January 28, 1999

One resolution I kept in 1998 was to start complying with the environmental rules I could afford to keep, "environmental rules" being my understanding of the real or imagined laws and restrictions supported by such outfits as the Sierra Club and Green Peace.

Attacks on landowners had been too terrifying to develop a clear understanding of the policies. Nothing has been written on the subject, but prisoners sentenced to the gallows learn very little about the tensile strength of manila rope or the operation of a trap door until it's too late to use the knowledge.

The first thing I did was save all the old newspapers for recycling at a waste disposal drop over in San Angelo. Even though I clip a lot of printed material to guide my kids and friends onto the safe grounds of my political and spiritual philosophy, I still ended up having huge bundles of newsprint.

At first, I hated sentencing my stuff in The Livestock Weekly to the recycling plant. Words die a fast enough death without tossing the pages in a big bin to be ground back to pulp. I also was uncertain whether I wanted to contribute the column inches 800 words take to save part of the forest to hide timber wolves, or provide nesting for the spotted owl. But then I realized my loss was going to be offset by disposing of all the pundits that readers and critics gush over as being "bright" and "lucid, and "deft of pen."

Right quick, I began enjoying bundling up ol' wise guy's and ol' smart mouth's columns to tie in a strangulation knot. My long-ago wife used to fold my articles face up in the bottom of her bird cage. She was one of the first practitioners of performance art in Mertzon. I still have bad dreams on the full moon from recasting the time I came home too late for dinner and found my pet tomcat lying dead on the dining room table from a hollow point .22 bullet between his eyes.

The next project was to save aluminum cans and coat hangers in reusable plastic bags. Took the first quarter of the year to set up the operation I named "AC&H-RPB." The way it was planned, I saved the 12-pack boxes to put the empties back in place. Then I kept the plastic grocery sacks to take back the cans and boxes to bring back more diet sodas. As the pantry became filled with sacks and cartons in various positions, from spilling out on the floor to tilting against the door, I used the coat hangers to fish out the sacks to rearrange the storage space.

By the second quarter, can sales became impressive. At 45 cents a pound f.o.b. Angelo, on a no-shrink, no-commission deal up front, the cans sold mighty stout compared to packer cows at a quarter and original bag 12-months wool at 35 cents a pound. (For the best weighing conditions on aluminum cans, chill in the freezer to induce vaporization. At weigh-in, don't watch the scales; watch the eyes of the person operating the scales.)

The disparity in values wasn't new. The grand old game of herding woolies and hollow horns steels us against tides of foreign competition and desperate market and weather disappointments painful enough to make a dental nurse change professions. At no time since the bloody history of the Roman gladiators, pitted against arenas full of roaring African lions, has a battle been fought as one-sided as the American ranchers matched against the subsidized forces of the beef and sheep industries of Australia and New Zealand.

The Wall Street Journal had just reported how China ruined the apple business in Washington State last year by causing juice apples to drop from $70 a ton to $10 a ton. Market quotations the week before this writing credited the tonnage of Australian and New Zealand lamb with 60 percent of our dressed market and all the major wool movement. (Over the weekend, the newest supermarket in San Angelo displayed New Zealand butterflied lamb in packages so bloody, it looked like the shad gizzards sold at a Highland lake bait stand.) So I figured I'd better ship my cans before the Australians moved on the deal and dumped a load of cans and coat hangers on the West Coast.

I no longer burn old tires to smoke polecats from underneath the saddle shed. Pour-ons are too high for a bitterweed sheep operation to use on the cow herd, and the sprayer hose leaks too much to spray anything but the ground. The trick is going to be to hit a happy medium as a new-day environmentalist, so my old adversaries won't come out to check my progress and my colleagues won't become jealous and turn me in for my digressions.