Tech manuals, cattle reports, and general industry news are essential to keeping happy healthy cows and making a profit. Most of that is available via your smartphone if you are blessed with sufficient cell phone coverage.
Reading for pleasure, however, can be problematic in a place that resembles the 19th century more than the 21st.
So how´s about a REAL book! I (for one) had to remind myself that there were non-battery operated, ink on paper, lovely, bound tomes by the best of authors.
Yes, it can be done and I encourage you to make it part of your ranching experience. The beauty of the surroundings, their soft natural sounds and sunlight, allow you a way to read superior to even the best library reading rooms.
It can be problematic, however. More on that later.
As proof that it can be done, I just completed all 800 pages of Doris Goodwin´s 2005, Team of Rivals , loaned to me by my new friend Richard Rust at Drinking Liberally Buenos Aires. Richard is a guy who knows a thing or two about both history and politics ...both in the US and Argentina!
Partly because I´ve never been a worshipper at the Alter of Lincoln and since I couldn´t remember the last time I completed a book of that many pages, I hesitated in both borrowing it and cracking it open. Man, am I glad that I did!
Turning the first few pages under the glorious Argentine autumn sun, I found my self reading like a young Lincoln was reading ...reading about Lincoln reading ...in a similar landscape under quite similar circumstances! I was hooked. The 800 pages flew.
Out here on the Pampas, books are almost as scarce as Sangamon County, circa 1830 ...especially in English. There is one lending library more than a horse ride away and you can imagine that the private libraries in the homes of the very rich probably surpass its collection ...just like in Lincoln´s day.
A more pressing similarity, just as in Ol´Abe´s day, is: when to find time to read! Work takes precendance ...make hay while the sun shines and all that ...plus, without electricity, when sundown finally ends the workday, it´s too dark to read!
You can certainly accuse me of bing an occasional slacker ...but I´ve never heard that of Lincoln. Nevertheless, the book mentions many stories of him caught propping his head againsta a tree reading when he should have been working. There´s hardly any other way to get some pleasure reading done off the grid. (Full disclosure: I chopped extra kindling to asuage my guilt.)
Goodwin doesn´t mention his burning any expensive candles for evening reading ...but I admit to burning the midnight gasoil (diesel) a couple of times. As flat as it is here, you could probably see my bedlamp for miles!
Once again, many thanks to Richard Rust and do yourself a favor if you are planning to ranch or farm far from the nearest electrical outlet: amass some weighty tomes ...and some not so weighty ...and you might want to amass some friends to lend or recommend some good ones.
Beware of autumn with her shortening days or your generator bill will tick-up noticeably ...and take a tip from that Great-Emancipator-to-be and sneak-off from hay-making to read in wonderful solitude during those long sunny days.
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