John Mattingly

Dustings

by

By John Mattingly The morning after a light snow is a revealing time to walk in the brush lands of the northern San Luis Valley. Fresh snow provides a relief map of the previous night’s activity, engaged in by other creatures that live here. The footprints of various rabbits and hares, mice and moles, numerous …

Read more

WHAT NEXT? Part 1

by

By John Mattingly Everybody knows that The Virus will gut-punch parts of the U.S. economy. Regardless of “what might have been,” the sheer cost of dealing with the disease—as it behaves alternately like a glacier and wildfire across the States—will be considerable. To approach “what next,” consider the parable of the $100 bill. A banker …

Read more

Dry Times

by

By John Mattingly Songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” should include the dicta: we need the rain like the rain needs the sky. The Sangre de Christo mountains are as bare as most of us have ever seen them in mid-May. On average, peak runoff from the Sangres is the last two weeks of May, and …

Read more

BMs, Part 1

by

By John Mattingly Note: This is first of a three-part series looking at the tension points between economic growth and environmental conservation. The November 6, 2018 election will host a ballot measure 1A, promoted by THISisChaffee.org, which claims voting “YES on 1A” will help protect forests, waters, and working lands. Four glossy pages of pictures …

Read more

Trump: the Word

by

By John Mattingly The word trump came into common usage in the early 1500s as a derivative of triumph and trompe, Germanic and Old French respectively. Use of the word trump peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, slumping in the mid-to-late 20th century, and finally enjoying a usage boost starting in the …

Read more

Working Like A Dog

by

By John Mattingly No one has ever mentioned me as a dog person. I’m not even a dog enthusiast. I would never walk a dog, for example, or groom or wash a dog, or take a dog to the dentist, or let a dog in a vehicle, or feed a dog anything but raw meet, …

Read more

A New Water Rush

by

By John Mattingly The right to domestic water, like the right to own guns, is constitutional. (Imagine Charlton Heston pointing at a glass of water.) The Colorado Constitution states no citizen of the state shall ever be denied access to clean drinking water. It’s a guarantee from the early days of statehood, when the East-West, …

Read more

Going Virtual, Part 3

by

By John Mattingly Ballot Measure 1A passed handily in the November 6 election, meaning there will be a small sales tax increase to raise an estimated one million dollars to fund activities that will protect forests, waters and open spaces. On November 5, Commissioner Felt offered a guest opinion in the Mountain Mail advocating for …

Read more

IRS and GAAP Part 2

by

By John Mattingly Note: This is the second of a three-part series looking at the tension points between economic growth and environmental conservation. Growth: Like gravity, it’s the law. Though there are solid reasons for both adoring and admonishing growth, it’s actually circulating in our economic bloodstream. Our entire economic structure, from Generally Accepted Accounting …

Read more

The B-WORD

by

By John Mattingly As FACEbook proves itself worthy of being another F-word, Inner Old Man has squeezed out a new B-word: BUTbook, an emergent social media platform with but one rule: Each message and response must end in the word BUT. By BUT-ending sentences, and BUT-splicing paragraphs, a conversation can be reversed, enhanced, or surprised …

Read more

A Farmer Far Afield: Watch Out For the Words

by

By John Mattingly

I remember the days of, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” And, “I am rubber, you are glue so what you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” Codicils to these were: “Talk is cheap,” and “Actions speak louder than words,” and “BS walks.”

Read more

Book Review: Brayed Expectations

by

By John C. Mattingly; Judith Penrose Mattingly, illustrations ISBN: 978-0-9710430-7-7 Morris Publishing, 2017 $10.00; 97pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel Readers of Colorado Central are likely already familiar with Mattingly, since he’s a featured columnist. His latest book, Brayed Expectations, is a collection of brief tales and essays about donkeys. The majority of them are …

Read more

A Farmer Far Afield: A Duck’s Life

by

By John Mattingly

Ducks are smart, capable of deductive reasoning, with an intelligence quotient equal to donkeys. Many are surprised by this, but it is worth remembering that mammals with four legs require a lot of brain space to regulate locomotion, whereas ducks have no complicated considerations when it comes to gliding effortlessly across water. So even though the duck brain is small, most of it is dedicated to the pursuit of life’s most persistent needs and pleasures.

