SIX SOUTHERN BELLES VISIT THE RANCH

The stagecoach with the mail arrived several weeks ago followed by mail from the pony express. It was verified and deemed official. Six good-looking Southern Belles were headed North to spend the weekend at Cedar Spring Ranch Horse and Cattle Co.

Their plans were of a “devious nature”, though. They weren’t coming here to learn how to “rope and ride”. Nor were they coming to be part of the “spring roundup”, branding the calves and making steer out of the bull calves.

Oh no, their plans were to strip this cowboy and his cowgirl of their boots, chaps, spurs, and cowboy hats, and then dress us in those new fancy Eastern Bostonian-type clothes and visit the wineries in Herman, Mo. along the banks of the Missouri river where Lewis and Clark spent many sleepless nights guarding against the local Osage Native American Indians while on their adventure to the unexplored West.

As if that wasn’t enough, we were then asked to join them at one of those St. Louis Cardinal baseball games on Saturday afternoon. They say that this “Abner Doubleday invention” will someday become the American pastime. That remains to be seen since their cowboy hats aren’t even designed to prevent red necks. In addition, they appear to be wearing sissy-socks that go all the way up to their knees. I mean come on. What’s that all about?

It was a normal day, Thursday morning, March 31, 2011. When the sun rose over the eastern horizon to a cloudless blue sky, I walked onto the back porch and heard Tom turkeys gobbling in the distance trying their best to call in hens for the spring mating season. In the pasture on the other side of the house I could hear the thunderous sound of horse hooves pounding the dirt while those magnificent animals were running and playing at the sign of first light. Over the hill came the sound of newborn calves bawling because they were hungry for their morning milk. The bluebirds were flying around the fence-lines gathering up twigs and weeds to build their spring nests. It was one of those beautiful early spring mornings on the ranch.

My plan was to do a little work then take the afternoon and evening off and just enjoy being alive and spending time with the ranch cowgirl. And that’s just what I did because I’m the boss and I allow myself to be indolent every so often. However,  later that night, at about 11:30 p.m., a stagecoach pulled up in front of the ranch house. Six Southern Belles got out, knocked on my front door and I answered. “I heard six gals were heading North,” I said with a semi-quivering voice. “I assume you are them”. Actually, I knew who they were. I was just acting coy. “Why yes sir we are,” they all responded in unison with a sweet southern drawl. “Well then come on in, there’s room here at the Inn.”

This was the beginning of a weekend that turned out to be the most fun this cowboy has had in a long while. Ranch work was put aside and the party began. YEEHA!!!

Since the young ladies arrived so late, there was not much time to visit. I showed them to their bunks and they hit the sack faster than a buzzard could pick up the scent of a fresh road kill out on Route 66. They were really tired after a four hour ride up from the Appalachian Mountain Range in Tennessee taking all the back roads to circumvent the Missouri border raiders and bushwhackers along the way. Since I had advance notification of their visit, I rented a coach large enough to hold eight people. It was one of those new-fangled S.U.V., GM YUKONS with more horse power than a team of four Belgian draft horses that could pull a six-bottom plow. It was jet black and rode as sweet as my three-year-old Palomino Fox Trotter filly that happens to be for sale at the very reasonable price of $3500.

On Friday morning, while I took care of the ranch duties, with a languid approach I might add, my cowgirl made those six gals a hardy eastern-style fancy ranch breakfast, consisting of scrambled eggs, waffles and syrup, and orange juice. You know, like city folks eat.

Well, this cowboy would have none of that. So when I completed my ranch duties, I sat down to a real cowboy’s breakfast of fried wild jackrabbit, possum belly bacon, cheese grits, homemade biscuits smothered in sawmill gravy, and sliced fried rocky mountain oysters gathered from last year’s fall roundup. Hey, they can have their fancy pants Eastern-style New York breakfast. I’m sticking with what brought me to this square dance. I’m just saying.

