A Good Day's Work (26 page)

In a copse of trees near the road she slows down to point out a pair of white-tailed deer. They freeze for a minute, then bound away as others join them. By the time the last one disappears I've counted twenty-seven. I realize that could be more than the total of all the deer I've glimpsed in the wild in my lifetime.

WEST Place, which Marj owns herself, is twenty miles off. The occasional gas well—ugly, black and often fenced off—breaks the ice-frosted grassy plain. Ranchers only own the surface rights of the land; what's underneath is the possession of the province of Alberta, which auctions off the mineral rights. Gas wells are a real pain in the ass if something goes wrong, Marj says. Most of the time, the ranchers are happy for the royalty the well operator pays them.

Once your eyes get accustomed you can tell that it wasn't always so empty around here. Some of the old homesteads—the ones abandoned when their owners gave up hope, were starved out or went broke back in the early thirties—are just a remnant of a wall, a foundation or a corral now. In others, abandoned more recently, it's like a set for
The Walking Dead
: skeletons of old trucks in the yard, pigeons flying in and out through broken windows. Some people just couldn't take the isolation, the economic uncertainty. They blew their brains out with dope or booze or their guns. Or, in most cases, one day they just left.

When she and Greg moved into the area thirty-two years ago, it wasn't exactly Yonge and Bloor in Toronto. They had neighbours. But a lot of them were getting up there, wanted to retire and had no kids interested in the farming or ranching life. Or they had financial issues that forced them to sell out and try something else. All told, forty families who used to live on or around her land have packed up and vamoosed since she arrived. “Leonard and Martha Faupel sold to us and another neighbour to retire in 1989,” she says, running through the list. “Clarence Heggen wanted to retire 1988. Ed Housch retired sometime in the late eighties. Hector Lloyd moved on to other
things in 2002 or 2003. Eric Walper moved on to other things 2000. Wayne Faupel moved to another area to farm in 1996.”

It's about 3 p.m. The sky is darkening and the temperature dropping as we make a little detour. There's nothing remotely derelict about the Senkiw Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It's white, small and wooden, with a gabled roof topped by a small cupola bearing a mounted cross. The windows are glassed in, the small cemetery next to it neat and orderly. Senkiw is the surname of lots of settlers from the western Ukraine who settled in Alberta and Manitoba. Someone somewhere still looks after the church, which I'm guessing still holds services when a Ukrainian cleric makes his way to these parts. Also well maintained is the graveyard next door, where I imagine a lot of those Senkiws are buried, which adds a mournful quality of the scene.

When Marj and Greg bought West Place from old Leonard Faupel in 1989, it was about a third of the size it is now. It was also mostly a wheat farm. “I knew what I knew best,” she says, “and it wasn't farming.” Now the prairie grass from the seed they planted feeds two hundred cow-calf pairs year-round. The ranch is gently rolling prairie with some bluffs of poplar and willow trees. Marj shows me coulees and one heck of a dam, which we look at for a minute before hustling back to the truck.

We zig and zag. Eventually we hit a long stretch of straight road on which something moving approaches from the other direction. It turns out to be a friend of Marj's named Sue who is clad in a snowsuit. Her husband, John, is away hauling in hay for the winter, so Sue is heading to a friend's place for dinner. She's on foot even though the friend, whose place we passed, lives some five miles away by my reckoning. We chat for
a moment. Then she picks up where she left off, long strides chewing up the road, a singular figure heading cheerfully into the open prairie.

Back at the Home Place, Marj shows me the inside of the barn, which is patrolled by eight comical border collie puppies that slip and slide on the upstairs loft floor like it's a sheet of ice. When she and Murray hold their spring bull sale, the proceedings take place here, where the guests look at videos of the bulls penned outside. At other times, an old-style country and western band sets up in the loft. Friends, neighbours and family two-step into the night.

