Branding the Land

Branding the Land

 The hunched Custer County clerk squinted at our signatures, her crooked nose nearly touching the land deed spread out between her and Frank and me on the tall wooden counter. Slowly, she shifted her gaze to our photo IDs, which she gripped in one bumpy hand. Like a rusted toy crane, her neck cranked her head upward until she could peer over the top of her spectacles to survey my face, then my shoulders, and, finally, even my chest. I felt like a teenager caught after curfew in the beam of a cop’s flashlight. I tried to arrange my face into something pleasant but she didn’t return my smile. Next to me, standing still as a column, Frank started a nose chortle that threatened to break into full chuckle — but it failed to thrive and aborted into a cough when the clerk’s rheumy eyes darted to him.

Stamp! She suddenly pounded the deed as if she was tenderizing meat, and I started my happy dance, but only from the waist down. Foots, c’mon and play. Our dream had come true — we’d been anointed landowners! What an atrial-fluttering word! What a picture of stolid American work ethic it conjured!

And then, it happened: somewhere between floating out of the courthouse in Westcliffe, Colorado, and finishing up a course of congratulatory bean burritos at the diner, we started having delusions of the grandiose sort that went something like this: Drive to our land; search for a couple fallen Ponderosa pines; peel them with some tool or another; sink them deep into the rutted track leading to our property and then hang between them a plank of wood upon which will be etched the clever name of our homestead, something catchy such as Hare Today, Fawn Tomorrow Ranch or Limping Coyote Mesa.

. . . .

Ownership does funny things to people. I don’t care if it’s a cat or a car, people I know feel compelled to christen their stuff, to assign possession a personality. I name everything, even my plants and the squirrels in my yard, although the latter all bear the same name of “buddy” because I can’t tell them apart. And so it was that Frank and I could not allow our newly purchased property to go without an epithet, something catchier and more meaningful than its current legal appellation of “parcels 6, 7 and 8 in Cottonwood Springs Ranch Subdivision in south central Colorado.” That made it sound like the crumb-sized piece of the Wet Mountain Valley that it actually was. Certainly, it failed to capture the fact that it now throbbed with Monica-ness and Frank-ness, that it had, overnight, become an extension of our selves, one that made us more Monica- and Frank-like than ever. What it needed, by cricket, was a name!

We built a campfire, pitched our tent and started to free associate. And then the roadblocks started to go up.

First, we had to deal with the oxymoron of the property’s legal name. Cottonwood Springs Ranch Subdivision? Surely no two descriptors of land are more diametrically opposed in the popular Western-American imagination than those last two words. In any case, our imaginations, and our egos, had already snagged like salmon on hooks at the word “ranch” on our deed. We’d completely ignored what came after it for a lot of reasons, episodes of Bonanza being one. We, along with our apple-cheeked, misty-eyed Midwestern relatives, had watched too much television as kids in the 1960s, and when we eyeballed our hundred and twenty acres, we thought it looked a lot like the Ponderosa at the opening of the show Bonanza when Little Joe, Hoss and that forgettable big brother of theirs ride toward the camera in an equine line dance.

From the middle of our property, the view stretches to the west of the spires of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, looking like white-capped rickrack stitched onto a fabric of blue sky. To the east snake the hills of the Wet Mountains. Patches of pines, slabs of red sandstone, and clumps of yellow rabbitbrush dot the vistas north and south. On our first few visits, the seclusion made us want to holler and gallop through the trees naked. Even our well-behaved dogs sneered at their leashes when they were released from our truck, racing off like bank robbers leaving a heist. And, thanks to little modern intrusion made on our acreage, the place is a wildlife haven; we counted the shy lynx and the polite rattler (not everyone gives you warning before they strike) among a growing zoological compendium of sightings that included deer, cougar, bear, porcupine, coyote, owls, hawks, magpies, mice and hares so big they could wallop a pygmy horse.