After breakfast, we loaded up the coach and headed west to the wineries in Herman, Mo., an 1800’s German settlement. It was about a one hour and thirty minute trip. This cowpoke didn’t quite know how to act being surrounded by seven beautiful gals so I just put on my natural “cowboy charm”, exercised my cowboy “intellectual muscle” and discussed how I needed to perform the arduous task of cleaning out six stalls every morning of fresh horse manure and equine urine-soaked bedding. It must have been something they ate that morning because the gals all rolled down the windows to get fresh air because they said they were getting nauseated. I figured it was that fancy New York-style breakfast they ate earlier. I swear, the food people eat nowadays makes me want to put a saddle on backward and ride in reverse.

Anyway, we arrived at the first winery at high noon. It was Stone Hill Winery, one of the oldest in Missouri, which was founded in the late 1800’s. It sits on a hilltop overlooking the Missouri River. We went on a tour through their wine cellar and saw hundreds of wooden oak barrels full of aging wine. It was pretty spooky down there in that old 18th-century man-made cave made into a wine cellar. There were probably two types of spirits present in those caves, the drinking kind and the spooky kind.

Here’s an interesting side note. Wine is stored and aged in either French oak or American oak barrels. The American oak barrels are made from white oak trees. “Why white oak?” you ask. Well, because the wood is very dense and it seals naturally.

We have a lot of white oak trees on our ranch and we just finished “selected” logging. The trees were sold to Independent Stave Co. They hauled them to Salem Mo. where the staves for the wood barrels are produced. The staves are then shipped to Lebanon, Mo. where the wood barrels are made for aging wine and whiskey. It is really an interesting process that you might enjoy reading about on the Internet. It’s pretty exciting to know that somewhere in this world, wine or whiskey will be aging in oak barrels harvested from our ranch. That’s as cool as watching frog legs fry in an iron skillet on a Saturday afternoon.

We visited three wineries on Friday in Herman. The last one was the oldest family owned winery in the U.S. and their wine was very enjoyable and quite unique.

It was a great day. We sampled wine and champagne all afternoon, drank a pot of coffee and then drove back to the ranch with a coach full of fine Missouri wines and champagnes purchased from some of the finest wineries in Missouri and the U.S.

I am so happy for the girls since they got to spend the day with me. Or maybe they drank all that wine to try to forget whom they were with. I hope it was the former but I am thinking it was the latter.

Friday evening was special. The ranch cowgirl, Bernie, made her famous lasagna dish. To add to a perfect dinner, the girls opened up a bottle of white and red Missouri wines.

After dinner, we sat on the porch and consumed two more bottles of wine while telling jokes. The jokes seemed to get funnier with each new glass of wine poured. Being of a frugal nature, we made sure not a drop was wasted. In the distance we could hear the coyotes singing their song known as the “call of the wild”. It was all I could to do to keep the girls from howling back at the coyotes and waking up the neighbors the next ranch over.

Since we were up so late Friday night sipping fine wines, I thought the least I could do the next morning was to pleasure them with a rendition of that old German favorite, the Liechtensteiner polka, on my accordion, especially after spending a day at an old German settlement. If they didn’t wake up with a headache from drinking all of that wine, they certainly had one after listening to me play the accordion at 7:00 a.m. Saturday morning. Their vitriolic rhetoric, aimed my way, placed my own emotional stability in jeopardy. It seems that what I consider “sensory satisfaction”, they consider “sensory repudiation”. However, once I put the accordion away, tranquility and civility reigned once more. 

After breakfast, I took some of the gals for a tour around the ranch. We visited with the horses and cattle and were able to spot a couple of wild turkeys in the woods.

At 11:00 a.m. they packed up their gear and headed downtown. We met them at the ballpark at noon. They were nice enough to buy our tickets showing appreciation for me waking them up with a polka early that morning. It was a beautiful afternoon at the ballpark even though the Cardinals lost the game due to non-fortuitous circumstances like, NO RUNS!!!

I must tell you, this was a weekend we will never forget. We never had so much fun. It was tough saying good-bye to the six beautiful Southern Belles after the game. We can only hope that in the near future they will come back to the ranch, not only to have a good time, but also to hear, and this time enjoy, another encore of the bellows blazing to the tune of the Liechtensteiner polka and appreciate the intricacies there of. Although, there seems to be compelling universal evidence that the accordion is an abomination to society. WHAT EVER!!! 

Dan, the polka man :)  (aka Ranch Foreman)