Reading the Western News

No doubt it is possible to buy The New York Times in Tucson or Phoenix, but no one sells it here – and by “here” I mean Willcox, our nearest real town, not little ghost town Dos Cabezas, where there has been no store of any kind for many years. One can read the Times online at the library, but I say, why bother? “The News Hour” with Gwen Ifill gives me as much national and world news as I can handle. And besides, I’m keeping my online time to a minimum, averaging well under 30 minutes a day on the Internet, most of which time is spent downloading and reading e-mail, updating one or two of my blogs, and briefly checking Facebook to make sure I’m not missing an important message from anyone (though I’ve tried to get across to friends that e-mail is my preferred contact).

Anyway, in general, I like to be where I am. By that I mean that for me the point of being somewhere other than home is immersing myself in that different place. And so, here in southeasternmost Arizona for the winter, it is Cochise County news that really captures my attention. The big Arizona newspaper comes, of course, from Phoenix, but news of where we are is most thoroughly covered by the Arizona Range News, published in Willcox, Arizona, since 1882. The office on Haskell Avenue isn't in a fancy building, and it may look at first like there's not much happening there, but sit and watch a while, and you'll see people coming and going. And every week the paper comes out.

The Range News (like our own Leelanau Enterprise back home) is a weekly newspaper, generally two sections, and it covers news in the communities of Willcox, San Simon, Sunsites, Bowie, Cochise, and Dragoon, which is pretty much the whole Sulphur Springs Valley. There are feature news articles, obituaries, columns, editorials and letters, public announcements, and advertisements. When we first arrived in the area, I couldn’t get enough of the obituaries and loved the one about a woman who was a lifetime rancher and whose favorite activities were knitting, quilting, and “working cows.” Reading a local newspaper is a good way to begin getting acquainted with a community.

Is this week’s Range News particularly interesting, or am I just paying closer and closer attention, the longer we’re here? The following stories pulled me in:

1) Feeding the hungry: “Distribution center to help area hungry,” reads the headline of the story of a $1.2 million donation from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation for what will be called the Willcox Food Distribution Center and will serve Cochise, Graham and Greenlee Counties: The HGB Foundation, I learned from this article, advocates for those who are “food insecure,” not only in third-world countries but right here at home. Howard Buffett (son of Warren Buffett) was born in Illinois, and his foundation owns farmland in Illinois, Nebraska, and Arizona – most interestingly to me, this winter, a research farm right down the pike from us on the Kansas Settlement Road – and his foundation’s threefold mission is to improve lives worldwide through food security, water security, and conflict resolution. I am most interested to learn more about HGB projects, especially as they are being tested so close to Dos Cabezas.

2) Gould’s wild turkey: Have you ever heard of it? I had not, until now, but a long piece in the Range News informs me that a wildlife project in the nearby Pinaleño Mountains (north of Cochise County, in Graham County) has received national awards for habitat restoration and re-establishment of Gould’s wild turkey, the largest wild turkey in the U.S., and found only in southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and Mexico. A partnership between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Wild Turkey Federation is “part of a broader effort to restore habitat for Gould’s Wild Turkeys in southeastern Arizona’s ‘Sky Islands,’ 12 mountain ranges primarily managed by the Coronado National Forest.” The article calls the birds “spectacular” and their comeback “incredible,” their population in SE Arizona now standing at an estimated 15,000 birds.

3) Copper mining: The brief boom that brought Dos Cabezos into its most populous era was based on copper, and it was copper and iron that fueled the mining industry in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so of course a headline reading “Opposition organizes for copper mine” would get my attention. I also know from what I’ve read of mining in the Dakotas (SD my birthplace) that modern mining leaves more than holes in the ground. The news is that Excelsior Mining, having “recently completed a drilling program” in the Dragoon area, is now preparing applications for permits “to inject sulfuric acid deep underground to release copper and pump the pregnant solution back out to retrieve the copper....” Concerns are about “the use of groundwater in an area where supplies are limited” and possible contamination of groundwater. Like fracking, this process bears close scrutiny and “faces a long period of review,” according to the paper. Present-day alchemists take note: there are plenty of metals besides gold and silver much needed by modern technology! Being able to manufacture (rather than mine) copper or a good substitute could solve a lot of world problems and make the successful inventor very, very rich!

