Welcome to Awe Nice, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

This week, I interviewed Forrest Van Tuyl. Sound familiar? Forrest wrote Rockjack and he sent the instrumental version to me for the intro and outro. In a forthcoming segment, he’s going to talk about that song and the ranch structure that inspired it.

For this segment, he shared a moment when he was working in way eastern Oregon, not far from the Idaho border. Sounds like amazing country and here he is to tell us about a long, keen observation. 

Forrest is married to Margo Cilker, who is a musician and also someone who sings about time outside. They have performed all around the country, in Europe, Scandanavia, and at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. I hope you check ‘em out.

Forrest

Margo

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.  

My name is Maddy Butcher, I developed Awe Nice to highlight moments of wonder outdoors.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

My name is Maddy Butcher. I live in southwestern Colorado and I’ve worked as a journalist for several decades.  I like to spend time outside and, thankfully, I have spent many years working outside, not just playing outside. I think it’s important to distinguish between the two. In my experience, people’s perspectives, experiences, and philosophies towards the outdoors is different depending on if they are building a life where they’re working, if they become an important part of their outdoor world, or if they’re just passing through. 

So far, we’ve focused entirely on interviews with people working on the land, but that’s not by decree. As I’ve mentioned, I grew up in Maine and I’m looking ahead to interviews with people who work on the water.

Occasionally with this project, I share a few mini-moments of awe. My nickname for these segments – cringeworthy, I’m sure – is Mini-Awe-Polis.

Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets. 

This week, I wanted to share some water-related thoughts, maybe to kind of to prep you all for those interviews with fishermen and lobstermen. Okay, maybe it’s just an excuse to share them. 

The biggest factor in being on the water where I grew up on Middle Bay, anyway, was tide. I’m guessing you know what tide is. But if you don’t, tides are the rhythmic movements of the world’s water, based on the pull of the moon. In Harpswell, the difference between high and low tide is nearly 10 feet. In Miami, closer to the equator, it’s less than three. Heading up the Maine coast to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, in the Bay of Fundy, the difference between high and low tide is 53 feet.

Billions of gallons of water flowing in and out, twice a day, every day.

Not exactly, twice a day. The movement of the tide is more like once every 12 and half hours.

So high tide would be at three in the afternoon on Monday and more like six o’clock by Friday.

Tide, at least for us on the mud flats of Middle Bay, meant the difference between heading out to swim or boat or go clamming or fishing or not.  It meant that a moored boat would likely be aground or nearly so at low tide, but floating freely at high tide. It meant the difference between swimming in water the height of a kiddie pool or the deep end.

Living on the mud flats isn’t all bad though because at low tide on sunny days, the mud soaks up the sun and heats up the incoming water. By August, that means it’s actually swimmable. Maybe water temps in the 60s.

In certain areas and at certain times, you do not want to mess with the tide. The flow in tight spaces of the shore creates current that you can’t swim against and often can’t boat against. Maine’s coast is full of ins and outs and wild meanderings. A straight line from the New Hampshire border to the Canadian border is just 228 miles as the crow flies. But the in and outs and peninsulas and islands make it nearly 3,500 miles. 3,500 miles!

If you’re on the water, you really need to know where you are, where the tide might take you, or how it might make things more challenging. And oh boy if you want to start combining tide with fog.

In the coldest of winters, the ice would freeze clear across Middle Bay, a mile wide in spots. But inevitably, tide would break up the ice in chunks, sometimes as big as a yard or as small as a cooler. It was a thing to go iceberg hopping, a really stupid thing that we did as kids. A boy I knew was iceberg hopping. The tide was going out and took him way down the bay. Like miles away from home. The Coast Guard had to fetch him.

I want to say something more about mud flats, since they get so disparaged. I mean, they are not picturesque, like rocky coastlines or sandy beaches. If you’re barefoot or are digging into the mud, that mud will stay with you. It’s so finely grained that it can be hard to wash off. Mud flats have a particularly wonderful but certainly distinctive smell. Earthy, salty, of the seaweed and eel grass and clams and hermit crabs. As a girl, I was riding a bus to summer camp up the coast. There was a girl from New York City who said, ‘pew, what’s that smell? It smells like a sewer! Welcome to the Maine coast, honey. 

