in traffic on the way to K street in DC. Some folks in my profession are pissed that they either have to move out to Grand Junction to keep lobbying the BLM or find ways to schedule regular flights and split their time. Or they would, anyway, except they’re doing everything over Zoom these days. Not me. I sold up in Bethesda and plowed some money into a couple thousand acres in Mesa County. My commute is shorter, my sky is bigger, and I can roll all around my new property however I see fit. So I’m not in the center of power anymore. Big deal. The steakhouses in Washington might have more power brokers per square foot, but the beef is better out here.
And it’s not like I had to settle for some falling apart, tin-roofed shack, either. The new place is pretty recent construction - two stories, plenty of square footage, jacuzzi out back. Smoking room with a pool table. Built-in gas grill on the patio. A kitchen sizable enough that I got a personal chef a couple days a week just to make good use of it. A movie theatre where I can run my own damn screenings of the latest Christopher Nolan film or whatever else. It’s a shame Disney pushed back Black Widow, because I’d love to get a hold of a screener and throw a life-sized Scarlett Johansson up on the wall. She’s hot. Not hot enough for me to watch that Jojo Rabbit bullshit, but hot.
Anyway, since nothing new is coming out to watch in my new theatre, I thought I’d take a break from re-watching some of the Duke’s finest and walk my property. Give the Dodge a rest, and take an afternoon on foot.
So I’m hiking around, boots crunching on this sandy gravel, picking my way through some overgrown and dried out grass (which I should probably get a fire crew up here to thin out and burn), and I head up this gully. It looks like a seasonal creek, but there’s nothing running at this point. It’s right at the end of summer, heading into the fall, and it’s plenty dry. I know from the property map that this gully cuts into some foothills, but I want to check out the grade. Really find out what I’m working with in case I get a few head of cattle and one of them heads in this direction. If it’s too steep or too narrow, I might need to fence it off to avoid some trouble further down the line.
Luckily, this thing seems pretty much flat. The hill it cuts into doesn’t have much of a slope, and by the time the vegetation gets too thick the walls are only a little over head high, maybe six and a half, seven feet up. I figure that it’s worth climbing up to get a different perspective on the whole thing and check out the terrain. I grab into the hard clay of the wall, pull on an exposed root, and swing my right arm over the top. It looks like there’s a tree stump or something up there, so I grab a hold of that.
