They're well-versed in hard times

By Ashley Powers

March 12, 2009 12 AM PT

ELKO, NEV. —

The rancher’s wife takes the stage in a white cowboy hat, a brown fringed shawl and an oversized silver belt buckle. A spotlight illuminates her hazel eyes and sly grin. Yvonne Hollenbeck, who has spent 63 years on the plains of Nebraska and South Dakota, clutches a microphone at the Elko Convention Center and shares her poem’s title with hundreds of ranchers and their kids:

“The Bail-Out Plan.”

The audience titters.

A “Bail Out” plan in Ag-Land is to feed the livestock hay,

and not the type of bail-out plan we hear about today.

When country folks lose money, which happens most the time,

they don’t receive a handout. . . . not even one thin dime.

Folks nod. A few mouth “yes.”

Cowboy poetry is a genre long on cattle roundups, prairie sunsets and falling in love. Now, the bards of the range are working the recession into their rhymes, and not always in a sentimental spirit. Resentment over federal bank bailouts in particular has lent an edge of class warfare to some verse.

Ranchers endured their own financial crisis two decades ago. Steep debt loads, high interest rates, and plunging prices for cattle and land pushed thousands of family farms into foreclosure. The government eventually shored up agricultural lenders and streamlined the farm bankruptcy process. But the lifeline came too late for many families.

Now Washington is opening Treasury’s vaults to kick-start the economy and stabilize financial institutions. The contrast in the speed of the federal response is stirring frustration on the range and enlivening poems. As Hollenbeck says of her fellow ranchers:

“Stock Exchange” to them is to trade a horse or cow;

their market is the Sale Barn while on Wall Street it’s the “Dow.”

There’s never been a program to bail out the livestock man;

when things get tough their motto is to “Hang on if you can!”

It was amid rough financial times in 1985 that a group of folklorists launched the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, a city of 17,000 in Nevada’s northeastern corner. They celebrated a type of verse that harks back to at least the 1800s, when cowboys twisted sailing tunes into odes to their lives.

“We adapt and make things pertinent for our times,” says Hal Cannon, founding director of the Western Folklife Center, which runs the Elko gathering where Hollenbeck performed in January. Modern cowboy poets have molded environmental debates into verse, and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a few grappled with issues of patriotism and grief.

The genre has grown in recent years, with hundreds of regular gatherings in the U.S. and Canada; books, anthologies and CDs; articles in academic journals; and recognition for top cowboy poets, including Wally McRae and the late Buck Ramsey, by the National Endowment for the Arts. About 8,000 people attend the annual Elko gathering.

The poems -- shared on blogs and websites, sometimes in song -- are observational, plain-spoken and often wry takes on life on the ranch. That can include selling the homestead.

Vess Quinlan, a retired 68-year-old who lives near Alamosa, Colo., wrote “Sold Out” in 1963. The poem tells of working for a rancher losing his livelihood.

The old man turns away, hurting,

As the last cow is loaded.

I hunt words to ease his pain

But there is nothing to say.

Academics often interpret the poem as showing the failure of the American dream because, Quinlan says, they can’t grasp the hardships of ranching life. He says the poem is actually about starting over.

“We’re ‘next year’ people,” he says, attributing the saying to his grandma. “If we weren’t ‘next year’ people, we would have jumped off a bridge long ago.”

Hollenbeck grew up in Nebraska -- her prairie accent turns “wash” into “warsh” -- where poems served as bedtime stories. Eventually, she began to write them as a way to recollect the day.

She brought up two daughters and two stepsons on the Hollenbeck Ranch, near Winner, S.D., where she and her husband, Glen, raise quarter horses and Angus beef cattle. She compares the life to gambling: So much is out of your control. The family regularly borrowed money for fuel, feed, equipment repairs and medical insurance. When the cattle market plummeted in the 1980s, Hollenbeck remembers interest rates as high as 22%.

She survived by spending little and running a title insurance business. But she said goodbye to many cash-strapped neighbors, as she recalls in “The Bail-Out Plan”:

Remember in the ‘80s when the markets were so low,

and interest hit an all-time high? There was no bailout dough.

Half the farms and ranches were foreclosed on and were lost;

no bail-out plan was offered and the small towns bore the cost.

Then more were lost in ’96 when blizzards swept the range

and then came several years of drought but still there was no change

in attitudes in Washington, they didn’t seem to care.