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here. at awenice.com. Oh, and AweNice also welcomes your support. You can find a donate button here. 

Music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl,. Find more of his terrific music from a link here. 

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Rae Nickerson. Rae lives is persuing a PhD at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, but travels widely in the west. She studies large carnivores and specifically works on conflict reduction between wolves, grizzlies, and livestock. 

Rae has had several encounters with bears, some scary, some hilarious, like when a bear was trying to get apples out of the back of her truck while she was trying to sleep in the cab. But she picked another kind of encounter to share with us.

Aside from all her work in the field and with producers, she also finds time to help the Western Landowners Alliance with conflict reduction outreach.

Apologies in advance for the audio quality. Sometimes when recording people for these segments, we don’t get the most stellar reception. Doing the best we can. 

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here. 

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl, who knows a bit about wonders at work. Find more of his terrific music here.  

My name is Maddy Butcher, I’m a journalist and day worker here in the Four Corners area. I developed Awe Nice in hopes of brightening your day. If you’d like to donate, head here and thank you. 

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

Welcome to Awe Nice, that’s a-w-e-n-i-c-e, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

This week, I interviewed Beau Gaughran of Berwick, Maine. Beau directed A Brutal, Beautiful Life, a short documentary about ranching for which I served as writer and producer. It’s done well at film festivals and is now online. 

Almost all of Beau’s work is outside, often in the backcountry. I’ve learned from him that you need athleticism as well as creative talent to excel at this kind of filmmaking. 

The moment that Beau chose to share doesn’t unfold outdoors, but it sure is worth hearing. 

One of the reasons I love working with Beau is because of how he sees, how he takes in his surroundings. Such a talent.  

Hearing, of course, is huge. Because of his decades-long enthusiasm for water sports and because of particularly angular ear canals, Beau’s had lots of ear infections and compromised hearing. He’s right not to take it for granted, eh? Where would Awe, Nice! Be without it? 

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page. 

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Kim Kerns. Kim is a fourth generation rancher in eastern Oregon. The country is remote. No Man’s Land. Services are distant, which is why her family and their neighbors banded together to organize a rural fire fighting entity, which you’ll hear about.

I met Kim several months ago and we talked about dogs, mostly. Kim and her family have about a thousand sheep and hundreds of cows. They have eight guardian dogs, several stock dogs – those are mostly kelpies and border collies, and she also has Burt, an 18-pound Jagd terrier, who keeps down the pack rat population and takes on all comers, Kim told me. 

Predators are a constant source of concern. Mountain lions, wolves, coyotes. She relies on her incredible guardian dogs to keep her animals alive, especially during calving and lambing, in the spring, but really year-round.  

It’s a big operation and she tackles it with her parents, her husband and two employees.

Kim said she met a big family from Seattle up on Big Lookout Mountain during the 2017 eclipse. They were planning to just watch the eclipse in a parking lot or something, but they ran into some NASA guys who said, “Heck, no. You’ve come all this way. You’re going to get up to this mountain!” And they did.  Afterwards, that family tracked down Kim’s dad online and got a message to him that visiting with Kim and her friend, Maddie Moore, was a highlight of their trip. 

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.  

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. Find a link to his terrific music here.  If you’d like to donate, find the link on our About page and thank you.

My name is Maddy Butcher, I developed Awe, Nice! to highlight moments of wonder outdoors.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Sisto Hernandez. Sisto lives in Arizona and I met him at a training for range riders. Range riding is a successful strategy for deterring wolves from predating on cattle and Sisto was teaching, sharing his insights from work with the reintroduced Mexican wolves. 

A few notes on some things Sisto mentions:

- Traps aren’t metal contraptions, they’re fenced off areas of between five to twenty acres, built for holding cattle. 

- Tapaderos are leather fittings, sometimes rawhide, over stirrups that keep anything from getting wedged in your stirrup. That's a scenario which can be pretty dangerous for you and your horse. 

