A Good Day's Work (24 page)

Marj, who talks in miles rather than kilometres, is old school. When the weather is nice, she gets on her saddle horse at first light. Then she and Duke just ride out into the land. Many days when she returns home after a day of mending fences, checking her herd and making sure the deer hunters haven't left her gates open, it will be dark. Usually she won't
have seen a single human being since departing in the morning. She does not necessarily see this as a problem.

Marj is fifty-six the day I arrive. A squarely built woman with a no-fuss haircut. Neither her temperament nor her appearance suggests a humanity-hating hermit. She brings to mind Bob Dylan's line to an interviewer about being “Exclusive, maybe, but not reclusive.” Marj's green eyes are level behind wire-rimmed glasses. But her face—undamaged by the elements despite all those days outside—erupts when she laughs, which is often, and a little surprising. For Marj has seen her share of troubles. She has had moments that have made her wonder if there is anything resembling fairness on this old earth. She has stood there with no place to go but forward. Then she has put one foot squarely in front of the other until she is as I find her here today: a woman who has made her way in a man's world, a third-generation Alberta rancher at a time when a host of difficulties—mad cow, the Canadian dollar, surging feed prices and the developed world's desire to eat less beef—are making cattle ranchers an endangered species.

That she doesn't make too big a deal of everything she's had to bear could be because that's just not done in a place whose story, on the Town of Hanna website, begins this way:

Her people's story fits the mould. It really begins in 1909, when her grandfather Hugh Nester took his blacksmith's forge from an Ontario village called Tara to an Alberta hamlet named Bassano, where there were horses to be shod and land for a man with ambition in his heart. “He built a shack and broke ten acres” is how Marj puts it. “He did what he had to do and married the girl from across the road.”

She was a Holcomb from North Dakota. Evelyn Holcomb's people may have seen one of the posters advertising “The Last Best West” or “the flour barrel of the world,” a country offering “homes for millions” and “free land.” They may have even sat gape-mouthed in some prairie hall or auditorium listening to an agent hired by the Canadian government—hell-bent on populating the West now that wheat sales were booming and a bout of railway building was underway—who was paid a commission for every man woman and child he persuaded to settle in western Canada.

The great arc of history had pretty much emptied out the place where the Holcombs ended up: by the 1890s, buffalo hunters had killed off the large herds of bison that had once roamed southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Starving and marginalized, the Bloods, Cree and Siksikas limped onto reserves. As the North West Mounted Police marched west, ranchers—many of them from the United States, where the frontier had been closed off—moved into the prairies and foothills. For a while a powerful compact of ranchers kept the homesteaders at bay. But, desirous of open settlement, Ottawa had its mind made up. The winter of 1906–07 helped things along: those same ranchers saw at least half of their herds starve to death in the bitter cold. The ranchers went bankrupt, or they
just up and left. In 1908 Ottawa amended the Dominion Lands Act, giving a quarter section of free land to newly arriving immigrants, opening twenty-eight million acres in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta.

Though many homesteaders, like Hugh Nester, came from eastern Canada, the government pitchmen really wanted immigrants from Europe and the United Kingdom. Clifford Sifton, the Canadian minister of the interior, saw midwestern American farmers as the perfect recruits: they knew how to farm the prairie soil. Mostly they spoke the same language and shared the same values as their counterparts in western Canada. They were also desperate: the good American land was gone. In 1890 the American West was officially closed. Though the numbers were unreliable, between 1896 and 1910, it is estimated that close to six hundred thousand Americans poured into the Canadian West in search of cheap land.

“Grandma's people ended up in a dry, arid place called the Palliser Triangle,” Marj tells me. We're in her living room, looking at old photos of her predecessors. The frontier where they landed was so called because a British aristocrat named John Palliser had passed through there in 1857–58 and declared the area “desert, or semi-desert in character, which can never be expected to become occupied by settlers.” Other later visitors felt much the same way. Colonel G.A. French, who led the North West Mounted Police's great trek west in 1874, noted he had expected, for some reason, to encounter a “luxuriant pasture, according to most accounts, a veritable Garden of Eden.” Instead, he found “for at least sixty to seventy miles in each direction … little better than a desert, not a tree to be seen anywhere, ground parched and poor.”

It rarely rained there. The thin topsoil compounded the problems. The winds out of the Rockies came “soughing across the land, howling through the fences and telegraph lines, aligning small coulees,” in the words of historian David Jones, “lifting the typical thin brown regional soils and piling vast sand dunes.” In the Badlands around present-day Drumheller the winds cleaved away all vegetation and carved out strange formations called “hoodoos.” Everywhere, Jones wrote, the blowing was all-powerful. “It was as if King Aeolus, ruler of the winds, had hatched a foul plot high in the Rockies and had set the west wind and the south wind, those normally gentle and compliant breezes, against each other in a struggle of influence and dominion.”

Newcomers like the Nesters and Holcombs, knowing nothing about this, came anyway. Idyllic images of free land and bountiful harvests danced in their heads. “Southern Alberta,” gushed a writer for the
Canada West
magazine, was “a land blessed of the Gods—a land over which bending nature never smiles and into whose cradle she emptied her golden horn.” Before the influx, southeastern Alberta was home to around nine thousand residents. Within ten years, the region's settler population increased eightfold. Almost all of them lived on new farms where wheat was the principal crop.

