The alarm goes off at 4:15 in April. That part hasn't changed in forty years. What's changed is the seventeen minutes between the alarm and standing upright. The hands are the worst in the morning. They close about halfway by the time the coffee's ready. By the time the boots are on, maybe three-quarters. Full grip doesn't come until somewhere around ten, depending on the weather.
April 14th this year was thirty-one degrees at dawn. I had a first-calf heifer that needed checking every two hours and sixty panels of fence down along the south pasture where the elk pushed through in March. The horse needed saddling. The saddle weighs forty-two pounds. That's a fact that doesn't bother a man at twenty-five and becomes a negotiation at sixty-two.
I rub the topical into my lower back and both hands before I leave the house. Karen used to do my back, but I've gotten the reach figured out — a long-handled brush, the kind you'd use to put fly spray on a horse. It works. The salve takes about fifteen minutes. That's not a guess. I've timed it by how far I get in morning chores before the back loosens enough to bend properly. Fifteen minutes gets me from the house to the barn. By the time I'm throwing hay, it's working.
Spring is the hardest season on a ranch body. That surprises people who assume winter is worse. Winter is cold, but winter is feeding. You're on the tractor or the truck. Spring is calving, fencing, branding, riding. It's twelve to sixteen hours of physical work every day for two months, starting when the ground is still frozen and the wind hasn't quit. The body doesn't get a warm-up week. It goes from winter pace to spring pace overnight, and whatever was wrong in February is still wrong in April.
The herniated disc doesn't care about the calendar. The stenosis doesn't take a season off.
I don't use an edible during the day. That's a rule I made early and haven't broken. A ranch has too many ways to get killed. Machinery, horses, cattle, ice, heights. A man who's not fully alert around a PTO shaft won't be around long. The topical doesn't affect my head. It takes the edge off the back and loosens the hands enough to work. That's what I need between five in the morning and eight at night.
After the work's done is different. On the bad spring days — and there are plenty — I take a 2.5 milligram edible after supper. Sometimes 5, if I've been in the saddle all day and the back has seized up hard enough that I can't sit in a chair without leaning sideways. The edible doesn't erase the pain. It moves it far enough away that I can sleep. Six hours most nights. Before the edible, it was three or four, and a man running cattle on four hours of sleep makes mistakes.
I made mistakes. I left a gate open on tramadol and lost six head for two days in rough country. I never left a gate open on a 2.5 milligram edible. That's not a medical claim. It's what happened.
The routine in spring is simple. Topical at 4:30 AM. Reapply around noon if the work is heavy and the back is loud. Edible after supper on bad days, nothing on tolerable ones. The topical costs about forty-five dollars and lasts three weeks if I'm not wasteful. The edible runs maybe a dollar a night at the doses I take. Ibuprofen was cheaper but put me in the clinic with stomach bleeding in 2020. Tramadol was covered by insurance but made me someone I didn't trust around livestock.
The real cost of spring pain isn't the money. It's the work that doesn't get done because a man can't move well enough to do it. I hired a kid to help with branding this year, first time I've paid someone for a job I used to do alone. That's a different kind of cost. The topical and the low-dose edible don't make me thirty again. They make me a sixty-two-year-old who can still do most of the work, most of the days, through the hardest season on the place.
Nobody promised more than that.