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Rancher and poet in Rapid City Journal today

Liberty Belle

Well-known member
Longtime rancher finds his way back to poetry
By Ed Martley, Journal Copy Editor

When Bruce Roseland was in high school, he was a jock. Like so many tough, hard-working ranch kids, he chose wrestling as his sport and, as do a lot of his fellows, excelled.

But there was a little problem: Roseland was conflicted by a seeming disparity between what he calls his “two selves.” His public self was outdoorsman and a superb athlete. The less-public self was a budding poet.

“At that time, things were simple. You were either one kind of person or another kind of person, an egghead or an athlete, and athletes then were not of a particularly scholarly bent. But over the years, I learned that you can be any kind of a person you want to be, wherever your interest takes you.”

He was a good student, and he read a lot. He publicly revealed his poetic side only long enough to win a small scholarship from Northern State University in Aberdeen. He turned it down and instead chose South Dakota State University in Brookings, where he became editor of the “Calliope,” a student literary magazine. It was also during these years that he declared a hiatus on writing poetry and set aside his pencil, not to pick it up until 30 years had passed.

Today, Roseland is a “seed-cap” rancher near Seneca, east of the Missouri River halfway between Gettysburg and Faulkton. East River ranchers, he said, wear caps advertising seed companies, whereas West River ranchers wear cowboy hats. About 90 percent of his operation is devoted to raising beef cattle on his “moderate”-sized ranch; the other 10 percent involves cultivating his land. A normal day might consist of working with the cattle all morning and then driving to Faulkton, where he is assistant wrestling coach at Faulkton High School.

Even though he abandoned wrestling in college, he couldn’t stay away from it, a sport that features a physicality, balance and motion he likens to sorting cattle. In West River, it’s often called “cattle cutting” and frequently done from horseback. A seed-cap rancher such as Roseland does it on foot as he sorts the critters for whatever purpose — off to market, for shots, separating out the yearlings and so forth: “A dance performed in the mud or the dust.”

At night, when he is driving home from Faulkton, Roseland tries, often unsuccessfully, to dodge the legions of deer that roam back and forth across the road. “I can dodge the deer on the highways, but they always jump out of the ditch and hit me in the side. I have to buy a new car about every year and a half. I never buy new ones because I know what’s going to happen to them.”

In addition to ranching, coaching and dodging deer, Roseland has resumed writing poetry, and this time, he is not making any attempt to keep it under wraps — quite the contrary: The Institute of Regional Studies in Fargo, a branch of North Dakota State University, has published a book of his poetry, “The Last Buffalo.”

Roseland’s path to becoming a published poet was long, obscure and cut by false trails, one of which he strayed onto because of college English classes where he learned to write poetry the “right” way, with layers and deep meanings and nuances that cry for interpretation, line by line explication — what did the poet really mean?

The teachers, Roseland said, “analyzed the hell out of the poems. One that struck me was Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ And I remember Frost himself saying that he just sat down and wrote it. He had stopped by some woods on a snowy evening and sat down and wrote about it. But the teachers said this cannot be, that he worked on it and shaped it and formed it.” As time passed, Roseland began to believe otherwise. “Take a man at face value. That’s what he thought; that’s what he wrote.”

Anyway, with all of this new knowledge, “I found that I was writing worse and worse. When I was 23 or 24, I was writing crap, and what the world does not need is more crap. I should just be kind and shut up. I decided I was not going to write again until I had something to say.”

He stopped writing and threw himself into his studies, breezing through a master’s degree in sociology at the University of North Dakota, graduating in 1980. He became a health planner, expecting to work for the federal or state government. “I could do things like market studies to see how many beds should be added to a nursing home, or if a hospital needed a certain piece of equipment.”

The year Roseland got his master’s, then-Gov. Bill Janklow pulled the plug on his plan to work for the state of South Dakota. The governor eliminated the whole department he would have worked for, he said.

It was time to do some serious thinking about his future. “I was educated to be a mid-level bureaucrat; then, I realized the only thing I was really good at was pulling calves. My father was not very good at pulling calves, so when I was 14, he handed me the calf chain and said, ‘Here, you try it.’ So, through trial and error, a lot of error, I got pretty good at it. That’s why I came back to the ranch. I love calving season, I feel like I’m bringing new life into the world. It’s the one time of year when everything seems right. I know what I am doing.”

This is reflected in one of his poems, “Birthing Calves.” Here is an excerpt:

But every now and then

a cow has trouble and needs my help. After restraining her in a head gate,

I reach in and move around what’s gone wrong,

cupping the calf hooves in my hand

and swimming them out of the birth canal,

making sure the calf’s nose

passes through the pelvic bone,

double hitching chains around the legs

ratcheting the puller

saying to myself

“Take it easy, Take it slow,

But GO GO GO!

An old high school cheerleading chant

my calf-pulling mantra for this delicate task,

bringing life in or making mistake,

pulling the calf too late.

The first gasp of air and flicker in the eye

is the prize.

Roseland, now in his 50s, has found his voice, and he has something to say. His aim is to preserve the knowledge of his way of life and of those who went before. He is of the fourth generation to live on his ranch. He wants his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, (he and his wife, Barbara, have none yet, but they have two sons and high hopes) to know where they came from and thus who they are. In the “Last Buffalo,” he tells how life was, and he tells how it is right now with the rapid changes in the South Dakota agriculture industry.

He spends many words in several poems telling how the land is emptying as drought, economics and technology force many off the farms and ranches. “I’m not thrilled with the change, but you can’t stop progress, history. The economic process is relentless. You can’t stop it. Land changes, and people change with how the land changes.”

Roseland’s poetry can be hard, reflecting much of ranch life. The writing is muscular; it is realistic. He doesn’t rewrite much, except to make his “little stories” as accurate as possible. He doesn’t fool around forcing rhymes and taking a chance on turning his words into doggerel. It’s free verse, and it is powerful. It can be brutal, as in the poem about the farm wife who was stricken with cancer and “blew her head off” with a shotgun.

The 69 poems in the “Last Buffalo,” however, are not all gloom and doom. He tells of his delight as a child when his dad gave him a baby jackrabbit. And in the poem “Spring Dance” he tells one of the reasons he loves the life he has. An excerpt:

Ah,

the sunshine is brighter,

the moonlight is whiter,

whenever I go on my farmyard rounds,

the where and the why

I am a rancher.

“The Last Buffalo” is available from The Institute for Regional Studies of North Dakota State University in Fargo. Call (701) 231-8338 to order. Waldenbooks in the Rushmore Mall and Star of the West Hats & Lonnie’s Boot and Leather in Haines Shopping Center in Rapid City, and Wall Drug in Wall also have “The Last Buffalo.”

Ed Martley is a part-time copy editor for the Rapid City Journal. Contact him at [email protected]
January 2, 2007
 
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