We’ve completed eight ponds in the last nine years on our family’s property.  Typically a pond is built in July through September.  This takes advantage of the dry stretches of late summer and gets things completed before we start a fall of tile and terracing.

There was hardly any dry stretch this summer, and we were slated to build our largest pond to date.  We started in late September, with water still running through the project.  When we began the dam, we were committed.

Prior to starting, the pond site was surveyed and staked.  The stakes marked the locations of the center of the dam, projected water level, and where the slopes will begin for the dam’s front and back.  Work began with black dirt being stripped from the work area and pushed to the backside of the site.  You can see that dirt on the left side of the picture above.  Normally we would have pushed more, but an existing fence limited us.

Next we cut a four foot deep trench the width of the dozer blade (about 14 feet) the length of the dam.  This trench serves as the starting point for the clay core, which will makes its way up the center of the dam to just above the future water line.  The trench notches the bottom of the dam.  Should water soak between the dam and the old surface, the notch keeps it from bleeding all the way through and creating a leak.  You can see the bright yellow clay of the core in the picture above.

Only clay goes into the core.  This pond presented a problem.  The west side had sandy clay.  There was enough sand we weren’t comfortable using it in the core.  Such fill could be used on the front side of the dam, and I began making a pile to use there later.  I hoped to eventually dig through it.  No such luck.  We would have to build the core using only the east side of the site.

At the topside of the pond we were ready to lay the overflow. The 6″ steel pipe was welded together in 20 foot sections. We set it in place with the excavator and a skidsteer. Around the pipe were welded three four foot squares. These were anti-seep collars and function similar to the notch of the core. If water seeps along the smooth pipe, it hits the collar and can’t continue.  I used the excavator to sink the collars down into the core, and then pack clay around the pipe.

The pond will be able to do what generations before it could not:  stabilize a ditch that had cut across a grass pasture.  It will function as a filter below 40 some acres, catching whatever sediment the grass and newly completed terraces above it might miss and stop it all from moving further downstream.  It will also provide water to further expand a rotational grazing system on the pasture we rent to the north.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.  In practice there is.”

The Tale

I have never written in any great detail about my divorce.  To some degree I’ve never known what to say.  Recently, at some place or another, I heard that writing is to thinking what painting is to seeing.

Perhaps that has been my problem.  Thought leads to thought, and each one skips across the water in a different direction.  Sooner or later it all kind of gets away from you.  Yet why write if not to attempt to understand?

My marriage ended just before Christmas, nearly four years ago.  Sometimes I try to approach the subject when that time rolls around.  Tis hardly the season, however, and sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if only the timing were different.  In less than two weeks it will be my birthday.  Maybe the occasion of our birth is a better time to think of how we try to be born again.

In the aftermath, all that time ago, came no shortage of advice.  Some of it was particularly good, and of what wasn’t, some of that was at least well intended.  It was offered from the married, the divorced, those never in a relationship, and the lucky who still thought they had something to do with their own good fortune.

Besides the free advice, answers were readily for sale.  A $15 book, for instance, promised to teach me how to free the wonderful child within, who only wanted to love and be loved.  He would lead me to myself, and that would lead me to those wanting to accept me unconditionally for who I am.

$15 seemed a bit pricey for a kid to tell me I’m an asshole.  I’ve gotten that for free once or twice.  I guess I’ve always been lucky that way.  And conditions…well…they are just like assholes.

Instead I wanted perspective.  I thought I would find the answer there.  I suppose we always think that, and it never crosses our mind that we might have to give up on one to get the other.

In all of it I was drowning, and the drowning man will cling to anything.  Only some of which will keep him up.

The Setup

The man whose job it was to talk our way through the day had earlier began by mentioning he lived on an island.  It was nice to know we had something in common.  His island was in Maine.  Mine was in my own mind.

It was my second of these conferences, and it had found me even more nervous than the first.  The fact that most attendees were mental health professionals makes you worry you’ll be exposed for being even more of a sham than you thought you were.  The longer you go without being detected, the more imminent you feel detection is.  We always forget that we are all delusional.

The conference centered on the ideas of Bowen Family Systems Theory, a theory named for Murray Bowen who began to develop it by observing the patients and the families of those suffering with schizophrenia.  What makes it unique in psychology is that it takes a “systems approach.”  After lunch the speaker presented the following example:

Think of a family that has three people in it.  A mother, a father, and their 23 year old son.  The son is making a spring trip home.  He’s rarely been home because he feels as though his parents treat him like a child.  His mother has been excited for some time to see a son she’d like to see more of.  The father is worried that this visit will follow the past, with everyone leaving in disappointment.

When they pick their son up from the airport, the mother greets him and in an effort to express care says, “Why you don’t have a coat on, you must be cold.”  The son immediately bristles at the comment.

The father, recognizing anxiety on the rise, decides to show support for his wife.  “Your mother is right.”

The son feels as though he is being tag-teamed, and begins to withdraw.  His mother senses this.  “Are you sure you are all right?  You don’t seem like yourself.”

The father now teams up with his son and says, “He’ll be fine.”

“There you go, minimizing my worries,” says the mother.

All I have to do is make it through the next couple of days, thinks the son.

For me what makes Bowen Theory, Bowen Theory then, are three things.  First, in the above situation blame falls on no one.  It is not a problem of an “overly-protective” mother, nor an “under-functioning” father, nor an “overly-sensitive” son.  The situation above is the product of a system, a system that likely began before any of the current participants arrived on the scene.

The situation is not a matter of the past simply repeating itself, however.  We actively recreate it in the present.  We all seem to be more comfortable with what we know, however ‘dysfunctional,’ than what we don’t.

