10/16/2026
Last weekend I was at a retreat with about a dozen other writers. I don’t go to retreats often, which is probably a mistake. When I do attend, learning more about writing and working on my skills is a bonus. The conversations are the real attraction, at least for me.
One of the attendees was a woman who’d grown up on a ranch in Nebraska, in the Sandhill area. It’s a part of the country that isn’t ideally suited to crop farming. The fragile, sandy soil is mostly covered with grasslands and used for ranching. It has the reputation as the sort of place that travelers just try to get across on their way to Colorado or other points west. That’s a mistake, because in its own way it’s beautiful and interesting. About 85% of it has never been plowed, and its rolling hills reach up to 400 feet high. Since it’s land that hasn’t changed in thousands of years, it’s a habitat perfect for a huge variety of birds and other wildlife. It’s not in-your-face spectacular, like the Tetons or a stormy Oregon beach, but sometimes subtle beauty is worth looking for.
While the woman was chatting on the phone with a colleague, the topic of where home was had come up. She mentioned where she was from, and the other person said, “Oh, we drive through Nebraska all the time on our way to Colorado for skiing. That’s where there are so many homeless cows, right?”
She didn’t see that one coming. She had no idea what a homeless cow was. A wiser person might have just let it go, but in the end, the woman had to ask her colleague what she meant by homeless cows.
The reply? “You know, those cows that are just out running around. You see them behind a fence, just munching on the grass. They aren’t in barns or anything like that. They’re just homeless.”
“Oh...you mean the cows that are just living free on the prairie?”
“YES. So sad.”
I don’t actually know where the conversation went from there; I may have been laughing too hard.
There wasn’t much more to the story, because the woman ended the conversation as quickly as she could. As it turns out, her brother is still a rancher who lives on the family farm, and she couldn’t wait to get on the phone to tell him that folks from out East were concerned about his homeless cows.
I shouldn’t mock this clueless city person. I am confident that in a lifetime of running my mouth, I’ve said many things at least as ignorant. However, we live in a world of technological magic, so no one needs to remain ignorant. For example, I typed “homeless cows,” into a search engine just to see what would happen and lo and behold, homeless cows do exist. A story from five years ago told about a small herd of cattle in Montana that made their way into a newly built home that was sitting empty. They squatted there for a couple of months until the owners showed up to move in.
Pretty smart cows, but I still think they would have been better off with a home on the range.
Copyright 2026 Brent Olson
