Raising the Higher Ground

It turned winter again in the Pahsimeroi, a perfect prelude to May. I was out supervising Cowgirl Abby in snow flurries today on her fencing project, and new snow is dumping in the mountains. We donned our wool sweaters, re-fired-up our woodstoves, and found those gloves again. Although the cattle are eating green grass, it is not yet growing fast enough in the cool weather to keep up to the demands of young beeves. So, still, we make our pilgrimage to them each day to feed them our preserved sunshine from last summer-also known as hay. They don’t each much of it this time of year, but they definitely still want it. And I think they know best.

The hay peels off the bale in green slices and is often laden with pressed flowers. It is somewhat of a catalog or herbarium of the summer plants of Alderspring. There are sainfoin flowers, still a brilliant pretty pink. Coupled with alfalfa and clover flowers in a spectrum of dark pink to purple, they provide a floral arrangement that mixes nicely with the greens of dandelion, orchardgrass, and timothy. There are many more species, all identifiable by Caryl, our own botanical expert. But I think the beeves may know them even better, albeit by other names.
It’s the perfect ration, because the beeves pick it. This is something that I’ve only come to understand in the past few years. I believe that they are the best balancers of their diet, choosing between hay and green grass, and it shows up in all of our beef as a flavor that resonates.

Most commonly, I get those reports of resonance from folks who have eaten our beef, not in ribeye form, but as lowly ground beef.

Here’s an example: George runs a little brewery in nearby Challis, Idaho. It’s called “River of No Return” brewery after the nearby Salmon River. The Salmon was nicknamed that by 19th century river freighters who would have to dismantle their 40′ sweepboats and sell them as lumber after going down its 100 miles of tortuous rapids and canyons. (In fact, there is still no road along the river through to the other side of Idaho.) They then mounted stock horse and pack string and made their way on the rocky footpath that follows the river back to the town of Salmon. The meandering torrent passes just a mile away from George’s pub, and river runners and fisherman often stop by his watering hole for a post-river draught.

George called me about 8 months ago, wanting to carry our beef there. Since then, he has built a successful burger biz, and I am always amazed at the reports I get from folks who have tried some Alderspring fare at his brewpub. A few weeks ago, it was a top aide to a US senator. Yesterday, I was coordinating some of our summer range plans with the federal government’s BLM and Forest Service. One of the guys in the meeting told me how great our burger was—at the brewery.

It’s why Forbes said it may be the best burger you’d ever eat. And it is the most common fare on our own table. In fact, there are some burgers on the Weber right now. I’m thankful that Caryl and I have come this far, where we have access to great beef like this staple. Contrary to what most folks think, we still buy it, because every pound we consume is dollars we don’t take in to sell in our till (we actually do run out of ground beef every now and then). We are grateful, especially since it wasn’t always like this. There was a time in our early married life 29 years ago that all we could financially manage was a diet of beans.

It’s not that I don’t like beans. But beans everyday”¦well, you know. We were living in Maine at the time. I had just gotten into the University of Maine at Orono. I had found a friend in Fred Knight, the Dean of Forestry there, and although I was broke, he encouraged me to attend there for my Forest Science studies. It helped that I was valedictorian at my previous school’s forest tech program. Dean Knight simply smiled when I told him my financial situation, and said that “we would work things out.”

As I tentatively drove on to campus for the first time, I found he was right, in spite of my skepticism. I met with Mr. Brooks, the University’s bursar, and he agreed in a handshake deal that I could go with tuition on payments. Somehow they wangled for me in-state tuition, and if I worked while enrolled, and gave them, say, half my paychecks, they would let me stay. Caryl and I have college-age girls now, and I’m pretty certain those university bursars do not make deals like that anymore. Mr. Brooks and I became friends over those years, as weekly I made a pilgrimage to his office and handed him cash. And those handshakes and deal wrangling allowed me to graduate debt-free.

That didn’t mean we had lots of money to live on. We drove our beater station wagon far away from the high rent of town into the economically depressed landscape of central Maine. I moved my bride there in early winter, something she’ll probably never let me forget. It was entirely forest, and hidden away in the thick woods were tiny hamlets of loggers and subsistence Mainers connected by a network of derelict dirt (or frozen mud) roads and iced-over boggy streams.

We noted a cabin on one such stream, appropriately named Sunkhaze, as it was a forest primeval place where the fog of the wet boreal timber drifted in and out of the hollows over the meandering clear waters of the river. The house looked abandoned and rough, but after finding the owner, Jim, he agreed to let us live there for free, provided we did some work on it. It had history too! Jim told us that the house was built as a bootlegger hideout in the Prohibition days, and it had a turret-like lookout structure at the peak of the two story roof for a bird’s eye view.

