Harland Ulrich.....
was a long time family friend, and he was like a father to me. He would never admit it, and rightfully so, but he was a spiritual mentor as well. He worked in an occupation that is ironically one of the most important for all of mankind: Agriculture, the production of wheat, the staff of life. Yet, in the economic scheme of things, farming gets little credit compared to the likes of computers and space ships these days. But "blame it", as Harland would say, everyone has to eat. And in 1973 through 1974, as a young man, I did also. He and his gracious family took me in and fed me, in many more ways than one. I am proud of the two years of vocational agriculture I had in high school, and the agrarian, bucolic tinge that resides in the colour of my blood. But it was Harland Ulrich, the man, the father figure, who, in his own way, with his own paradigm about working in the wheat, with animals, with the soil, with weather, and with the community of people around him, set the tone for the importance of that experience in my life. And his influence will resonate with me for the rest of my life. I was honoured in helping farm along side one of the best farmers ever to farm.

Before working with Harland, I had never seen anyone with the "gift of faith". Harland had an amazing ability to see an end to a problem, a solution to a situation from around a seemingly insurmountable corner. And in my young, tender days when I was honestly seeking a meaning for life, his character was exactly what I needed to sustain my spirit. He showed me that gift, profoundly.

It was a wet spring in Whitman County that year. Harland had some of his choice angus bovines out on the prairies of the Winona place. They were range cattle, wild and independent, fiercely matriarchal, like angus are, and prone to doing their own thing....having their babies wherever they wanted and if they wanted, extending their social life across the neighbour's fence. What was left of the loess soils that lay in between the outcropping of exposed basalt, had sucked up water like a sponge. And now that sponge was saturated. Muddy ponds dotted this leftover Pleistocene landscape like a revival of ancient pluvial times. It smelled. Not like the sweet, moistened soils of the scabland country, after a summer rain, but rather of a cold, damp, stale scent hanging in the dense air between the rocks, the smell of a soggy, moldy towel swaying in the breeze.

It was cold and an overcast night. The saturated sogginess of it all made it even colder. We had all gathered at the Winona place to extract cows from the mud. I can't remember the number, but I can remember the picture: pregnant angus cows, up to their pin bones in a pool of black mud. Their huge black heads were randomly scattered in the mix poking up out of the ooze like a bizarre scene from an Alice in Wonderland tale. The animals rested there like they were made for the experience!

As we approached them, our flashlights, the truck lights, the tractor lights shining down on them like bovine movie stars captured at a mud bath spa, it was very apparent from their expressions that this paparazzi of farmers and ranchers were intruding on them! Frantically their heads jolted back and forth watching our every move. It was like we'd uncovered some strange pregnant cow ritual, and now their eyes were glowing wildly back at us in disgust...."What on earth! can't you leave us alone! what's the problem, haven't you seen a cow taking a mud bath before?"

Maybe the rich and famous in some big city have the time and money to plaster themselves in volcanic mud, straw and cucumbers and even give such an experience an exotic name like Shiatsu or a Turkish bath. But we could not condone this same behaviour for our female bovine .....no matter how spoiled and elegant they thought they were. It was a practical matter. Perhaps after their therapeutic indulgence, the city folk's phone might ring with an invitation to go out for wine and a steak supper? As hard as we tried to break up these mud soaking mothers, and pull them and what they carried within them, the future of steak suppers everywhere, out of this slurry of adobe ala angus, they refused our invitation to leave the muddy womb of their predicament.

So in that cold, wet night of nights, ropes were attached, cables were strung, and cows bellowed in protest. The steam of the breaths of men saturated the damp night air and carried with it mutitudes of ideas on how to rotate, lift, buoy up and extract a one thousand pound cow out of gooey black mud that sucked the animal in like a Newtonian force all its own. "Bring in a tractor!" one said. And so they did. Not just a tractor but a TD4 CAT. They tied a rope around its draw-bar and then around the body of a bellowing cow. But as the CAT pulled on the protesting cow, its tracks rotated into the muck and the tractor sunk itself miserably into the ground. The CAT had found its resting place, right where it began its labour. And it would not be moved until drier times would arrive later that year. But when they brought in the wheel tractor and it did the same thing......then the whole fiasco began looking like something from an episode of Green Acres. Men cursed, smoked, cursed some more, and still the cows bellowed and remained mired down.

But one farmer coined a term there that night which for me became the descriptive quintessential essence of the moment. As neighbor George Knott, with a defeated look on his face, came up to Harland, I sensed something profound was going to happen next. It did. And there beneath the cold overcast skies of the Palouse, like the shaman of ancient times on that same prairie before him; like pioneers, people of faith, had no doubt concluded in this rough cut environment in years past; when the going seemed helpless, impossible, you turned toward that metaphysical force outside yourself. And there in sympathetic neighborly fashion, George simply conferred the whole thing to a higher power. "Harland," he said, "those cows are stuck in there truer than Jesus."

