Help Thy Neighbor - Andy Rieber—Home Page

Neighbors to the rescue!
88 | WORKING RANCH | APRIL / MAY 2012
t’s a late March morning in Adel, Oregon. The sharp chill in the air
makes our breath curl into jets of steam as we pack wood from the
gooseneck to the branding pot. Birds are diving and wheeling on
the fitful gusts of wind, chattering at each other in the pale sky.
Yesterday John O’Keeffe, owner of the O’Keeffe Ranch, sent a
crew to set up a trap in the corner of the pasture, so gratefully we
don’t have to mess with any panels this morning. I stand back a
ways as John douses the wood with some mysterious liquid from a dirty
unmarked bottle and tosses in a match. FOOMP! The pile ignites like a jet
engine. We gather around the roaring branding pot, a former air compressor with a cowboy weld makeover. Rubbing our numb hands together we make small talk, waiting.
Then we see them, creeping across the broad pasture; an armada of
pick-ups and gooseneck trailers. They look like a flotilla of whales as they
nose and wallow across the flat, gradually approaching, and coming to a
halt with a gentle squeaking of brakes outside the trap.
Doors open. Kids in broad-brimmed hats tumble out, some clutching
pint-sized catch ropes. Their parents follow after, bridle outfits hanging
over their arms.
Blue eyed, weathered, and quiet-spoken, Joe Cahill is a regular at these
O’Keeffe brandings. Joe’s wife Chandra maintains order as Rachel, their
freckle-faced daughter, scampers off to find her friends. Mary Barbara
and Kelly Woodworth from Coleman Valley are here, with kids Sissy and
Hammond. George and Robin Shine, also usual suspects, come wellmounted on excellent Shine Ranch horses. In all, over twenty friends and
neighbors will arrive to pitch in this morning and work.
After some handshakes and gossip are passed around, everyone jumps
their horses out and bridles up. Then John lines us out on how he wants
the pairs gathered.
Cowboys, neighbors and bigger kids mount up and string out in a
sweeping semi-circle that eases around the scattered cows and calves like
a great net, gradually driving them towards the trap. In ten minutes, the
whole bawling mob of pairs has been worked past the wings and into the
corner, where we leave them to settle awhile. There’s friendly visiting
among neighbors while the irons heat, calves mother up, vaccine guns
are filled, and pocketknives get a final honing on the steel. Then, when
everything looks like it’s ready to go, John gives the signal.
“Let’s brand ‘em.”
In about five hours, right around four hundred HOK calves have been
roped, branded, vaccinated, earmarked, castrated, and doctored if they
were scoury. The twenty-odd neighbors who showed up to accomplish
this Herculean task gave up the better part of a day’s work on their own
ranches to make it happen. The pay for their time and sweat? A chance
to rope, visit with friends, a hot lunch, and cold pop or beer off the back
of a beat-up flatbed.
Just about every cow-calf producer will be familiar with some version
of this performance. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big production or
just a couple of neighbors branding a handful. The calves may be headed and heeled, or they may get run through a chute. Method doesn’t
matter much. What matters is the common theme running through
these scenes like a vibrant golden thread. Like so much of the work in
this industry, these things get done because of a valued rural tradition
we call neighboring: that fading but time-honored art of cooperating
with the people who share our communities and partake in the common joys and miseries of ranching.
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The author titled this one ‘Ears ‘n Beers’ for obvious reasons.
A FRONTIER ETHIC
To an untrained eye, neighboring
may just seem like friends helping
friends. But there’s much more to it.
Though fun and friendship clearly
play a part, generosity, duty, even
necessity are what set real rural neighboring apart from the affable subur-
ban gesture of lending your weedwhacker to the guy next door. In its
purest sense, neighboring is the act of
collectively helping each other survive when it takes more than one person, or one family, to get a job done.
Nobody knows this better than
O’Keeffe. Without good neighbors,
Sharing the work is more than a survival tactic;
it’s the fiber that binds our communities together.
