In September of 2006 I visited Harland and his family and went with them to the Whitman County Fair. I was going through a loss of a marriage and my heart was sick. Nine years, and then bang, like a shot gun blast at a big pheasant in a wheat field....it's over. I dropped from the sky dumbfounded. But in the midst of it all I fell into some very special people's lives. People who had been there all along for me almost as if it were planned somehow. Larry and Naomi Mathews was one family I had known since childhood. They went to bat for me and ironically, at one time they knew and had worked with Harland in the past. Good people are linked together. The Ulrichs were family friends just like the Mathews and in September, I was on my way back to La Grande and decided to stop by.

It seems the only thing I can do when things such as this happen to me is write, write, and write some more. At the fair that year, and on the way to the fair my mind had a chance to reflect on where I was and who I really was. Where I was, was on the side of the mountain that was home to me, where the landscape looked familiar, where my children were born and raised, where I grew up in many more ways than one. Who I was, I rediscover, was a person who felt very much at peace here, with the vernacular, the personalities, the entities flora and fauna, with myself. I was missing that, And on 23 October 2006 as a result of that visit to the Ulrich's place and the Whitman County Fair, from my home in Wenatchee I would look out over the sun coming up on the Cascades and I would turned toward my academic training and write, like a geographer, about where I am, physically and perceptually:

It's a peaceful quiet place mostly. We have our share of the city life here, but you can get outside that quick. Urbanization is still charged somewhat with stopping at some boundary of sanity where mint, and the potato, wheat and asparagus, beehives and pastures take over. It doesn't change much around here...except on occasion when its time to weed out a wind break. It can get a little noisy around harvest time when you can hear the sounds of Mexican folk songs being sung in the orchards, the clatter of aluminum ladders in the tree rows or the roar of trucks and tractors hauling fruit. The smell of the ripened fruit in the air coincides with this noise... a productive smell, a productive noise.

There are mountains here filled with rattlesnakes called the Saddles. There are places here like the old course of the Milwaukee Road that have long been forgotten. Pheasant, Chukker and quail hide in the bushes and fields. The wind here can still speak by way of the rustling of leaves. Some may call this simple, quiet, landscape, hicksville. Centre pivot irrigation systems run by computers...are just not sophisticated enough for them. That's okay. There's a place for them...where those folks are happy. But I'm happy here, at home, with my people, who tell jokes about bulls jumping a fence line and the folks who hear the joke..... sincerely laugh and understand the punch line; folks who know how to make pie crusts that never fail and have two years of peaches preserved and stocked up in their pantry; people who never miss the county fair, people who live on county roads made of gravel and don't mind the dust. This is where I need to be these days back where life still has not lost hope for me

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What's Real
I remember writing those words above and coming to terms with something inside myself, and for a moment quelling the anxiety and pain. When Harland and I were on the side of that hill by the barn that winter day in 1974, little did I know that some thirty years later, would I be writing about that experience in this context.

We had finished feeding the bulls that morning. There really were bulls, Angus bulls, a herd that Harland had developed into a kind of marketing niche. Not many people were specializing in bulls back then, let alone, the notion of hybrid vigor in defining a herd had really not taken off quite yet in the 1970s. And so, Harland became associated with Angus...and in particular these bulls. It was amazing to me, but Harland told me that much of the stock he started with, and many of the animals (Angus) on the ranch while I was there, were registered and had their bloodlines going back to his parents herd. There were some old cows in that herd when I was there.

There really was an Ayrshire we named Antenna Cow. Antenna cow stood out amongst all the black beauties in that she was clearly not Angus and she was defiantly NOT POLLED! and she knew it. Her horns stuck up on her head like cell phone towers on the top of Steptoe Butte. She did give plenty of milk, especially to calves that may have needed a little extra at times. She was a good cow, and looked to be a direct descendent of the famed Ada, whose notorious antics were not too far out of sync with those of Antenna Cow.

