It is early morning. Here, on these 200 acres of land in rural Leon County, I’ve given up sleeping through the rest of what would be called the night. Daybreak is still almost three hours away. Today, my sisters and I prepare to sell off the cattle that have been a part of this place for the 35 years it has been in our family, and to lease the land for grazing. A small herd of commercial cattle—Hereford bulls were popular back then—grazed this place in 1973 when our mother and daddy bought the land, actually a gift from our maternal grandmother, money from land she had sold in northwest Harris County, that sprawling area near the Gulf coast that the city of Houston has laid claim to over the last 30 years.
Where we grew up, Jackrabbit Road, a two-lane blacktop, was one of the major roads, but dirt roads were not uncommon in the early 1950s. Jackrabbit Road has been a 6-lane combination speedway/traffic snarl for some time now, Highway 6 it’s called, running east and west across a heavily populated, at times nightmarish part of north Houston. In our young years, expansive pastures still dominated the landscape, part of that great salt grass plain that goes to the coast—or comes from the coast—forests of pines and hardwoods breaking the sameness. Dairies were common in the first half of the 20th century, but by 1973 things had begun to change, as the city crept north. The land increased greatly in value, sold by the square foot, and of course, the taxes crept higher and higher. Land that had been in the family since the late years of the 19th century, a gift to our grandmother from her mother, became too expensive to own, practically speaking. For people who love land, and that is important, especially to German Texans—Theis, Kleb, Benfer, Fuchs, Feuhs—the migration was farther to the north, for those of modest means, those who cashed in on family inheritance in northwest Harris County.
November will mark 35 years for our family on this land, a place that wasn’t a home, except in the beginning, for a short time before daddy got sick, and they moved back to northwest Harris County, closer to doctors and hospitals and family. The retirement place in the country became just a place, a place that daddy claimed to love—“If I could just get better and go to Normangee,” he said, not long before he died. I think he got to make that trip—he, Mother, our sister Sue and her husband Henry, and most likely our Grandma Fuchs, the matriarch, the source for the land, and by some consequence, the cattle that inhabit the land. The Fuchses always had cattle. In the early years of the 20th century, before busy Memorial Drive was a street, which along with Buffalo Bayou separates luxurious Houston River Oaks from the historically working class neighborhood known as the West End, the stretch just south of the neighborhood was our great grandpa Will Fuchs’s pasture. In the late 1940s and early 50s, our hard-working Grandmother and her son operated a dairy on the 80 acres out in the country she had inherited from her mother, Louisa Benfer Fuchs, whose family settled in northwest Harris County in 1866. The historical marker for the Klein community lists the Benfer family as one of the early settlers, along with Theis and Kleb and Klein. An elementary school is named for our great-great grandparents.
Yesterday afternoon the neighbor who looks after our small herd here on the land in Leon County rounded them up, riding a bright orange Kubota tractor, bags of range cubes the prize once the two dozen cows, half as many calves, and these days a Brangus bull made their way into the corral and the holding trap that sits to the east of my barn house. Throughout the night, the mothers, separated from their current crop of offspring—an aid for our brother-in-law Henry today when he attempts to pair them up—have bellowed without ceasing. This ain’t no “Cattle Call”, no romantic tone as captured in the lyrics of Eddy Arnold’s famous old cowboy song: “The cattle are prowlin'/The coyotes are howlin,” with cowboys on horseback, spurs jingling. The coyotes around here that typically announce the coming of dusk and greet the early morning have been drowned out by the plaintive bawling of cows trapped, separated from their normal routine, wondering what’s going on.
This morning, as I lay in the bedroom downstairs, only 50 feet from the corral and the trap fence, I moaned at the intense protests of the cows. Dumb beasts they are, but their instincts tell them something isn’t right. When a few seconds would pass, marked by absolute quiet, only the chirruping of crickets just outside the door that leads from the bedroom to an outdoor shower, chirruping crickets occupying sound space, I would think, “Oh, how wonderful is the quiet”. No more sleep for me, however, because the bellowing continued, and it continues.
As the saying goes, our cattle are town dog fat. After a hot, dry June and July, the rains started in August and have continued into September, the most recent courtesy of Hurricane Ike. Today, decisions will be made. Some of the herd will likely remain—the young blacks, and maybe the black baldies—remain to graze on the only land they’ve known, land to be leased to their new owner. All of the others, including the Brangus bull, will go to auction. Perhaps that won’t be the decision, however. If the price is “too high” for the prospective buyer, others claim to be waiting in the wings for their chance at this small herd and the lease. One way or another, change is in the works. Soon, we will no longer be “in the cattle business”. Producing round bales of hay from our 20-acre hayfield will no longer be our concern. Paying someone to put out hay and cubes in the winter won’t show up in our check register. Fretting over when the cows and calves will get worked each fall will be a memory. Maintaining the fences and mowing the pastures will fall on the shoulders of the lessee. Yes, change is in the works, and there is no need to fear it. Now you have a cow, now you don’t. Want another cow? That is indeed a choice and a possibility. Now you have a horse, now you don’t? Want another horse? Yes, that is also a choice and a possibility. Want to be free of responsibility for livestock? Want to make some choices for yourself, in all due respect to the choices that have been made for you by those who thought they knew what was best for them, and for you? How does that feel?
Pay homage to your heritage, and try to move forward, honoring not only those who begat you, and before them, those who begat yet another generation of ancestors. Change doesn’t have to mean loss. I am reminded of one of the many bumper stickers I see in northern New Mexico that cause my antennae to salute. “Change is inevitable. Growth is a choice.” I like the way that feels. It’s a little scary, yes, but it carries with it the wonderful promise of being alive, living the only life we know in this odd reality where we exist, and hopefully, where we do our best to live it loud and clear and strong, every chance we get.
Growth is Optional—Normangee, Texas (September 23, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
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