I felt it welling up inside me: disgust and anger. And yet it was glorious!
Arizona is having a February heat wave, as if being ungawdly hot for 9 months a year isn't good enough. And I was working outdoors, during the heat of the day, on rebuilding my wooden leveling ramps. I tried to work in the shadow of my van, but the verticality of the sun in late February was making that difficult.
"Glorious" in the first paragraph was not meant to be theatrical or facetious. This is ranch country in southeastern Arizona, and it has become quite the little tourist trap, commemorating its glorious cowboy past. But how do you experience the reality of ranching in 1890? By looking at pretty sunsets? By researching the area on the internet? By going on a ranger-led hike?
Hell no, it ain't about prettiness, although there is quite a bit of beauty here:
It is about soil and grass and grazing cattle or horses. I still don't understand how they dug wells in those days. Water only flows in the arroyos three days per year. Maybe it was easier to build dams for small ponds.
I have heard about John Ford and John Wayne's movie, "The Searchers" for awhile, and finally had a chance to watch it on Tubitv.com. The reviews raved about what a classic it was and what great cinematography it had.
Nonsense! It had typical (and ridiculous) John Ford postcards from Monument Valley. The characters were supposed to be a ranch family. But look at the land: red buttes, red sand, and with one blade of grass per acre. How would you graze cattle on utterly useless land like that?
The land my video shows is what ranch country can look like. And believe it or not, Hollywood movies are starting to film westerns on realer land. Consider "Dances with Wolves," or the movies shot in the far northwest of the Great Plains, aka northern Alberta, right up against the Rockies. ("Open Range", "Unforgiven", and probably others.)
Gone are the days that a western will show a snow-capped mountain in the background, while claiming to be Dodge City, Kansas. Or claiming to be "Medicine Bow, WY" or "Virginia City, NV", while showing Joshua Trees or saguaro cactuses in the background. It's about time!
I thought about such things while finishing my project. It helped me to make peace with the utterly hateful Arizona heat and sun.
Comments
We have been camping on a former ranch with cows still grazing on the land. We woke up one morning with one grazing right outside the window. I was able to see that yes, they eat the dried grass stems. Unlike the dairy cows eating green grass of Tillamook County where I was raised.