And along with the milk there were cats....cats....and more cats....Harland let the cats thrive on the place, they were ferrel for the most part but every once in awhile one of them would get friendly, and of course, they all tolerated human kind, around Antenna Cows let down. (Perhaps out of that lineage of kitty's came a special cat; as black as an Angus, a cat named Mully. Harland gave Mully to my wife, in about 2002 or so, as a little kitten. What a special cat he became.) (Above left: Hampshire hog at the Whitman County Fair 10 Sept. 2006)

There really was an Earl Butz who was Secretary of Agriculture back then. He said strange things about the Italian Catholic Pope and got into a lot of trouble over it. Harland and I always had good discussions about him, agricultural policy and politics in general. Although he had his ideas, he was good at defending them, and I learned more about the strategies of argumentum ad hominem at the ranch than I ever did in a logic class. Let alone, I was daily indoctrinated into Harland's insightful perspectives on agricultural policy and the nature of the greatest bureaucratic contradiction to production in the "capitalistic free world"(?)....The U.S. Department of Agriculture. An agency that teaches the farmer to grow more crops, so he does, and conversely he becomes one of the most productive farmers on the face of the earth...so he gluts the market with commodities, and the prices drop into oblivion and he goes broke. Harland, however, was ahead of this vicious cycle, by virtue of his thinking, and his work ethic.

Metallic Memories
Additionally, on the place near St. John there were metallic memories embedded into the soil like the granites of Steptoe Butte emerging out of the loess. And there amongst the bulls the cows and some sows, and generations of farrel felines taking up the volunteer job of maintaining the population of generations of field mice...There were lots of old tractors, cars, combines, trucks and an occasional refrigerator. They did not litter, but rather decorated the landscape, in the true spirit of one of the original recyclers, the American farmer. And Harland was a re-cycler. Once I had been given the opportunity to take some photographs of this truly unique metallic museum of natural history and while doing so Harland would amaze me at his in depth of remembrances he had of each exhibit. He'd tell me which car still ran, which truck still had a good transmission, which one was missing what, and how long he had this vehicle and where he bought that one at. He knew it all. Once, while I was taking some pictures of some of the old rigs out in the yard, he asked me if I could go out and put a fence post up "agin" one of the doors of an old prized truck that had been parked in its present position for umpteen years. I was obliged to do so, noticing that although the faded body was still in pretty good shape, the seats had become a Mecca for field mice. "It's a great truck, it still runs, it's one of my favorites!" he said. I believed him. And I did so because thirty years before, when we were both just a few feet from where that truck now rests I asked Harland if he'd like to have a little fun with an old hubcap I found partly buried in the field. After an in-depth discussion on how old the hubcap was and from which car it came, he said sure! (Left, one of the museum exhibits on the place).

UFO, Circa 1940
It was about 1947, just a little west of St. John, in the shadows of Mount Rainier, where one of the first UFO sightings ever took place. So it was anachronistically appropriate what was about to happen that winter morning on the farm. Harland and I both proceeded to a position on the hillside east of and above the barn from which Antenna Cow was watching us intently. The hubcap was from a 1940's "something-mobile" that, when I picked it up, had probably been embedded in the ground for almost as long back as that first sighting had taken place in 1947. Harland, cleaned it off a little, and from his position on the hill gave it a throw. As it went sailing across that gray winter sky, with a backdrop of the Palouse country, lightly frosted in snow, I took four pictures. I stood just west of Harland on the same hillside and after each toss I retrieved the hubcap. The angle seemed good in the little viewfinder but I could not be sure if the pictures came out until I had them developed at the local drug store. A few people did see them since then, and many wondered....and we kind of let them.

....Just a twenty year old kid and his "boss" out on the farm taking UFO pictures. And that is how the UFO pictures came to be. And that was Harland. That's why I believed him. And it was this childlike nature in this very good man that I so needed in my life back then. And like a vine of bindweed in that field tying itself around the rear view mirrors of the old REO Speed Wagon, it's what I have clung to since. When the critics and the skeptics asked Jesus, who were those foremost in His kingdom? He called for them to go bring him a little child. The simple punch lines, the honest work, the clear clean air; the straight forward look at life and even his stubborn belief......those are the virtues I found in this man who threw a hubcap Frisbee that winter day. It was this childlike character that so caught my heart a character exhibited only by those who are truly the chosen ones of that Kingdom.

Right: Harland by an old Cider Press at the Whitman County Fair 2006. 10 September 2006

Myles Marian Mustoe Ph.D.
Professor of Geography
Eastern Oregon University

1:32 P.M. 30 June 2007
72 Degrees, Clear degrees F.
La Grande, Oregon
Others:
Renate Mustoe, Myles Mustoe, Svein Waalen

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.
The Harland Ulrich X Files ....just for fun...........Dr. M.