EVELYN Nester was about Marj's height, five foot two. Back in Carrington, North Dakota, she played the piano for silent movies and in a dance band. Life in a prairie farm town would have prepared her for the drought that hit the Prairies
soon after her marriage. But perhaps not for the successive years of rainlessness and crop failure that followed right through the 1930s.

Yet they hung in. They endured, even as their lands became the prairie dust bowl of history and the very symbol of the Dirty Thirties. Even when Evelyn, in Marj's words, discovered that Hugh was “quite dead one morning” in 1933. Picture, if you would, her predicament: in midst of the Great Depression, living on a prairie farm that, after a decade of drought and every other kind of misfortune, must have seemed godforsaken. Did I forget to mention that she had seven children ranging in age from twelve years to eighteen months?

Marj's dad and aunts and uncles would tell how Evelyn played the piano at country dances for a few dollars, then ride home alone on horseback or in a buggy across the empty Alberta landscape to face her brood and more hard work. They mentioned how her fingers bled from playing so long and always being so cold. And how, while Marj's dad and his older brother looked after the livestock, she sold homemade butter and bread to neighbouring bachelors to scratch out a living for the household.

“They talked about her sense of humour,” recalls Marj, “her ability to make a meal out of most anything that was available and her determination to keep them all in school as long as possible so they could make something of themselves.” Evelyn Nester died old before her time, when a brain tumour took her at age fifty-three. Marj wasn't born until six years later, so her memories of her grandma are second-hand. But, she says, “I've often thought of her and what she endured with seven kids, no running water or indoor plumbing, no vehicle
or any of the other modern conveniences that we have now.”

Marj thought about her grandma a lot after her first husband, Greg Veno, died in 1991 following a long, spirit-sapping fight with cancer. The parallels were cruel: Marj owed the bank half a million dollars. She had 2,500 acres of cultivated land to work and a herd of two hundred commercial cows to raise. She was a single mother of a fourteen-year-old daughter, left to her own designs in a land where life, even at the best of times, has never been easy. “I was angry,” Marj says in that matter-of-fact way that you feel she might use to report a global apocalypse. “But I knew that I could get it done because she had before me. I owed that to my daughter, her dad, myself and my family before me. Then I just put my head down and went to work.”

ALMOST noon now, and Marj is in her Yukon, one of seven trucks I count. They, along with the various tractors, skidders and trailers, make up the vehicular fleet of Veno Ranches and McArthur Livestock. The vehicles are stored in a big metal Quonset hut in the farmyard. I discover there's a whole world out there. Off to the right, big metal granaries hold pellets of cattle feed. To the rear, half-ton bales of hay that don't last as long as you'd think in a place where each cow eats thirty pounds per day for feed. Farther yonder, a corral made out of discarded Alberta Energy poles, a cattle scale for weighing livestock and chutes for loading the cows into trucks and trailers.

The latter is next to the red barn that was here when she and Greg bought the place. Built in 1918, the structure was
the handiwork of the ranch's original homesteader, Gottlieb Knopp. When the old fella and his wife died, the ranch went to a daughter, who married badly—a drinker and poker player who let the place run down. They eventually sold it to a rancher named Jack Jager, who let things slide even more, until he sold it to Marj and Greg in 1980. “The place was a rundown mess,” says Marj, “but with lots of enthusiasm and hard work we cleaned it up and built new buildings and corrals and fences when we could afford them.” Marj, Greg and her dad straightened the barn themselves. Now the barn loft's floor is plumb enough for their annual square dance and cattle auction. When they were done with the barn renovation, a neighbour said that old Knopp would sure be proud of it, as he was a proud, hard-working man.

In short-grass country endurance and fortitude are treated with a reverence akin to an ability to profitably flip a condo among city folks. Calling someone hard-working—along with saying they are honest and have integrity, which matters in a place where deals are still done on a handshake—is the highest praise you can have for a person. Being a survivor is something to feel good about too. The number of cattle farms in Alberta shrank from eighty thousand in 1941 to under twenty-nine thousand in 2006. Farms are getting bigger. But farmers are getting older—Alberta had 16,660 farmers under the age of thirty-five in 1991 versus 6,290 by 2006. It's harder to get out of the business when land prices are so high and there's less and less appetite among the young for the kind of labour that cattle ranching requires.

Marj has always liked a daylight start: because she's fondest of the world at that hour but also because cattle ranching is
what economists like to call “labour intensive” toil. Toil is my word, not Marj's. That's simply not how she sees things. Spring, when the two-year-old heifers calve, may mean a parade of eighteen-hour days wrestling with half-ton animals out in the calving pasture. It may mean checking every head of cattle daily and new calves twice or even three times in the run of twenty-four hours. (“No daylight,” she tells me, “is wasted.”) But she thinks of it as “a time of rejuvenation. The air smells so fresh, the crocuses are growing, everything is new and fresh and young.”