Read more

Warm Winters

by

By John Mattingly

The most common “thoughts and prayers” during an unseasonably warm winter are mixed between taking advantage of the warm weather and the perennial concern in the West for snowpack and water supply.

Having farmed for over forty years, I’ve spent most of my life outside, where luck and livelihood depended on the weather. My memories and records of the weather are testimonial and cover a de minimis time period, but suggest warm winters have come along about two out of five winters since 1968. There have been several Januaries during which I had to suppress the temptation to plant wheat, and one January, in 1976, when I did plant wheat, it went on to be harvested in June. “You got away with one,” an old timer told me.

Maybe. In recent years, as noted in a prior column, winter wheat (Hard Red Winter Wheat), is becoming common in places that were previously too cold. And, ironically, this should signal that we may need to “get away with one” (or two) if Earth’s climate changes in ways less favorable to mammals. We know this is a possibility; we see evidence accruing, and recent storms have both stimulated probity and caused many to bury their head in a pew.

Ed Quillen wrote a piece years ago articulating problems with mobilizing today to prevent or influence outcomes that manifest several generations in the future: (a) it’s hard enough for 7.6 billion people to secure their daily bread and shelter, let alone change their behavior to benefit the still unborn, (b) many of the necessary sacrifices are required of those least capable of making them, and finally (c) the difficulty of arbitrating fairness between those who probably contributed to the problem and those who may deserve extra credit for prior restraint or inability.

Read more

A Farmer Far Afield: Inner Old Man Year-End Wrap Up

by

By John Mattingly

In the late days of fall and early days of winter, we get long nights, we wrap ourselves, we resolve, and we make lists: the Top Tens of the prior year, acknowledging that at this time of year, the benign indifference of the universe is simply more precise.

Read more

Inside Out

by

By John Mattingly

In a year when we’ve been learning how virtual reality actually is, an interesting pair of tomcats came to visit the farm. Though not a cat person, I do enjoy cats. A great number have come along over the years, sometimes as a gift, sometimes as a feral visitor, occasionally as an opportunist, and more than once: as a traveler behind the seat of an old truck. Early on, I decided that on a farm, a cat has to be either inside or out. It has to be fed to fatness, or fed just enough to survive another day living the precarious life of a cat, while policing rodents.

This either/or of in-or-out is probably guilty of many worthy exceptions, but without doubt, every cat that seduced me to invite it inside the house, later fell victim to predators when venturing out at night, into darkness filled with eagles, hawks, owls, coyotes, dogs and raccoons. Those cats who remained outside, living in a den of their choice while hunting – these cats lasted into old age. To live through Valley winters, a feral cat learns early that life is dangerous and some recognize the value of a little help from humans, which they reciprocate by keeping the rodents terrorized.

When a cat wanders onto the farm, the first thing I do is offer food and watch how they eat. An outside cat will take no more than a small nip of food before checking in all directions for potential attackers. An inside cat will keep its nose to the food and never look up, except if petted, and then only briefly.

Over the years, most experiences typical of farm cats have come my way. A calico named Tulip slept with the chickens and occasionally caught a ride on the back of a goat. Then there was Orpheus – a solid black cat with luminous eyes who appeared and disappeared around the yard like a ghost – until, on Halloween night, he rolled over on his back at our front door, expecting a belly rub. Mamasita, a brown female, had a nice home for herself and six kittens in the tool box of a truck I bought from someone almost a hundred miles away. Three months later they all disappeared and showed up at the seller’s farm. Kit and Kat, a pair of females, hunted together sharing the fun of cat-and-mouse for hours.

Read more

Farmer Far Afield: In Biology We Trust

by

By John Mattingly

Fall is a seductive time. The changing colors, rich afternoon light and impending curiosity about the approach of winter. The hot days of summer become a memory and life in the garden moves to preparation rather than anticipation. Regardless of how difficult the summer, the summer solstice and Halloween feel like a reward for enduring the worries of water, weather, weeds and varmints. And larger four-legged mammals.

Read more

Gardening in Circles: Give Peas a Chance

by

By John Mattingly

Shutting down a garden is like saying goodbye to a good old friend who visited for the summer, a friend who challenged you, fed you, worked you, taught you the upside of patience and sharpened your powers of observation and contemplation.

You knew the friend had to leave, but in the course of the season you tossed that onto the compost heap. It seemed the friend would always be there, connecting body and soul through Earth and sun.

As the end of September approaches, a gardener becomes attentive to the cool feel of the morning air, and takes measures to keep the friend around a while longer, and makes an effort to preserve the friend’s bounty to bring light to the dark days of winter.

In the Valley, frost-free days after mid-September are a gift, even though the heat units are few. Many nights the temperature drops to 33 degrees and then bounces up to 60 in the first hour of sun. This can be good for curing some crops, but inevitably reminds us that our friend is packing up, getting ready to go.

One consolation is that much of the work of a garden continues in all seasons: working with the aftermath and thinking about rotation and expansion options for next year.

One of the farmers I learned a lot from in my youth asked me, “When does next year begin?”

Thinking it was a simple calendar question, I said, “January first.”

He put a rough, gnarly hand on my shoulder. “Son, next year starts right now, in the fall of this year.”

He went on to explain that the way you treat your stubble and your ground in the fall makes all the difference next spring.

Read more

A Farmer Far Afield: Gardening in Circles

by

Part Two

By John Mattingly

Farmers and gardeners look to the scientific method for guidance, after exhausting their instincts, intuition, indications from their bones, and the testimony of others, which is likely based on instincts, intuitions and bones.

Read more

The Rise of HRWW and Gophers

by

By John Mattingly

Temperatures in the Valley have been warm this season, and modeling shows spring arriving two to three weeks early this year. The notion that the weather and climate have a timetable may be a prime example of hubris, but there clearly are signals in global weather that are changing, and whether they are human-caused or cyclical, or a combination of both, does not change the needs of adaptation.

In the Valley, from 1988 until now – the period in which I farmed in the Valley – a couple of changes correlate to a longer growing season. Acknowledging that correlation is not causation, it is true that from roughly 1995 to present, winter wheat, aka HRWW for hard red winter wheat, and winter rye have become a regular crop in the Valley, when prior to that time, winter wheat was not thought to be viable because of the cold temperatures and late spring frosts. If the wheat crown is frozen for long periods it dehydrates and dies, and if the crown makes the winter, it will head out and a frost in late May or early June will cause a lot of blanks in the wheat head.

Read more

John Mattingly: Rock and Roll

by

By John Mattingly

“My-my, hey-hey, rock and roll is here to stay…”
Because a lot of the great rock music is now regarded as classic or oldies, Neil Young may be right; that rock will always be with us, though it may elevate to a truly classic status, in which the great rock and roll of Mayall, Cream, Stones, Beatles, ZZ Top, Hendrix, Doors, and a host of others will rise to the same historical atmosphere as Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Bach, and Britten.
The term rock and roll gained wide popularity from a Cleveland-based disc jockey, Albert Alan James “Moondog” Freed in the 1940s who played a blend of country, rhythm and blues, and “race music” from black artists. Freed’s sponsor, Leo Mintz, encouraged him to call his show The Moondog Rock & Roll House Party in an effort to spread race music to a wider, whiter audience. In the late ‘20s and 30s, black artists had produced a host of popular songs, including the titles Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama and Rock and Roll. Freed and Mintz were instrumental in re-branding race music as rhythm and blues that eventually became rock and roll.

Read more

John Mattingly: The Tale of Dingdoggy

by

By John Mattingly

An old yellow dog named Dingdoggy came from fortunate breeding and circumstance. His daddy, Dongdaddy, had been a well-cut dog with excellent cunning who ate well, accumulated an enormous number of bones, lived large with attractive bitches, and worried little about necessities. In short, Dongdaddy mastered his masters, for the most part. They occasionally spanked him with a newspaper, but that did not stop him from teaching his son, Dingdoggy, the ways of big-league dogliness, which went back to grandfather doggy, Drumpfdog. The Drumpfdog line were purebreds who, to be honest, dominated at dog shows where young Dingdoggy learned that he could chin, snag and even mount female dogs at dog shows, without them being in heat, an opportunity and privilege afforded by his heritage, and his huge and growing status among show hounds and assorted bitches.
Dingdoggy dug up a few of his daddy’s bones, though he was never forthright as to how many bones he secured from his own hunting prowess, and how many bones he exhumed from Dongdaddy’s many bone banks. Dongdaddy had buried so many bones that he honestly did not know how many bones he had, and Dingdoggy also gathered many bones beyond his actual bone needs, taking bones from many other dogs, and after a short time, bragging that he had, himself, earned all of the bones. Given the nature of canine purity, many dogs admired Dingdoggy’s ability to claim the success of other dogs for himself, while other dogs only growled when he came around.
Dingdoggy was a particularly barkative dog as a pup, which confirmed his philosophy that if he barked long enough, and loud enough, and lifted his leg to water various territorial structures frequently enough, food and good fortune would fall from above. Dingdoggy learned that he could even excrete a big brown pile on a lawn or street or even in a vehicle and only good things happened to him. As he matured, Dingdoggy began to think there was something special about his exudates.
Dingdoggy let other dogs know that his exudates not only did not stink, they were sweet to the eye and nose, a claim that many dogs recognized as the workings of a dog deluded by his failure to deal with his exudates when he was pup. Yet other dogs fell into a uniformed stupor, and even though they knew Dingdoggy’s exudates were foul to both nose and eye, they did not seek to offend or correct. They simply fell in with the pack and followed the stink.
This coaxed Dingdoggy to an even more unusual assertion as to his abilities: he began to walk on his hind two legs. This caused a huge disturbance among all purebred dogs, who were appalled at the mere notion of walking on fewer than four legs. They asserted that, yes, sometimes a dog lost a leg in a fight or a trap and had to get around on three legs, and these dogs were more pitied than admired for their adaptation. But Dingdoggy declared that three-legged dogs were beyond pity and worthy only of jokes and mockery for their lack of leg. Dingdoggy claimed that walking on two legs while keeping two legs in reserve was smart, even though several alert dogs pointed out that if Dingdoggy’s hind legs failed, there was no way to transplant his front legs. Instead, he would be walking with his muzzle in the dirt.

Read more

John Mattingly: The Sap in Sapiens

by

By John Mattingly

In the fall of the year, when the season’s efforts – good and bad – must be accepted, and preparations for the next year are less demanding, it is nice to sit on a tractor all day and watch Earth turn from daybreak to dusk. The light has a slant and richness that are hypnotizing. It is a time for what my father called “a long ponder.” After one such ponder he told me that he suspected he was living in the last years of Homo sapiens. Even then, in the years of Reagan and Bush Sr., he could not quite reconcile the persistence of war, greed and cruelty. It is sad and humbling to think what humans could do if all the killing of human culture had been applied to improving the life of everyone.

Read more

Cut My Hair

by

By John Mattingly

Not long ago, I was dining out with a friendly group of Republicans who went on and on about the glories of the Reagan years. It’s difficult to stay quiet on this topic if you actually lived in the Reagan years and paid attention. But, before I could give the discussion a booster shot of reality, before getting to the Reagan-guided deregulation of financial systems that laid the foundation for a greed-and-bubble economy, or the Iran Contra Affair in which Reagan “knew in his heart” that he did the right thing even though it was a felony, or before I could get to the bulging taxes and deficits and expansive militarism of Reagan’s actual term in office, a song came over the radio in the cafe …