Tradition, like history, matters to Marj. From the walls of the loft, it's obvious that she's proud of her people, how they've carried on and what they've done. In a place of honour hangs a 2009 poster celebrating “100 years of ranching in the Special Areas by the family of Hugh and Evelyn Nester.” There are old black-and-white pictures of the Home Place as it was in 1954, long before Marj owned it; of her dad hauling loose hay in 1949 with a four-horse hitch. Over there is Hugh Nester's homestead,
circa
1912, before he married Evelyn. (A cousin of Marj's still owns and operates the original property.)

I come upon a more recent, colour photo of Marj's people: her mom and dad with Marj and Murray, along with daughter Janet and son-in-law Steven. The couple have a farm in Gleichen, Alberta, where they maintain a feedlot for fattening calves for market, run 250 cow-calf pairs and grow barley, canola and hay. Steven's dad is dead. His mom lives nearby on her own land. Janet and Steven also own some grassland that attaches to Marj's West Place. The couple consequently farm and ranch in conjunction with their family on both sides.

Also in the photo are Janet and Steven's two boys, the apples of their grandmother's eye. Tate is eight. He sounds like a chip off the old block: roping and riding in kid rodeos, riding along with Marj as she works, asking the same type of questions she used to ask her daddy. Wyatt, two years younger, is quieter and takes a bit of a back seat to his older brother. He's more interested in a ranch's machinery and building things than the livestock. But Marj can see the pair of them with her and Murray's land when they are done. “Family traditions run deep,” she says, “and there is a lot of pride in keeping those alive.”

Youngsters like that are getting rarer and rarer in this day when most Canadian kids think that milk comes from a carton in a store. Canuck boys and girls don't put chin in hands, peer at the cereal bowl and reflect that the Cap'n Crunch wouldn't be there if not for some Saskatchewan grain farmer working his ass off in the blazing sun. Just as their parents probably don't remember that some time ago among their people existed someone growing something on a country farm.

Marj understands that people don't necessarily want to live close to the land anymore; she really does. “Young couples today—and I see it with my daughter and her family, who want to go to the show, want to take the kids to hockey games every week—they don't want to put the time in,” she says. “They work hard. But I don't think most people have the dedication and the drive to stick to it to get through the rough spots and ride it out.”

She's at the table in the ranch house kitchen. The kettle is on. Marj, by her own admission, is cash poor but asset rich: they don't have hundreds of thousands in the bank. But they
do have a lot of land that has soared in value in the thirty-two years they've owned it. In 1982 they paid fifty-five dollars an acre for the leased grassland and two hundred dollars an acre for the cultivated farmland. Now the leased grassland would easily go for three hundred dollars an acre and the cultivated farmland four-fifty to five hundred dollars an acre. There are areas, in fact, where those prices would qualify as a bargain.

Which goes a long way to explaining why young people no longer dream of getting themselves a ranch. “It isn't fiscally responsible for a young couple to borrow the kind of money they would have to borrow to buy an outfit that they could make a living off of and raise their family on. They will never on God's green earth pay the debt off.”

She goes on, “You really have to want to do it. There's ups and downs, but you'd better figure twenty years. That's the reality. The best work years of your life—that's what it is going to take to come out the other end and be sitting where I'm sitting.”

Marj, on the other hand, never really wanted anything else. She had a dream. It's not a dream that speaks to new starts. Or, even in the early years of the twenty-first century, a dazzling future. Her dream was simple: to have a family. To honour her lineage as an Alberta cattle rancher—and follow the forward-ho example set by her parents and grandparents. To rise every day and ride out into this hard, beautiful land. To endure.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

LIFE OF A SALESMAN

Y
EARS
ago, long before his hair turned a lavish silver and he peered pensively over reading glasses perched on the bridge of his pug nose, Steve Forbes took a Saturday job at Noel Kerr's men's and ladies' clothing store in downtown Ottawa. “I was just fifteen, which is a little young to be working the floor selling shirts, ties and the like,” he says. “I guess I did like talking.” It was 1969. Man walked on the moon; countries waged war in Southeast Asia; terrorists bombed stock exchanges. Kids everywhere were riled up—marching on governments, rioting in the halls of universities. Yet you wouldn't know that the world was aflame standing inside Noel Kerr's place.