View from the North 40: A tale of too many rocks

Once upon a time in Montana we all would’ve been swimming with the fishes, but times change.

The ice ages melt. The inland sea recedes. The Missouri River settles into a drainage 60 miles south. And the Milk River is left to meander through a gumbo valley that cuts through a high plains gumbo desert. This is modern times and everyone lives happily ever after. The End.

You can’t see it, but I’m wiping away tears of laughter right now. Don’t feel left out, they’re not happy tears and laughter. They are just little tools of self-preservation shaking off the bitter sting of defeat and exhaustion — because “happily ever after” isn’t the end of that story any more than “I just have a few hours of work left with the tractor” is the end of my column last week.

I spent two hours on the working end of a shovel, soaking in sweat and my own stench, before finishing up those two hours with the tractor.

I blame James J. Hill, Mr. Empire Builder himself, for the misery, but before I start disparaging that hero among men, let me digress to my story about the history of the world.

The ice age glaciers pushed a lot of rock around. The melting and flowing waters, like any flooding, deposited this ground up rock in the eddies and swirls of the waterways and along the banks that managed to stay intact.

And when the age of man came upon the area, the Native Peoples said, “Ow, that rock hurts to walk on but, hey, grab some of the big ones and we’ll use them to weigh down the edges of our tepees.”

Then some white folks showed up and said, “Hey, let’s put our roads on that gravelly stuff so they’ll be less muddy.”

Then almost 140 years ago James Hill brought his Great Northern Railway to the area and he said, “This is going to be the greatest railroad ever built. And I’m going to use your beautiful gravel — you really do have the most amazing gravel in the world here, the best gravel along all my tracks — and I’m going to use your beautiful gravel as the base for my railroad tracks. For my whole huge empire really. It’ll be great and the world will call me an empire builder and your gravel will be a part of that. NOT those big rocks like those there and those boulders, but the good gravel, the very best, it’ll be part of my empire. You should be proud of that.”

And, lo, it came to pass that he came in and mined a huge swath of gravel off the property which I would one day own. True to his word — well, the words that I imagined him saying — the builders upon which his empire is built took all the beautiful, gravelly gravel from the hill and left all the ugly rocky rocks and the bouldery rocks, too.

The boulders were cast aside, and the big rocks were left in a vast pit with just a little mound showing, like the tip of an iceberg, to give evidence of the rock pit’s existence. Dirt, as it is wont to do, built up around the boulders and covered over the mound. The grass grew and the place settled in peace.

That would be the end of the story, but the saga continues with the tale of those rocks, whose final resting place is in the extreme southeast corner of the North 40, homeland of this column. I naively picked that stupid, stupid place to build some corrals and pens and a horse shelter.

So last week’s tractor work required the incidental relocation of tons of big rocks that kept cropping up.

Finally, in a gruelling anti-climax to the story, one large boulder defeated me and my sweat-covered digging efforts. And I left it where it had been cast by the empire builders almost 140 years ago, its giant hump of a back peeking above the surface of the earth — right in the middle of my horses’ shelter.

I could not alter history.

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But I did swear a lot at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .