Some of you will remember the music of silver screen cowboys that made the West seem romantic and beautiful. Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey, and the Sons of the Pioneers had a lot to do with that, and one of my favorite songs was Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Having spent some years in Sheridan County now, I can attest that the writer of that song had never lived with the pesky things.
Most of my life has been spent in the middle of the Sandhills where we have the occasional tumbleweed, but since farming isn’t prevalent, it’s not a real issue. Bruce’s family ranch is about three ridges into the Sandhills; not far enough from farm country, and we battle tumbleweeds constantly. The fence around the yard is plastered with them, shelter belts hold them so you can’t walk through, repairing pasture fences is a stickery proposition, and the corrals are packed full. Bruce spends days dragging tumbleweeds out of the corrals with the tractor and then trying to break them up with the mower. I pick them out of the flower beds and lilac bushes to pile in the incinerator, but even if I stomp them down it only holds a fraction of the problem, and there’s no burning them anyhow, unless we get a three-day rain, which is seems unlikely.
Tumbleweeds are Russian thistles that came in with wheat that settlers planted during the homestead years when the government insisted that these vast prairies would flourish under the plow. We all know how that turned out.
A windy spring is typical of this part of the world, and it’s easy to discern which way the wind blows by watching the tumbleweeds travel through. They roll north one day and back south the next. There’s an endless supply, so clean up never lasts long. Bruce says he should have waited a while to clear out the corrals because they are about full again, but tumbleweeds were piled so high before that they mostly just blew on over the top of the six-foot fences.
Our deck and patio are an obstacle course because new tumbleweeds blow in daily. They are stacked against the big sliding barn door. I cleared them out of the yard yesterday, and this morning found a large one caught on top of the grill.
Some years, I’ve driven down Panhandle highways among tumbleweeds blowing so high that visibility was obstructed and, in a few prairie hamlets, people can’t even get out their front door in spring because tumbleweeds have blown in and packed tight.
Welcome to the romantic west.