Third, the solution isn’t found by making someone whom we have no control over do something different.  No one holds the others captive.  If any of them were able to see the system in place and respond differently, it improves.  Any can keep the past a little more in the past and create at least a slightly different outcome in the present.

In the theory are concepts and terms related to ideas I simply don’t have the space or expertise to discuss here, but in the years that brought me to the conferences, I’ve enjoyed becoming more acquainted with them.  By and large it is easier to see how they impact the organizations we are involved in and the acquaintances we have and act on it.  As we travel in, towards the emotional bonds that form our most significant relationships, acting and seeing gets exponentially harder as the forces become exponentially stronger to stay where we have been.

“Are you a therapist too?” asked one of the guys I was eating lunch with, seemingly with some assuredness.

“No.  I’m a farmer.”

He smiled.  “I think you are the first farmer I’ve ever met at one of these.”

“Don’t hold me against the rest of them.”

I had intended to sit at another table, but I found it already had several women at it.  In the auditorium we were talking about higher functioning in relationships.  Outside I was still in junior high.

“I once had a client who said he could see the theory perfectly in his mind.  He understood why the ones he loved said this, and why he said that.  What he couldn’t do, he told me, was act on it.

In order to truly know where we are at, we need to get it out of our minds and into a relationship.”

The Hook

For me interest in the theory had began the following way:

“I know you think you are doing the right thing, coming in here and taking all the blame.  Honestly, it’s just fractionally better than if you were coming in here and taking none of it.  The real work in life is figuring out what is yours, and what isn’t.  What isn’t you can’t do anything about, but you might be able to for what is.”

There I found the work of a lifetime.

“What are you looking to get out of all of this?”

“I would like to go forward.”

“Well, it looks like we have some direction, then.”

The direction turned out to be mostly backwards and sideways.  She never complained.  It felt like flailing, but I wasn’t drowning.

The Sting

The speaker had begun by sharing some thoughts of a James Shapiro on evolution.  “The role of (natural) selection is to eliminate evolutionary novelties that prove to be non-functional and interfere with adaptive needs.”  He had began with it because in farmers’ terms, what Shapiro was suggesting was a departure from how we’ve typically been taught to understand evolution, and thus part of how we got here.

Evolution did not create the long neck of the giraffe.  Instead, it merely selected against fish that could not swim.  As I thought about “non-functional” and “adaptive needs,” I wondered how long it would be before evolution would come for me.

“I’ve realized something.”

“What’s that?”

“I am never going to be the person I want to be for those I care about.  We think we will save it in the end, and it will look different, but we aren’t getting out of this tunnel.”

“Maybe not, but we can still get up each morning and chip away at it.”

Perhaps I’m overly-sensitive with an overly-active imagination.  Behind it all is an engine for thinking, a brain self-aware and folded in on itself.  This is all part of being human, I should think.  For me it works well for writing and not so much for other things.

Operating together it all creates an anxious wake across the same surface my thoughts go skipping across.  There we do what evolution cannot.  We create, if we chip.
 

Recently we had the opportunity to work with Frank Hawk, a friend from my youth.  He began helping us last spring.  How he spent his time was varied.

Personally, I’ll miss him.

In the United States it is estimated that less than 4% of the original tall grass prairie remains.  80% of what remains lies in Kansas.  Most of it lies in Kansas’ Flint Hills region, carpeting hill after rolling hill.  Recently the Madison County Cattlemen sponsored a trip to that area for member families.  They met area ranchers, ate good food, and got to roll over a few of those hills in a tour bus.  One producer they met was Mike Collinge.

“The tall-grass prairie evolved because of fire and because of grazing.  Removing either changes it into something else,”  the Greenwood County rancher said.  “What we primarily use for grazing in the Flint Hills are ‘stocker cattle.’  These are calves weighing 550 pounds or so in April, and we will run them to mid-July.  During this time they will gain 150-275 pounds.

There are not many of the cow/calf operations you guys are familiar with in Iowa.  The reason is our grass.  When it is good it is really good, and when it is not it requires the supplementation of protein.  That cost is a challenge to carrying a cow year long here.”

He had cattle when the grass was fit for cattle, and when it wasn’t, he didn’t.

The calves in the Flint Hills are usually from the southeast region of the country.  Typically these cattle are considered “high risk” by the industry and sold at a discount.  Some of them will wind up here before they arrive in the feedyards of the north.  The role of the Hills is to add value back.

“We burn every spring if we can.  It’s good for the grass and keeps invasive species out.  If we didn’t continue this once natural process, deciduous trees would take over.  It is also good for the cattle.  Burning will create an additional 30 lbs per head.

It also maintains our diversity.  It may all look green out there, but there is a wide range of plants.  Maintaining that is like insurance.  Our weather is highly variable, and different plants excel for different climates.”

Collinge estimated that nearly 85% of the area is owned by absentee landowners.  Ranchers, like Collinge, might use their own ground, but lease additional acres from these landowners.  They function as caretakers, not just on behalf of the landowners, but also for the families that own the cattle they run.

“How we charge is all over the board,” Mike explained.  “Some of us charge per head, some by gain, some by hundred weight, and some per day.  Typically it would cost someone $90 to $110 dollars per head to run 550 pound steers from April to mid-July.

What it is really about, however, is relationships.  Relationships with landowners, relationships with the cattle owners, and relationships with where the cattle will wind up.  It needs to work for all of them in order for it to work for us.”

Several area producers had joined us at Collinge’s ranch, and continued on with us for the other stops on the morning’s tour.  As we looked out at a different land than we were accustomed to, with operations different in their makeup and structure, engaged in such a different part of the industry we share, we were reminded that in the end the cattle business is a people business.  And that’s the same as it always has been.