90 | WORKING RANCH | APRIL / MAY 2012
his calves wouldn’t get branded, at
least not without a ton of hired help.
So when Cahills or Shines or any of
the other Adel area ranchers put out
the word that they’re ready to brand,
O’Keeffe makes a point of being there
and bringing his crew.
In the early spring, O’Keeffe also
neighbors by being the “go to” guy in
Adel when a calf pull goes from bad to
ugly. Any time between February 1st
and mid April, he may get rousted by
a dead-of-night phone call asking him
to come out and help with a hard
pull. O’Keeffe always goes. The pay? A
cup of coffee, maybe breakfast, and
the unspoken promise that when he’s
in need of help, help will be there.
“It’s kind of a code in this community,” observes O’Keeffe, mirroring
the feelings of thousands of others in
the same boat. “We’re real fortunate
here that we have a core group of people that’ll help each other.”
Call it a code, if you like, or the glue
that holds a ranching community
together. Either way, most of these
family ranches depend on good
neighbors to tackle the big works, and
to handle some of the curve balls for-
tune inevitably pitches. Case in point:
when time is of the essence, there’s
nothing like a fresh pair of hands at 2
a.m. to get an ugly situation, and a
stuck calf, turned around.
“[Especially with] neighbors that
don’t have employees, it’s always been
important to me that they felt it was
okay to call any time of the day or
night,” O’Keeffe reflects. “And it’s a
reciprocal deal, ‘cause if I need help at
two in the morning, I gotta call somebody, too.”
NO ONE’S KEEPING SCORE
It is one of the beauties of American
ranching that everyone has a pocketful
of stories like this to tell. Jim
Connelley, who ranched for thirty-odd
years out of Mountain City, Nevada,
has a few good ones up his sleeve about
that close-knit community spirit.
In a particularly memorable incident, a neighbor had lost her husband
to a heart attack shortly before the
start of haying season. With no kids
on the place to help and short on
financial resources, the bereaved
neighbor had few options.
“She was in a bad position,” recalls
Connelley. In a classic act of neighboring, he and a few other ranchers got
together, pooled their haying equipment with what she had available, and
set about putting up hay on her outfit.
“We told her, ‘Just relax, and feed us
at noon,’ ” chuckles Connelley. The
widowed neighbor covered the cost of
fuel, but the time and labor were gratis.
“We did that for two years ‘til she got
the place sold,” he recalls with pride.
When I pointed out that there was
little chance of reciprocation if the
ranch was being sold anyway,
Connelley was philosophical.
“If you have a sense of community,
you help your neighbor and they help
you,” Connelley reflects. “The crop
had to be got off the field and put up
while it still had value. Nobody keeps
score. You just deal with the problems
as they come around.”
Connelley also recalled a time one
winter when a neighbor with whom
he’d had an irrigation dispute buried
the hatchet to bail him out.
“We weren’t real buddy-buddy,”
Connelley admits. “We differed on
things and just didn’t have a real
friendship.” But when word got
around that Connelley was so sick he
couldn’t get his cows fed, the neighbor came around for a visit.
“One morning he comes rumbling into the yard in his pick-up,
comes to the door and just says, ‘I
may not get ‘em fed right, but I’ll
get ‘em fed. Tell me what’s where,
and that’s all I need to know.’ ” The
neighbor and his hired man got the
cows fed until Connelley was back
on his feet. The irrigation squabble
was never mentioned.
These little neighboring gems
remind us that even though we may
have a load of reasons to be ticked-off
at the guy or gal over the fence, the
need to help each other survive in
this business/lifestyle puts all our
gripes in perspective. Maybe the
neighbor still hasn’t patched those
holes in the fence. Or maybe he
returned your tractor without filling
up the tank. But that same neighbor
may also be the one who lends you
their baler when the bearings on
yours go out. Or gets your cows fed
when you’re stove up. Or helps you
fight fire in your stack yard. These are
the things that count out here.
1/3
Vert.
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Five neighbors are better than one.