Read more

John Mattingly: The War on Fire

by

By John Mattingly

Wildfires are not inspired by ISIS, but the war on fire and the war on terror share a few futilities. Fighting fire is somewhat like squaring off against the sun.
Sun, water and earth combine to form carbohydrates and sometimes nitrogenized carbohydrates (proteins), all of which burn through either combustion or metabolism in relatively short time spans. Simple carbohydrates, like leaves and vegetable matter, burn relatively quickly and usually within a year. More complex carbohydrates, lignins, like trees, have a longer calendar for burning, but a visit to any forest shows that at all times some of the lignin is being burned, if not by fire then by microbes and bigger creatures. If the full family of carbohydrates did not burn, the litter would make it very difficult to move about on the land surfaces of Earth, and lightning ignitions would be enormously hazardous to mammals. As it is, humans are working industriously on a positive feedback loop of carbon emissions that increase heat and carbon dioxide, that in turn increase heat and carbon dioxide and more forest fires.

Read more

John Mattingly: Inner Old Man Update

by

Just as science fiction is having a hard time competing with science fact, Inner Old Man is having a hard time competing – or perhaps the word is coping – with the voices of complaint, despair and outrage. Terrorism is horrible, but so are car accidents and train wrecks and the fact that more teenagers have been killed in Chicago gun violence than have been killed in action in Iraq, yet we are not spending trillions to reduce these horrors. U.S. citizens are truly incapable of accurately and appropriately assessing risk, and Donald Trump knows it.
One might say the only thing we cannot ignore is ignorance itself.

Read more

John Mattingly: Home Land Security

by

When leaders and legislators use the word “homeland,” war is usually on the way. Putting the words “home” and “land” together commutes a national notion to one’s home and has been a reliable motivator for raising or deploying a fighting force. Young people in particular, the most able to fight, and who have been living at home for most of their lives, are easily tricked by this play on words. The prospect of defending the home of your parents, spouse, or children motivates the fighting spirit far more than the truth, which is that gutless, lard-bound leaders need young people to do their bidding and generate profits for the war machinery.

Read more

Extinction

by

By John Mattingly

or the last 30 years, I’ve written for various ag trade publications on topics ranging from salt to bears, estate planning to bindweed control. After reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, I started a five part series on extinction: the history of human understanding, the process, what we know of prior mass extinctions, the clues to the current mass extinction, and the consequences.

Read more

Dogs – John Mattingly

by

By John Mattingly

I don’t dislike dogs. But this doesn’t mean I would run a mile to divert a dog from jumping off a cliff, nor would I go out of my way to be mean. I appreciate that dogs have become a treasured mammal among many humans – sometimes to the exclusion of all rationality – which prompts the proposition that many dog lovers have both rosy glasses and selective amnesia about the nature of dogs, and that they tend to ignore a few of the savory historical facts about canines.

Read more

Keeping Up With the Bundys

by

By John Mattingly If you’re like me and many sensible folks in Nevada and Oregon, you’re wondering why the federal response to the Bundy antics has been so patiently executed. Before pondering that puzzle, I’d like first to state my perception of the underlying problem, for which the Bundys have become icons: The cattle business …

Read more

Football and Religion

by

By John Mattingly

With the playoffs going full force and the Super Bowl on the horizon, my mind wandered back to many years ago when my wife and I got married. We made a deal: I would go to Roman Catholic mass with her on Sunday morning if she would watch football with me on Sunday afternoon.

Read more

A Call to Armistice

by

By John Mattingly

On Nov. 11 we observed Veterans Day, again lavishing praise and gratitude on our veterans. However, the Nov. 11 holiday originated as Armistice Day, a day commemorating peace at the end of WWI.

The European Allies met in Compeigne France in 1918 to sign an armistice with Germany that ended WWI, the “war to end all wars” that left over 20 million dead. Armistice Day was observed with an hour of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

The first Armistice Day in the U.S. was Nov. 11, 1919 following a proclamation by Woodrow Wilson citing the day as an “opportunity given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the council of nations.” In 1938, the U.S. Congress made Armistice Day a national holiday.

Read more