Could we, then, name our land “ranch something” without becoming the butt of half-smothered snickers when we visited town? Frank thought so but I, reared in rural Colorado among real ranches, hesitated a few minutes longer. What convinced me finally was history; “Cottonwood Springs Ranch” wasn’t just a saccharine device created by a real estate developer to evoke a geographical fantasy, as is the case in the city where we reside most of the year. No indeed. Our land and the surrounding environs once composed a genuine 2,400-acre Cottonwood Springs Ranch created, neighbors told us, by a mid-20^th century dentist who, assumedly, pulled teeth and raised cattle. On his deathbed, that gentleman decreed that his property not be chunked up and sold off, which obviously did not come to pass. But whether that part of the story is fable (like his dentistry degree), we found it touching and duly catalogued it as support for our land’s claim to a ranching pedigree.

Then, the cows came home, the second of our name-game roadblocks.

It was a hot summer day in the high Colorado desert when we pulled across our property boundary and discovered bovines scattered about like giant black-and-brown boulders. Curious, we parked the truck at the campsite and marched off to investigate. Most of the cows appeared as if they had just hunkered down around the hookah pipe; they stared at us vacantly, chewing with that odd sideways motion reminiscent of a dislocated jaw. We were mesmerized by this joie de vivre until we heard an odd sound, sort of a hybrid of garbage truck and rusted gate, and turned in time to witness an enormous bull bearing down on us, clouds of dust enveloping each mean-looking hoof.

I confess: I spent a sliver of my youth on a farm in rural Colorado and despite the fact that I haven’t seen the underside of a cow for forty years, I pride myself on my knowledge of farm animals, often lording it over my city-bred husband with various facts about the anatomy and behavior of stock. Thus, my advice was simple: I yelled at Frank to run like hell and to not look back. We peeled under the jagged remains of the dentist’s barbed wire fence and pitched ourselves into the first amenable pine. The bull stopped at the fence and glared. This was very Bonanza, we agreed, gingerly extracting ourselves from the sappy juniper and inching our way back to the truck through the woods.

We discovered that the cows and their angry paramour belonged to a local rancher — a person who raised cattle but who did not own a ranch. This is not as strange as it may sound. Considering it takes around a trillion acres of stubby, arid Western land to feed a decent-sized herd, it’s no surprise that few contemporary ranchers actually own enough land to handle their own grazing needs. Instead, many have been driven to sell off what land they did have thanks to property taxes, dwindling profit margins and soaring overhead costs. This is why people who raise cattle will often request permission to run their herd on other people’s land — ideally a number of neighboring private holdings, which creates a large space for grazing.

From our first encounter with the bull our relationship with these hulking icons of Western ranching quickly soured. And, let me clear the record once and for all: these handmaidens of global warming do not “graze” — that sounds so genteel, like something spring lambs do in England’s sweet meadow vales. The truth is that once cows strip the groundcover in one spot, they trundle on to another leaving behind highways of excrement.  Besides the fact that a single helping of cow dung is the size of a party platter and heaps of it now decorated our landscape including our favored picnic spots, neither my husband nor I have eaten a cheeseburger since Ronald Regan’s presidency, and so we wondered about the ethics of supporting the cattle industry even though we loved the Cartrights on Bonanza. This is why we decided to rid ourselves of heifers.

Unfortunately, this was not a simple act.

Cows have right of passage in the rural west. That means you might find yourself inadvertently hosting the beasts despite having never granted grazing rights to the owner of the cattle. This happens when you own, like we do, a piece of land that borders property owned by someone who has delivered grazing rights and you have no fence between you and said neighbor, which, in turn, spells trouble because cows wander. As sure as the tax bill will arrive in your mailbox, without a fence to stop them cows will stroll and visit your yet-uneaten shrubbery, grasses, and flowers. And, please, it is no use yelling or turning your water hose on them because they’ll be back.