OLD-STYLE CONNECTEDNESS
‘Staying connected’ in a ranching
community isn’t measured in texts or
tweets. It involves looking out for the
people around you, even those with
whom you don’t necessarily get
along. It’s about the entire town,
including a crew of sweaty cowboys
just off work, trooping into the
Community Hall to honor the gradu-
ating class (of two) as it completes
eighth grade. It’s hospitality (“Don't
knock … just come on in!”) and simple rituals like breaking bread together (“Stay for supper … there's plenty!”) that are the soul of rural neighborly grace.
I’m aware of the uniqueness of these
simple customs more all the time, especially when I read the statistics of how
few families sit down to dinner together anymore, or how many commuters
actually scarf their meals down while
driving on the freeway.
According to Jim Connelley, the
Mountain City ranching community
maintained a pretty straightforward
protocol on mealtime hospitality.
“When you went to somebody’s
house, you ate,” says Connelley.
“You had to have at least a cup of
coffee and a cinnamon roll, if not dinner. If you happened to show up
around the noon-hour some place,
there was miraculously always enough
for another plate.”
To my mind, that is the true essence
of “connectedness.” It’s the helping
hand in the night. The extra plate at
dinner. The baler that shows up when
yours goes to crap. And none of these
random acts of kindness require any-
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Gotta love neighbors
that’ll help you fight fire!
92 | WORKING RANCH | APRIL / MAY 2012
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thing more technologically advanced
than a rotary dial. In fact, I’ll bet most
ranchers probably don’t even know
what Twitter is, let alone have any
“followers.” By contrast, consider that
seventeen million people follow
hyper-connected Lady Gaga on
Twitter. But how many of them would
help her put a prolapse back into a
cow if she had such a problem?
is something you have to practice if
you want to keep it alive. Without
practice and careful passing down
from one generation to the next, the
gracious art of rural neighboring—like
the party line, the milk man, the telephone booth—will become a creature
of the irretrievable past.
REALITY CHECK
Some years ago, I was driving
through Ohio and had one of those
gawk-out-the-window-and-almostwreck-the-pickup experiences: I passed
an Amish barn raising. There must
have been eighty Amish guys, maybe
more, all with chin-strap beards, flat
straw hats, and suspenders, swarming
like fire ants over the skeletal frame of
a barn that was coming into existence
as I sped by. I couldn’t tear my eyes
away. Not merely because a time portal back to 1847 had materialized
alongside Interstate 80 … no. What
made it remarkable was that so many
people were hammering, hoisting,
joining, and sawing in the sweltering
Of course, nobody’s saying that
ranching communities are perfect.
Arguably, some people just don’t “get”
neighboring. You know, the ones who
can’t figure out how to return equipment, let alone a favor? What do you
do about those people?
Here’s a bold suggestion; to the
extent that it makes any sense, help
them anyway. Remind them with
your actions what neighborly decency
is all about. Who knows? You may
teach that old dog a new trick. And if
you don’t, well, at least you are doing
your part to keep the tradition alive.
And that’s important. Neighboring
LIVING IN THE PRESENT,
LOOKING BACK
August sun, simply helping, pitching
in, neighboring.
For some reason, it felt like a fairytale moment.
And yet we barely realize that a wellorchestrated neighboring effort like a
branding or fall works is something
equally remarkable as an Amish barn
raising. It’s just that neighboring is so
basic to the existence of ranching, we
sometimes need to be reminded how
rare and wonderful this tradition is. It’s
worth reflecting on it.
With neighboring, there’s no contract. No fanfare. No kudos. No merit
badges or brownie points. Just help,
willingly given and readily returned,
natural and unscripted. Insofar as
there’s a recipe for being a decent
human being, neighboring might be
the best thing we’ve got. The late Ted
Baker, a lifelong Mountain City rancher, saw this. “There’s nothing you can
aspire to in my mind that’s greater
than being a good neighbor,” he was
fond of saying. Well, if you’re looking
down Ted, I sure hope you think we’re
doing a pretty good job of it.
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Tory Jaegar coils back up.
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