- The Mogollon Rim forms the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau and features big sandstone and limestone cliffs. As you might imagine, it is a significant natural boundary for flora and fauna. 

- The Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned nearly a half million acres in 2002. At the time, it was the biggest fire in Arizona history. 

That country that I've seen on or abutting the Grasshopper Livestock Association acreage (which itself covers nearly 200 square miles) is everything he describes. Beautiful and sometimes treacherous. Hopefully you can check it out. At least by taking a drive down Highway 77, which runs through reservations, National Forest, and Salt River Canyon. 

I did a little research and learned that aside from his work on the land, Sisto was an accomplished saddle bronc rider, competing for years at the national level. Brain and brawn.

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.  

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. 

If you’d like to donate, find the link here and thank you. 

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Sara Lowe. Sara lives in central Wyoming where she’s a livestock investigator and a detective for Fremont County. Fremont is about 9,200 square miles, about the size of Vermont and has about 40,000 residents. 

At a mental health forum last year, I got to hear Sara and a few other officers talk about the on-the-job stresses that bleed into their off hours. Sara’s moment of awe didn’t happen during her work, but because of her work. Because of her work, she’s spent years cultivating a way to generate her own sense of peace and calm. Heck, it was Sara who taught me about box breathing. She also does horse clinics.  

Sara said that just last week, a chaplain was brought in, to help the officers with the steady stream of tragedy and violence that has unfolded lately.

This fall, Sara is headed to the University of Wyoming, to work on her master’s in the mental health field. She wants to help the officers and ranchers who, in her observation, desperately need support.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.  

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. Find a link to his terrific music here.  If you’d like to donate, go here and thanks!

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Summer Peterson. Summer lives in Colorado now, but up to recently she’s been in central Utah as a farmer, a horse vet, and a competitive rider. 

By competitive, I mean, really accomplished. She was for years a semi-professional three-day eventer. Three-day eventing is dressage, cross country, and showjumping. The sport was originally conceived as a test for cavalry horses and riders, to gauge bravery, endurance, discipline. Summer calls it the triathlon for horses and riders. 

I felt so fortunate to be able to record this moment.  The pandemic hadn’t figured into the Awe, Nice! scheme of things until now. I know the outdoors was a great solace to many during this time, even for those of us who are (were) outdoors and away from other people as a matter of course. There are more stories out there, for sure.  

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com. 

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. Find a link to his terrific music here.  

My name is Maddy Butcher, I developed Awe, Nice! to bring a bit more attention to those non-verbal connections that we have and that Summer generously brought to light with this segment. If you’d like to donate, find the link here and thank you.  

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

We all are capable of experiencing moments of wonder. They are not reserved solely for creative or religious people. Moments of awe cross the political spectrum. They cross the livelihood spectrum. Awe is a positive force that can be felt by everyone.

 Nonetheless, I carry a fair amount of skepticism around with me. It’s a journalistic thing.

Like. I tend to think moments of awe actually happen with ho-hum regularity. It’s since we’re humans – distracted, in our heads, with dulled-down senses, that we miss them. When we do witness awesome moments, it’s because that moment occurred just when we happen to be particularly present and tuned in to our surroundings. 

I mean, how often to you find seaglass or a shard of old Indian pottery when you are not intentionally looking for it?

How do you hear the ‘drink your tea, tea, tea of a towhee (the bird in our logo) if you’re not listening?

Most Awe, Nice! interviewees tell me they experience moments of awe all the time. Yes, cool things are happening all the time, but these folks, these interviewees see them because they’re kinda special in a 21st century way. They’re quiet and connected, with their senses that is. 

Occasionally with this project, I share a few mini-moments of awe. My nickname for these segments - cringe away!   – is Mini-Awe-Polis.

Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets. 

