Leading up to the long weekend just past, there was a flurry of activity getting a house site ready for the last of our three sons moving home to Beaver Valley.
Then, the day after Victoria Day, the prefab walls came and with a crane the walls were put in place in less than a day.
I guess I am reflecting on how great that is. He, his partner, and their three young sons are moving from that great Alberta town of Canmore where the social and recreational life is pretty good.
However, homes are unaffordable to buy and build and rental of family accommodation is next to impossible to find.
We never knew what to expect when they left the ranch to get a post-secondary education. Not one of our sons chose agriculture as a field of study: liberal arts and economics, forestry and business, and engineering were the choices they made.
The ranch was hardly big enough to support one family so it became an understanding that if any of them were to want to come home, they would need to bring an enterprise or job with them.
But what made them all want to settle and put down their own roots so close to where they were brought up? I think about this a lot, and still wonder.
The ranch as an agricultural business would need to be bigger or would have to layer several more enterprises on top of the primary cattle/hay/direct market beef and pork sales in order to support a modern family.
It has been known for some time that the next generation of more than one offspring would have to bring some value-add to the base operation of a ranch or the ranch would have to be larger in scale.
These were not to be choices our family made. We had a great partnership with another family, which built the ranch, and then for succession purposes, the ranch was split in two, requiring both to grow or fade.
This last son, like the other two, was not the biblical “prodigal son” who left but wanted his share of the parents’ fortune upon leaving. By the way, the Christian prodigal son squandered the share the father gave him and he returned poorer than the servants at his family home.
Fortunately, each has made his own, but somewhat different way in the world.
Mum and I were not to hold any of them “down on the farm” if they wanted to prove their independence in the world.
We came home to where our roots were, in order to raise our family much as I was raised, free to explore the surroundings as we wanted. I think that being raised at the 150 Mile was a privileged opportunity. The population was around 90 people in the early 1960s.
Our children were free to ride their horses, canoe, boat, and raft further and further from home as they grew up.
I vividly remember one son being allowed to drive a team of horses in the hayfield for the first time. The machine made so much noise that he didn’t know we could hear him singing as he made his rounds of the field.
Another time and another son, it was the engine ‘missing’ on the baler that brought him into the field from home with the pickup and the tool box. While he was 10, he had been driving for several years. He informed me that the magneto was acting up and that I might need the tools he proudly had brought.
One other son, at being (badly) instructed by me how to run a machine by shouting over the noise of the diesel engine, stopped with a tear in his eye and informed me I wasn’t home enough to teach him anything. “Ouch,” it was true.
We tried during the upbringing phase of our family to encourage the enjoyment of our immediate surroundings.
On this past long weekend, the whole family went by canoe, kayak and paddleboard from the new homesite on Beaver Lake back to another son’s family home on the next lake.
Mother’s Day saw most of us boating to the “back forty,” the farthest flung property on the ranch.
The little ones (grandchildren) will soon be spreading their wings and exploring the world. We live in the hope they too will have a home someday, close to where their roots are and where their explorations began.
David Zirnhelt is a rancher in the Cariboo and member of the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Association. He is also chair of the Advisory Committee for the Applied Sustainable Ranching Program at Thompson Rivers University Williams Lake Campus.