I doubt they even knew there was a problem way out there.

The current recession is felt all across the range. As the economy worsens, demand falls for pricier cuts of beef, and cattle sells for less. The price of feed has skyrocketed.

Many ranchers are wary of anything that could be termed a handout, and Quinlan says their self-reliance pulls them through hard times: “We know how to butcher our own hogs.”

Even so, rural residents aren’t immune to overspending. Brenn Hill, a 32-year-old poet and songwriter in Hooper, Utah, recalls driving his son to preschool a few years back and noticing clusters of new salmon-colored homes with shiny trucks, boats and horse trailers in the yards.

“I started to wonder what boat I had missed,” he says. After talking to his wife, a mortgage loan officer, he realized their neighbors were buying beyond their means. It inspired the song “Debt,” which lists all the niceties -- a custom rambler, a 10-stall barn, a diesel pickup, a luxury sedan -- that force a cowboy to pay for groceries with his credit card.

I think a lot of folks are livin’ just like me

Waitin’ for the day they can break free

From all this debt -- it’s up to my nose

I make a lot of money but I don’t know where it goes

In recent months, John Dofflemeyer, 60, has watched the prices of tract homes and shares in Fortune 500 companies alike fall rapidly.

“Nobody knows what anything’s worth these days,” says the fifth-generation rancher, who lives outside Lemon Cove, Calif., in the southern Sierra foothills.

It’s made him ponder the value of his land -- and he’s convinced folks in cubicles and folks in cowboy hats would measure it differently.

In his poem “Enough,” which he posted in January on his blog, the Dry Crik Journal, he explains the differing outlooks. Lenders appraise agricultural land with an “empty string of zeros,” while ranchers treasure their acreage “enough to get religion every day.”

In “No Secret,” a poem he posted last month, he is even more pointed:

It’s no secret: banks have no friends,

nor any real expertise to get a job done --

and now that they’ve leant

what they didn’t have,

damn little sympathy once again.

Years ago, friends coaxed Hollenbeck, who rarely shared her poems, into reading at a gathering in Valentine, Neb. She launched her career with a rhyme about using a feed truck to pull her husband on a tractor that wouldn’t start.

“A lot of my poetry is humorous about things that weren’t humorous when they happened,” says Hollenbeck, who has published several books and recited her work at gatherings nationwide.

She writes about the feed salesman who pesters her weekly. The stench of her husband’s ranch rig. How he promised dinner in town and took her to pancake night at the feed store. But when she’s slogging through tough times, she repeats a ditty her grandma taught her:

From the time you were born, till you ride in a hearse,

nothing’s so bad that it couldn’t be worse.

Just after Thanksgiving, Hollenbeck recalled this while visiting her grandchildren in Valentine. The headlines out of Washington had her thinking about suburbanites facing foreclosure, and how they probably needed lessons in surviving economic hardship. “For a lot of people, a button comes off a shirt and they throw it out!” she says. But she also felt a pang of sympathy for folks pleading with bankers, as her neighbors had years ago.

“You have history repeating itself,” she says. “If those banks had rode it out with the ranchers, those people could have still been on the land.”

One afternoon, she passed a grand brick structure on Highway 20. Once a bank that loaned to farmers and ranchers, it failed in the 1980s and is now an office building. She remembered a farmer whose assets were frozen, whose combine had broken, whose harvest was saved by a generous repairman -- not a banker or politician.

A day later, she wrote “The Bail-Out Plan,” which she included in her Christmas newsletter with a picture of cattle moseying toward hay bales. When she recited it at this year’s Elko gathering, folks in Stetsons and Levi’s gave her a standing ovation. They passed around copies.

Yet, in cities folks buy houses that are bigger than our barns,

when they can’t make their payments, Congress says, “Well, darn!

We’ll gather up some billions so they can pay their debt,

and let their dandy banker get his biggest bonus yet!”

None of this makes sense to those who struggle on their own

and live within their budgets and aren’t careless with a loan.

‘Cause when country folks have troubles, neighbors help their fellowman,

they don’t depend on Washington to have a bail-out plan.

So in essence what I’m saying, “I’ve a plan to bail us out

of all the troubles we are in,” I hope you’ll hear me out.

When we have the next election, it is time to take a stand.

Let’s send Washington some leaders who make their living off the land.