MotherPie

Bringing Cattle to Market Long Ago...

The stockyards, dominated by Armour &  Company, were a fixture of cities that shipped meat back east, starting in the 1800s in Fort Worth, Texas.  Armour & Company in Fort Worth, began operating in 1903. Cattle in the 1800s were herded up the Chisolm Trail, through Indian Territory, to places like Dodge City, Kansas, where the railroad had reached.  This photo is from 1913 Fort Worth and the stockyards are still existing there.  Once Oklahoma City was formed, after the Land Run in 1907, Armour and Company established an outlet there.  

Now, if you go to the stockyards in each of those cities, Fort Worth has remained rooted in the past and still has a vital area thriving around The Stockyards, even though Armour abandoned the area long ago. Oklahoma City, on the other hand, has let its area dwindle down to nothing, focusing their self image on new areas of development along the Canadian River, plans which Fort Worth is also doing along the Trinity River.

My grandfather grew up on the upside - the better neighbhorhood -- upwind from the stench and when he finished college in the early Depression years, he went to work at Armour & Company.  When he married my grandmother, the announcement in her hometown newspaper had the headline "Local Girl Weds Employed Man". 

Such were the jobs and the industry out west, then, when cows were raised in a healthy manner before they started the route to market.

Cowboy Bush: A Proud Texan...

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram gave a huge front page splash for the story of Bush going home (to Texas) with his head held high.  He swaggers back, enveloped in his own idea of frontier diplomacy, the law of the six shooter.

The man, whose style caused the term *cowboy diplomacy* to be coined, will return to a state that would like to see the cowboy restored to the historic place of honor that it held in these parts from the days of the Western Frontier until...oh, say about eight years ago.

In July 2008 Texas Monthly's cover story by Elmer Kelton, True Grit, Kelton wrote:

There was a time when the word “cowboy” evoked respect, even envy. In ranching circles it was an honorable label that had to be earned. One proved himself worthy of it through character, deed, and skill. Many a wannabe ranch hand—like me—never acquired it. Yet regrettably, in recent times “cowboy” has come to denote rashness, a shoot-from-the-hip readiness to use force without regard to consequences—in short, a total reversal of the word’s original and true meaning.

...‘Cowboy’ no longer refers to a specific person or line of work but a style or way of doing things… The real cowboy has somehow been lost in all the reckless rhetoric that uses his name in vain. It may be too late to save his reputation from the sneers of the pundits and politicians, but let us at least try to present some of the truth about who he is and what he does.”

All Texans revere the historic cowboy of western mythology that exists even to the present day - the hard-working range-rider who saddles up with integrity. The rest of the world now holds a different view of what cowboys are all about.  Barack Obama stampeded into Bush's old stomping grounds, roping in 57% of the vote in Dallas County - a county that has not voted for a democratic president since 1964). Bush is now off his high horse of political office and any day will leave his Crawford ranch and settle into his new Dallas home in the Preston Hollow neighbhorhood, where he had lived 14 years ago before he became governor of Texas.

This week I'm observing real cowboys (not lost in the reckless rhetoric) at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.

Update: Well, the dudes at Davos are calling for an end to cowboy capitalism: "The chairman of Lloyds of London, Lord Peter Levene, (the company has avoided trouble) called for banks to be boring again. “Boring is good,” quoth Lord Levene. The message to cowboy capitalists was clear, and it resounds in Davos: your free-ranging days are over"

Blue Sky Rain...

This is one of the reasons I love living in New Mexico.   I had to completely stop and bear witness to this storm.  Isn't this just gorgeous.  This might be my favorite photo, ever, of all my years with photography.  What a moment.

I should enter it in a contest, offer it for professional publication, commercialize it, sell it.  But what am I doing?  Putting it out there and letting it loose in the world. For free.  Click. It's out of my control.  Some of the best things in life are free.  I give you my no-cost experience.  If you use this, please link back.

For a room with no views I put together a digital slide show of my western landscapes from Colorado and New Mexico.  I used iPhoto and iMovie on my mac and it plays on a tv screen like a digital photo frame.  It gives my room views.  Stunning views: The West is (so) within the room.  Next to make: digital art (think MOMA and MET art - Renoirs and such). 

Michael Hearne, a New Mexico musician/songwriter, won awards for his song, New Mexico Rain. 

Where the Buffalo (don't but the Elk do) Roam...

Elk roam these parts and it will cost you about $12,000 to go on a guided elk hunt on private land in New Mexico.  The Rocky Mountain elk have  gone from about zero in the state in 1930 to more than 90,000 and it costs about $90 for a license to hunt elk. 

The early settlers and soldiers killed off the native elk and that breed which was original to New Mexico has been extinct for many years (hence the implantation of the Rocky Mountain elk).  New Mexico elk herds are managed by the game department.  My husband will be going on his first elk hunt, which he landed by submitting his name to a lottery on the Valle Caldera.  (update - by getting his name pulled in the lottery, he only has to pay for the cost of his $90 hunting license. Taxidermy?  I've no clue on that cost but eating elk would cut the grocery budget).

My cousin's husband was trying to hunt a bear on his property, with a license to kill, in Colorado, back when I visited in September. 

Elk meat is very healthy.  We may be eating it for a long, long time.  Cougars are next up for stricter management.

I don't hunt.  I guess I might have an elk head hanging on one of my walls sometime in the future.

Wind Farming & Smart Gutsy Guys...

