Right smack in the center of Utah there is a tiny town named Redmond. There are no stop lights, no stores, and the post office is the one and only official building. It is in this town where my brother has just built a home. His wife Katie was raised in Redmond, and in the years since they met, he has lassoed his inner cowboy and decided to raise his family there as well.
My brother and I have become close since I moved back to Utah, and so when he offered me the opportunity to come to a real-life cattle drive there was no way I was saying no. Apparently (and I didn’t know this, what with growing up in the ‘burbs) there is a need to move cattle from place to place depending on the time of year and it just happened to be this weekend that these cattle were going from the dry farm (a farm where they do not irrigate) to the summer range (or something similarly named).
I got there at about 9, just in time to see Kate load her three kids, ages 5, 3, and 1, into the mule. The mule is not a live animal, but rather a Mitzubishi-made vehicle that looks like a toy truck. It goes about 15 mph at top speed, has one gear, and seats two comfortably. We all jumped in (all five of us) and drove over to an intersection where the cattle would pass. We sat in the mule blocking the road and heading off any cattle that decided to wander away from the herd. Then we followed them—on four wheelers and the trusty mule—out of town and over to a holding pen where they would rest on Sunday, ready to continue on Monday.
It was magical. Days that you can actually smell are not soon forgotten. This one smells like sunburnt skin, cow manure, barbecued beef, insect repellant, and Gatorade. Scenes I won’t easily forget: watching my five-year-old niece go after a wayward cow on a four wheeler; real live cowboys on horseback practicing their roping as they drove the herd down the road; watching Vance disappear in a cloud of dust and sagebrush as he tackled a calf that wasn’t moving fast enough; Ashley in another mule complete with car seat so her baby wouldn’t miss the first cattle drive of his young life; watching all of the kids passed around from motorized vehicles to horses and back again, and how they were all adored and loved and part of the experience.
I’m sure that my view of the drive is highly romanticized. In some ways I’m no better than those with voyeuristic tendencies that pull off of I-80 to film my brother and his in-laws in their chaps and hats driving cattle on horseback. Kate mentioned that later on there would be a big family argument about the way the drive was done, the cows that got away from the herd, and what someone should have done to prevent it. The hazards of working with family, I suppose; but I like my version better.
I still wonder if my nieces will ever really learn to play piano, or be encouraged or have the opportunity to get PhD’s and contribute in the way that I hope they do, but I can’t fault my brother’s decision to move there to give his kids the lessons that will truly make a difference in their lives: that a hard day’s work really does matter; that sometimes you do things just because they need to be done, not because you'll get something out of it; and that no matter what happens, or where you go, or what you learn, there is nothing more important than family. A lesson, incidentally, that it took a lot of years and several thousand miles for me to learn.