How I got my name

I get asked this question all the time. It has a lot to do with a red New Holland Combine. In the 1980’s farm crisis, land was dirt cheap. Ag land values plummeted, and interest rates soared. Many farmers and ranchers couldn’t make payments on ag loans. Creditors took possession of family farms and ranches all over our region and the Midwest. Banks were selling land cheap to anyone who could afford to service the high interest loans. It was a true crisis in rural America as people left rural areas to find other work. However, this tragedy was also an opportunity for some, including my dad who was leasing the “Sentel” ranch along highway 85.

Names tend to stick with ranches – the Sentel brothers sold their place decades before the farm crisis and went back to Texas, but their last name stuck to that gumbo grassland. The Sentel place went up for sale and dad had the right of first refusal. During the 80’s, grass seed was in high demand and the Sentel place was full of it. My dad bought a used combine and took it out to the fields nearly all hours of the day and night for weeks. The result? Enough money for the down payment on the Sentel place.

Last fall, dad spent a great deal of time combining those same fields. The same combine, however, finally quit us. But we replaced that old used combine with another old used combine and went after seed. The whole country was like a palomino’s mane – flaxen waves of western wheat grass. I sat with dad in the combine and watched the header devour grass seed while he excitedly told me the story about how he came to own the ranch. Every time there’s combining to do, he talks about it with an incredulous, whimsical tone. Dad still can’t believe he pulled it off, that he made the down payment with some sleepy hours in a used New Holland.

Although my dad wanted to name me after my great aunt “Bernice,” my mom had always thought the name “Sentel” was pretty. They compromised – I took Aunt Bernice’s middle name “Genevra” as my own middle name. Outside of telling an 80-year-old woman not to copy me, I don’t remember Aunt Bernice much. But I do remember toddler me sitting in dad’s lap in the feed truck pointing at the cows yelling, “my cows, my cows!” I just assumed the whole ranch was named after me and not the other way around.

Growing up, I wanted some other name that had a concrete meaning like my sister Stephanie, who could say her name was Greek for “crown.” I just told people I was named after a piece of dirt. I wasn’t sure what the ranch meant to me – it seemed so full of difficulties. The entrance to the Sentel place is 3 miles of dirt road; this wouldn’t be bad if it wasn’t gumbo. Gumbo is a mischievous kind of dirt. When wet, it sticks to your shoes like gum and prevents you from going anywhere, even in 4-wheel drive. I can’t count the number of times we’ve gotten stuck in mud.

For example, yesterday while trailing sheep miles from the house, dad had to hook up the trailer to a tractor to rescue us from a heavy rainstorm. Our crew got in the trailer with our horses, hugging them for balance and body heat. We were soaked and shivering! (Always tie a rain jacket to your saddles, folks!) When it rains heavily, a four-wheel drive truck is no match for gumbo mud.

When I was a kid, I remember getting stuck out there, unable to get back to town for days. I didn’t really want to be stuck at the ranch back then. These days, I’d love to get rained in at the Sentel house, with a box of Louis Lamour novels to keep me company like before. After the storm, I’d sit on the porch with a cup of tea and watch a rainbow rest over the barn.

After high school, I never thought I’d come back home to the ranch. I thought I’d move to a city. I wanted a fast-paced life without animals to tend to. I wanted to see snow and only worry about my driveway being plowed, and not if my sheep were piled up in a snowdrift. I wanted money that wasn’t tied to vulnerable creatures that seemed to have a death wish. I wanted freedom from agriculture and its many obligations.

But I discovered freedom from agriculture was not what I expected it to be. A cubicle seemed to me a poor substitute for the wide-open prairie. In other jobs, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I wanted to do or be. I had no peace at a desk, while there were adventures to be had on the ranch.

I like to joke that I can’t live without a certain level of chaos, and that’s why I’m a rancher. Ranch chaos (animals on the road, washed out fences, winter storms, drought, etc.) is just something you constantly deal with when livestock are involved. But mainly, I can’t imagine a spring without lambs, a summer without calves to brand, or a fall without giant flats of waving blonde grass and beat up red combines that gave me a name.