Since we working our way into the dog days of summer, I wanted to give canines some attention. While dogs sure can wreck nature sightings – because they tend to investigate eagerly and like to eat or chase things that you might want to see – they are also good at helping you discover things you might have otherwise overlooked. So I try to pay attention to them. When we’re working cows, for instance, they alert me to things I should be paying attention to all the time. Cows can hide. I know this may sound silly, but in big country, they can tuck in under scrub oak and you can ride right past them. Of course, this doesn’t happen if your dogs are with you. 

In the fall, we bring cows off of the National Forest and down to winter pastures. It’s a week of long days and, after a summer of moderate work, the dogs are primed and I feel like they take this week seriously. One day, in the middle of the day, I watched my dogs Monty and Tina over several hours as they helped move cows up a gully and across a big meadow, bordered by scrub oak and Ponderosa pines. I knew they were thirsty, but they are so dedicated to the task that they won’t leave the cows. So I developed a command, ‘get some water’ so that they can essentially give themselves permission to drink.

On this day, I saw a drainage and told them to get some water. They heard me but still took turns. Tina went for water. Monty stayed with the cows. When Tina came back, Monty went for water.

On the next day, we had more interaction with other help, folks with their dogs and horses. We got the cows to their stopping point that evening, a high desert grassy area with a pond, and settled them in. The dogs knew we were done for the day. I watched as almost all of them seemed to let down. Most of them peeed and pooped. Some starting playing. They had punched their time card and were headed for the tailgate party. 

My mom told me many times: a productive life is a happy life. Sure, maybe she was telling me to work hard, but she also felt this way – passionately - when it came to dogs. I do think that my dogs are happiest when they are working.

But what do I know?

 I developed AweNice with the notion that we all are capable of experiencing moments of wonder. They are not reserved solely for creative or religious people. Moments of awe cross the political spectrum. They cross the livelihood spectrum. Awe is a positive force that can be felt by everyone.

This project specifically seeks out interviews with those who work outside and work with animals, people I feel aren’t heard from often and whose daily life is relatively quiet and disconnected. I should qualify that: disconnected in the mainstream, digital sense. I’m finding, though, that they are deeply connected in other ways, to other things.

So, anyway, I want to share a few mini-moments of awe that I’ve experienced.

Get ready to cringe all you listeners! This is the first segment of Mini-Awe-Polis. Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets.  

There is a big, solitary, feral cat that comes around at night, especially in winter. I’ve named him Dana because I’m not sure if he’s male or female, but I’ll call him a him. Dana is fat and smart and friendly, which I think is a pretty unusual combination for a feral cat.

Because he is not stupid, Dana knows he can handle one dog, but probably not more than one. My dogs are not warm to cats, so, not surprisingly I rarely see Dana during the day.

But at last call (sometime between 8 and 11 at night when I check the horses and take a little walk with the dogs), I can sometimes spot him.

More than once, he’s crouched in the scrub, a hundred feet from the house, and watched as the dogs, clueless, go streaking by. I think Dana has us pretty well figured out. It’s fun to consider how he considers us. 

And speaking of cats.

I was helping gather calves on New Year’s Day last year. I had two dogs with me and was riding my grey horse, Ray. The country was rough, full of piñon, juniper, and scrub oak. I was sussing out a small, narrow canyon alone.

When I say sussing out, I mean that I suspected the calves were down in the canyon, grazing their way east, and I was zigging and zagging, trying to find a way down to them.

But the sides were steep, mostly unpassable, and I was having to back up and turn around a lot. My dog, Tina, jogged across this giant boulder jutting out over the gully and I took a picture to capture how frustrating the going was.  We paused and listened for animals moving. Then I look across and watched as an adult mountain lion strode up the other side of the canyon, some hundred feet away. She

walked with purpose but not urgently. She was large and lanky and graceful, and powerful – I remember her tail, which seemed as long as her body. I soaked it in, not taking my eyes off her, not moving or reaching for my phone. Then I saw another one, a juvenile, following her at a distance.

I’ve lived in cat country for more than a decade and I know well the feeling - in your bones and in your mind - that you are being seen by them. But I’d not laid eyes on one until now. Stay safe, Dana.

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here. AweNice also welcomes your support. You can find a donate button on our about page. 

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.