The night waned on, and slowly the neighbors and helpers had had their fill and left. It was hopeless. But long past their exodus, I remember watching Harland continually coaxing, prodding, shooing his cows, never giving up. I remember even myself beginning to think that this was pretty much useless. But I had no choice in the matter, let alone any place to offer an opinion. But could I really tell this man anything anyway? I remember once while traveling to Colfax from St. John when a Whitman County deputy pulled up behind Harland and pulled him over for going too fast. Harland was perturbed to say the least. But after the stop and an in-depth discussion with me on the inequities of the behaviours of sheriff deputies, I found myself five miles later, down the road, almost to Steptoe, with Harland flashing his lights at the same deputy and pulling him over for going too fast. Harland had clocked him going ten miles over the speed limit, and placed him under citizen's arrest! Could I tell this man anything?

But that night in Winona, I sat back and watched as Harland taught me a lesson in perseverance. Maybe he learned it as a medic in Korea treating hundreds of G.I.s for STDs. He once told me he had the frustrating job of counseling these young kid warriors. "I'd tell them think about what you're doing!" he told me. But as much as he kept at it, they did the same. But "maybe," he told me, "I got through to a few of them." Maybe this perseverance was a gift from God, or maybe it was just human stubbornness. Or maybe it was a little of all of the above wrapped together and expressed that cold, damp night, simply because Harland was being Harland and doing what Harland did best. All I know now is that I needed this object lesson that moment in my life. This was a man who showed me that while building a fence, if you dropped a nail, you picked it up, pounded it back straight and used it "agin." But this is also a man who told me over a meal of ground-up pork chops, as he asked me...."take this bib off, I don't need it," in a nursing home filled with people far worse off than he, days before he left this earth, that, "Myles, you have to look at all sides of this deal and what might be happening here might just be for the better."

As I sat and watched, freezing, wet and cold that Winona night, I saw Harland step back from his cows for a moment, never giving up, but seemingly repondering the situation. Then, like a miracle, at least to me, cows began to move, on their own, assisting instead of resisting the situation. Breaking free of the muddy mass around them, they made sounds like a thick soup boiling over on a stove. They were pulling themselves up and out of the mud all on their own with hardly any assistance except a gentle prod or two by Harland. I could not believe my eyes. "Truer than who?" If I can recall correctly, almost everyone of those cows made it out of that muck that night.

Perhaps not too many springs after that night in Winona, somewhere in an upscale restaurant in Seattle, a prime cut of angus beef was served to an unsuspecting bunch of city folks who never could have known what kind of a story was ensconced into getting that meat to the end of their elegant silver forks. But they enjoyed that meal because of this man, and by default they consumed his story. Maybe there's a sheriff deputy out there somewhere who still can remember a day when he encountered a very unique citizen with another point of view, and now he even has a story to tell. Or a G.I. who has thought twice about his life since days long ago in Korea.... because of a medic from St.John, Washington. The passing of this story maker has been hard for me because stubborn men are not supposed to die. Faith brings people out of the grave, not to it. It's all too fresh in my mind right now when I recount hearing Harland tell me in just these last few days, "I didn't want this to happen, and I'm sorry if I'm upsetting anyone, I think I can get better."

Well, Harland, I guess, as you also taught me...some nails are just too twisted to be pounded back into shape. I know that now also. "But blame it" don't leave them laying around on the ground because some cow might pick it up and eat it. I will see to it, Harland, that I pick up those nails in my life and put them where they are supposed to go and never throw them away without giving them a good look over and a real chance in my life to still go into what I am building. And these stories, about the soil, and the cattle, and the CATs, and the wheat, and the hogs and the county fairs, and family meals, and the late night milkings of the old antenna cow, and the Ford hubcap UFO's, and all the rest of the rich life in your own stubborn Harlandesque way that only you could facilitate and deliver to me, will never be forgotten in my lifetime; will never be taken for granted; will continually be reshaped and no doubt will help keep my heart hay wired together for what's rest of my fence building days on this earth.

Your Friend,
Myles Marian Mustoe
Professor of Geography
Eastern Oregon University

1:32 P.M. 30 June 2007
72 Degrees, Clear degrees F.
La Grande, Oregon


Please also read, if you get a chance:
The Harland Ulrich X Files the story of the UFO sightings ....Just For Fun!

Other Friends and Links
Renate Mustoe, Myles Mustoe, Svein Waalen
The Thirtymile Fire
Circle of Love

Other Links:
Bruning Funeral Home Announcement
The ambient sounds for this page were recorded from a marsh 4 May 2007 at 6:16 a.m. located on the Walter Sholz road in Whitman County Washington at the approximate coordinates of Lat. 46.858562 N,- Long 117.675741 W. The pictures in the collage above were taken with Harland while we visited Winona later on that same day.