Smart guys? I'm crazy for them. Driving through the Texas Panhandle from Oklahoma City home to Santa Fe this spring, I started to lose count, in the land of windmills, of the new wind turbines that have popped up everywhere in the Great Plains. Everytime I've made this drive, which has been a lot the last couple of years, the number keeps growing. In my uncle's oil business office in the Panhandle, I took a photo of the Dust Storm in Spearman, left, hanging on the office wall.  I happened to have just finished reading The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, a National Book Award Winner, about the Great American Dust Bowl.  It was a farming method that caused the crisis then, and the area's topsoil blew as far away as WDC and NYC, blackening the cities before attention was given to the policies of land management.  That was wind power and farming, then.  Now it is the price of gas and oil that is making the crisis we're all feeling in our pocketbooks.

In the Texas panhandle, just north of Sweetwater, is the town of Pampa, not too far from my uncle's town, where smart guy T. Boone Pickens' Mesa Power is currently building the largest wind farm in the world on 400,0o0 acres.  When completed, it will double the wind energy output of the U.S.   Mesa Power is buying leases up in America's heartland for wind farming.

I thought my dad was a smart guy for not going into the family (oil) business.  Today with the price of oil nearing $150/bbl, he'll tell you he's smart for buying Oklahoma City-headquartered Chesapeake Energy stock when it was low, low, low.  It was my stock in Phillips 66 that gave me a tiny cushion I invested wisely long, long ago.  Ah. Oil and smart guys.

The rising cost of oil and gas might might awaken us from our slumber. Wind farming in the Panhandle and the Great Plains is the next big thing and Pickens is embarking on a plan to save our nation via windfarming. In rolling out his plan, Pickens has been extremely media-savvy, embracing new media and social networking techniques to create buzz. Check out his Pickens Plan site. Pickens plans to spend $58 million on a multi-media campaign to raise awareness of the country's energy troubles and his plan for fixing them.

The Pickens Plan, outlined in the L.A. Times, could cut US oil imports by as much as 38% if we shift to natural gas as a transportation fuel (and thereby save our country by not sending dollars to other countries to purchase oil) and increase our reliance on wind power.  Natural gas is our country's second largest energy resource -- 98% of the natural gas used in the US is from North America, but 70% of our oil is purchased from foreign companies and peak oil was reached in 2005.  Domestic natural gas reserves are twice that of petroleum.  Using natural gas for transportation (currently only 1% of natural gas is used for transportation) would be less expensive than gas or diesel. Pickens is one smart guy.

One of the smartest gutsiest guys around?  JPMorgan Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, at left.  He was interviewed by Charlie Rose last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.  Part One is a must-watch, even though it is long.  Part Two is short.  Watch it for a good lesson in business leadership.  If I send you one important link you must see, this is it.  A man without hubris.

Another smart guy now gone: Dr. Michael DeBakey, who died this weekend at age 99 in Houston (where I am this week, gimping around in my boot cast),  credited much of his surgical success to his mother, Raheeja, for teaching him to sew, crochet and knit. I'm asking my mom if he operated on my granddad quite a number of years ago.  I think he did.

Marrying a smart guy was an important thing to me.  I did and I'm glad. 

windfarm photo

Windmill & Sky...

Water is an issue in the west.  Here's an image from one of my summer drives, coming back through the Nambe Indian rez.  Our NYC friend had a sample of the soul surrounded by beautiful landscapes.

Big Sky, Big Vistas...

There is something about the wide open spaces of The West that is defining in ways that Easterners or others would never know.  This is what I see, not just once-in-a-while, but on a regular basis. 

The sense of self, when overwhelmed and made miniscule in places where nature, not man, is the artist of the surrounds, is open to an awe and a spiritual connection on a regular basis.

I'm in the middle of The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich, a gift from a recent girlfriend who came from NYC out to Santa Fe for a visit.  The emptiness of the West is an idea of possibilities. 

As They Say in Texas: Oil is King...

Maybe people other places are suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous economies, but in some places it is all about the oil (over $121/barrel), or natural gas. Pronounced by old-timers like my dad and uncle, who grew up in the business: awl and gas.

Fort Worth, Texas, part of the D/FW Metroplex, our nation's fourth-largest metro area, is a new boom town, sitting on top of the Barnett Shale natural gas field. 

The current issue of Fortune has this by editor-at-large Peter Elkind, a  native of Fort Worth:

"Once-struggling oilmen and big landowners are suddenly flush with gas money, while thousands of average homeowners are now collecting modest monthly royalty checks. According to an industry-funded study, an estimated 84,000 jobs have been created throughout the region by the drilling boom. "It's created a new wealth in our city," declares Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief. "It's inoculated our economy. We find ourselves being an island in a sea of recession around us."

Houston was booming.  Dallas is flush and growing.  Oklahoma City is like a boom town all over again, Borger, Texas has new motels to accommodate the business coming in to refine all the sandy shale oil being drilled in Canada and Fort Worth is raking it in in royalties with cranes and developments going up all over the place.

Heavenly Landscapes...

The snow is melting but the Valles Caldera still has a look of winter.  Some landscapes in New Mexico seem to have same look, no matter what the season, like this ultra red landscape, at right.   These are two views that are over the mountains -- on the other side -- of the vista I see everyday.

Some - and I'm one - think that God is seen in nature.  So in many respects I find holiness surrounds me more here than it ever did in Manhattan.

Pottery, Art & Beauty...

This Indian pot displayed at the Aztec Ruins in N.W. New Mexico has a most lovely design and the fact that pottery was such an art form, culturally, among the New Mexico area indians for ulitarian purposes is notable.

I could write more about how the past designs influence the present design, or how creating art for the everyday is a way to live, or how cultures expressed themselves through design...

But I won't.  I'll just leave this image and others on my Flickr Aztec Ruins set.