Cool! We were excited. You can’t beat free! We happily stepped through the unlocked door, resplendent with a lovely 1920s floral etching on the glass, and were met with a mix of disgust and regret. It was filthy from animal inhabitants and trashed from the last humans (I’m not sure there was much of a difference). But somehow, after looking things over, we found hope in Sunkhaze, and fired up the wood stove and set to work with little more than brooms, washcloths and elbow grease. It took several days to get the house warmed up enough so that our mop water would not freeze to the floor.

The bright side was that we didn’t have to worry about vacuuming. There was no power. In fact, there was none for 25 miles. The grid simply had not arrived yet. No power meant no shower or taps either. There was a hand pitcher pump for water over the sink and an outhouse about 100 feet away in the woods. Our nearest neighbors (several miles away) lived nearly the same way, as their forebears had for generations. If they could do it, why couldn’t we? We threw down our few belongings, and made it home.

In forestry school much of the focus was on land surveying and with that skillset I was able to land a job surveying in the bush. It provided a decent income we needed to make ends meet…kind of. That was the only “meet” we had at that time. There was no “meat” to be had. The snows of Maine came fast and furious and the deer season on abundant populations was long over. We simply couldn’t afford the meat in the supermarket back in Old Town. It wasn’t in the budget, although bulk beans were. We were members of a small natural foods co-op that met in a friend’s basement once a week to split big bags of beans, rice, grains and spices. Occasionally, we’d bump into a kind neighbor in the bush who would offer us something (I think we must have looked a mite hungry on those beans).

I recall when 80 year old Joe further up the road a few miles offered us some fresh moose. He had “somehow” procured one and it was hanging, still fresh, in the back shed. He gestured to me to follow him down the dark cedar-lined path. As he shuffled, he said “the moose is back he-yah” in the way a Mainer would.  Joe cracked open the mossy door, and there was an entire moose, hanging upside down ceiling to floor, aging in his lantern-lit shed. He pulled a knife from the counter and carved off a generous roast from the swinging carcass. I realized that nearly all bush dwellers did this—subsistence hunting was a way of life. In all of my time there, I had never seen a conservation officer. The long arm of the law apparently wasn’t long enough in the backwoods of Maine.

Back at Sunkhaze, Caryl and I proudly placed our prize in the Dutch oven, roasted it perfectly, and tore into that moose roast like starved explorers. It wasn’t “grass-fed,” I would venture, but was certainly wild protein after Bullwinkle’s lifetime diet of willowy woodies and marsh vegetation. It was wonderful.

Joe wasn’t the only kind Mainer who offered meat. Catching game out of season for food was ubiquitous in backwoods Maine, and folks were often Robin Hood-like in the sharing of the king’s deer. We had another bush friend who taught us how to check roadkill: “Warm and not swollen equals fresh—load it up. Warm, not swollen and stiff equals the same day—load it up. Warm and flexible and swollen—it’s generating its own heat–leave it for the ravens and coyotes.” He would have us over for roadkill feasts. His wife would fix delicious dishes of ruffed grouse—as cashew chicken—served over wild rice.

We stretched scraps into soups and stews whenever we could, and Maine even gave us a new direction for those beans called “Maine Beanhole Beans.” There were Legion suppers, church suppers, and benefits that featured those beloved beans. My secret suspicion was that those enterprising Mainers were coming up with creative ways to hide those deer.

It was a simple and quiet life. Once a week, we would stop at Burr’s Store in Costigan, on the Penobscot River. We became Saturday regulars there and would splurge on a split of a $1.49 breakfast: 2 eggs, a pile of fried potatoes, 5 strips of bacon, and all the coffee you could drink. The backwoods Mainers became friendly with us, and we’d sit down with loggers and their kin. I asked a timber faller how much he made per hour in the woods: 1 dollar. No wonder they lived off the land.

After a couple of years in the Maine woods, school became a degree, and a degree became a forestry job. While away working a distant job, Sunkhaze sadly burned to the ground. With no connection to Maine, forestry jobs led to a career position in Salmon Idaho, later generating income to purchase a small ranch and 7 cows. That was 24 years ago. Biology took over and those cows had babies, creating more equity that allowed us to buy more cattle, and now we have a couple hundred head on Alderspring in the Pahsimeroi Valley. It took over 30 years to get here, but we still carry with us lessons we learned in those Maine woods.

And we have meat—our own beef. But, like that wild subsistence protein we ate in Maine, our beeves eat wild foods on ancient and intact soils, giving even our ground beef a rich and wellness-enhancing experience every bit as satisfying as Joe’s moose.

And our fatty ground beef or chunks of delicious chuck roast still find a reminiscent home in those Bean Hole Beans. Check out a cool Alderspring twist on those beans in the recipe above!

Thanks for riding with me. Happy Trails.