I don’t know what to make of this weather. These perfect fall afternoons are great, but it’s supposed to start tipping toward winter. The colors have been great, and it’s been so warm that a lot of the aspens are still green. So fall could go on for another couple of weeks, and that’s fine with me. With all the road construction around here that is still a long way from being wrapped up, it’s good to have cooperative weather. They should be flying lift towers at the resort formerly known as The Canyons. The new lifts should really fix the bottleneck getting on the mountain.
I wish I had my projects around the ranch nailed down. Somehow the whole season has gone by, and some big items on the June to-do list are still works in progress (or still in the planning stages). The biggest one was getting a coat of paint on the sheep barn. In my life, we have never had sheep. The barn has only been used for hay storage. But the barn was originally built for sheep and the name has stuck. The only livestock in there are some mutant rodents that will eat the wiring out of any piece of machinery stored there, and are immune to even plutonium-based poisons.
It’s a pretty big building, but slapping a coat of paint on it didn’t seem that hard. I actually got a reasonable start on it last year when I rebuilt the north wall. The new wood had to be painted, and I got a coat on that, and then did the front wall that looked really bad. I got a little of one side done before I ran out of paint. By then the weather had turned, and the project just stopped. So it really looked awful. Some of it was freshly painted, some was pressure washed down to bare wood, and some was still covered with the last bits of ancient crumbling paint still clinging to the walls.
There are no utilities there, so the pressure washer is gas powered, and the water for it needs to be hauled in. Like so many jobs, the setup takes longer than the actual job. Of course in the process of pressure washing, boards are loose and need to be re-nailed. Somehow last year’s fresh coat of paint made some of the really bad siding jump out, and I’ve ended up doing some fairly substantial siding replacement. That meant I had to round up a generator, saw, nail gun, and drag it all out there. It just kind of spiraled out of control, and what looked like a week-long project has turned into a Sisyphean loop where any repair on one part makes something else look bad enough to require more attention.
Most people would have decided that this barn was really obsolete and not worth spending any effort on at all. And I’m beginning to realize that most people would have been right. But I’m now looking at 20 gallons of paint, a new sprayer with a lot more capacity than what I tried to use last fall, and weather that really doesn’t offer any excuses.
On other fronts, I’ve reached the point in the season where the cattle can’t leave soon enough. We lease the grazing out these days, and the cattle go home for the winter. They could leave pretty much any time, especially cow number J-08. The other day, she was standing in the middle of the highway. I opened a gate down the road and, with the help of a couple of guys driving by, we convinced her to go back in the field. But by the time I got to my house (chasing the only tool that hadn’t already been packed out to the barn project), she had circled through and was back out on the road. This time she brought reinforcements.
I unleashed a special incantation that invokes steak knives, McDonalds, and other useful profanity, and they went back the way they came, showing me a big, well-hidden hole in the fence they were coming through. Everybody but cow J-08, who stood in the middle of the highway, looking to make a break into the neighbor’s front yard. In this case, the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence. But a big black cow standing in the middle of the highway in the evening shadows isn’t a good thing. So the barn project yielded to the fence repair and the roundup.
After considerable chasing, I finally got her back with her co-conspirators. But I have to say that there was an unusual satisfaction in tossing a steak on the grill that night.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs on Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.