According to state law, if you don’t want cows slobbering on your property then you must erect a fence to keep them out. Before you hit the Ace Hardware store, however, consider this: the state frowns on fence erection as potentially unfriendly fire and will raise your property taxes in return. If, on the other hand, you decide to join the symbiotic ranching relationship and forego your right to fence, the state will honor your collegial spirit by zoning your property “agricultural” rather than “residential” and hence extend to you a tax break. As a double bonus, the rancher will send you a modest check for grazing rights, enough to splurge on some hamburgers for your entire family at the local diner. Being prone to thinking too much, Frank and I pondered this dilemma further. Even though the rancher could run cows across our land, if we corralled a cow of our own, fed her, and later sold her, we would be in direct violation of the rules of Cottonwood Springs Ranch Subdivision because the subdivision’s covenants forbid owners to use their parcels for commercial purposes.

Even though the cows certainly legitimated the notion of property-as-ranch, as our high-desert Shangri-la morphed into a smelly stew of manure and upturned shrubbery, we wondered if taking second jobs to pay for a fence around our acreage was really such a bad idea. While we were deliberating the belching, defecating cattle, we reached the third and final property-naming conundrum. As the cows bullied their way on and off our turf, Frank and I took advantage of their relocation in the southern part of our property to hike the northern arroyo, which is a deep and wide crack in the parched earth with almost vertical embankments that crumble underhand if you try to claw your way out while being chased down by a hungry cougar, for example. We followed the bed until the banks flattened and we could easily walk out.

I ambled toward some sun-baked, manure-free rocks for a little nap but Frank lagged behind. I turned to find him pawing at the ground like a feral thing, or like a bull ready to charge into the trunk of a tree.

“What are you doing?” I cried.

He looked up grinning and called out, “Do you think this is something?”  He waved something light-colored. Upon inspection, I found he held one of the most perfect Indian spearheads I’d ever seen, about four inches in length and carved from pink granite, still bearing serrated edges sharp enough to saw through skin. Stealthily, we retreated into the trees with our loot to stroke it, ponder it and play with it, like two apes with a shiny toy. For a half hour, we laughingly tested the tool on our clothes and scraps of wood and when we tired of that, we puzzled over the meaning of this archaeological clue.

What tribe of Native Americans hunted here, we wondered? Did they live here or was it perhaps a summer camp? At one time, had there been running water in the arroyo? Did children giggle and splash here? We looked over our shoulders half expecting to see a warrior’s disapproving shade standing over us, arms akimbo, watching us mishandle his prized tool before exploding into expletives to let us know that he felt we were getting exactly what we deserved.

“Where’s the buffalo?” he demanded, pointing out that buffalo not only taste better than cows but they’re a whale of a lot smarter because they migrate before destroying the habitat. In his opinion, said our imaginary warrior, we could just take our pale, wrinkly skinned selves back to our uninspiring faux teepee and get trampled for all he cared. Glumly, we headed back to camp and I didn’t laugh when Frank made a half-hearted attempt to jab me with the spearhead. We should go rebury the thing, I said.

. . . . .

In the past decade and a half since signing that deed under the crusty watch of Custer County’s clerk, our notions about the land have shifted. We’ve dug up and restrung sections of the dentist’s downed barbed-wire fence along the arroyo, which at least keeps the cloven-hoofed ones at bay from a small sanctuary where we’ve built a primitive cabin. On long-shadowed autumn afternoons, I fancy myself an archaeologist, leading friends and family to the spearhead discovery site where we search for arrowheads; we’ve found a few tiny ones that might pierce a sparrow’s breast. These pieces never leave the land and if we ever sell, I will dig a hole and send them back to the earth.

We still have no clever name for our land but we did transform it into a conservation easement. The San Isabel Land Trust Foundation easement guarantees, at least as far as we can know, that the land will never be subdivided into smaller pieces, and we, along with our neighbors, have created a good-sized easement corridor for wildlife and wilderness. We’ve forgotten the eagerness and urgency of branding the land, instead seeing ourselves as an entry in the land’s biography. Still, every now and then, I eye the rack of antlers I found and nailed above the cabin door and wonder about hanging a wee sign there carved with a moniker for the cabin like the Rut Hut or Shed of the Sangres, and then the deer tiptoe past us and I’m once again fresh out of ideas about who possesses what out here.