4) Auctioneer recognized: Hooray for Paul Ramirez of Tucson, auctioneer extraordinaire of the Willcox Livestock Auction Market! At the Greater Midwest Livestock Auctioneers Championship in Motley, Minnesota, Ramirez carried off the Reserve Championship. We have seen and heard him at work and were very impressed, so we’re happy to see that he holds his own in competition. Good work!

5) Film Festival: This is the next big event coming to the Willcox Historic Theatre, the same little movie house where we were fortunate and privileged to see the Paris Opera not long ago. It’s only the second year of the festival, but it looks like great fun, with 20 regional independent films in competition. Expect to hear more of this in the near future.

6) Junior Rodeo: Expect to hear more of this, too! Admission is free for the two-day junior rodeo, with food concessions operated by the 4-H. “Don’t expect much,” David warned, and I told him, “Don’t expect to keep me away!” Will there be calf roping? Barrel racing? I can hardly wait to find out!

There was more in this week’s newspaper – a community service award for the Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative; results of the spelling bee in San Simon District; Willcox Middle School Honor Roll; a call to host an exchange student; local team sports news; the usual (but always unique and fascinating) obituaries and letters; and ads, display and classified, just one of which I’ll share. Under HELP WANTED is this notice:

TEMPORARY Open Range Livestock workers needed for Legacy Land & Livestock, Roswell, NM, from 2/15/15 – 11/15/15. Workers will be required to be “On Call 24/7,” perform a variety of duties related to the production of cattle and sheep; feed and water livestock; herd livestock to pasture for grazing and into corrals and stalls; distribute feed to animals; assist with calving, lambing and shearing....

Well, I can’t go on. Yes, there is castration and branding and spraying with insecticide involved, as well as cleaning stalls and pens (not as bad as castration and insecticide and branding). Oh, no, I can’t stop yet. How about this?

Must be able to find and maintain bearings to grazing areas. [Check!] Must be willing and able to occasionally live and work independently or in small groups of workers in isolated areas for extended periods of time. [Check!] Worker must be able to lift and carry items weighing up to 100 pounds. ...

Uh, okay, that’s enough. Hard outdoor work. Much as I love to work outdoors, sadly I think I’m past my cowgirlin’ prime.

Cattle Come Calling

The country at large was focused on the Super Bowl as the weekend approached, but one little winter household in the ghost town of Dos Cabezas, Arizona, could not have been less interested in sports. We were absorbed by a very different event, an everyday local occurrence out here in open range country but altogether new to us. We’d been told it would happen. We’d looked for it to happen. And at last, they came – the “cows.”

In fact, a couple of them had arrived in our front yard the night before the morning crowd assembled down in the wash. I’d gone out to the car after dark to retrieve a map from the car and heard a rustling nearby when, turning, I was surprised by a very large bovine face not 20 feet from me. Yikes! And there was another one over by the other open gate! Not that closed gates would have changed anything. There are no fences around the yard, only a couple of gates across the part of the yard used for driving in and out. Here in open range country, if you want to keep cattle off your private land, it’s your responsibility to put up the fences to exclude them.

The next day when I investigated in front of the house where the cows had been, it looked like someone – something – had been chewing on the big, fleshy leaves of an old century plant. For the moisture, perhaps? No significant rain had fallen for quite a while. In days following the cows’ visit, we had over 48 hours of rain, a slow, grey, sometimes mizzling, sometimes pounding, long-drawn-out, Michigan-style soaker, but that’s another story, and while ranchers here welcomed the rain, the cows’ visit was more interesting to someone from Michigan, to whom rain is an old, familiar story.

Given my after-dark encounter, it wasn’t a complete surprise to see big animals grazing behind the cabin the next morning. Sarah, though (always on a leash for that first and last sortie of each day, leashless for the adventures in between), was somewhat startled and thoroughly amazed. Sarah barked! Anyone who knows Sarah knows that she almost never barks. She is, however, always alert to changes in her surroundings, and this was a big one, something completely new in her experience. “Never mind,” I told her. “They belong here. You are the interloper!” But, eyes fixed on the big, strange animals nearby, she could hardly attend to her own dog business, so I took her around front, where she finally peed, and then, there at the gate where the cow had been the night before, her eager little black nose worked the ground over to a fare-thee-well. This, she was clearly thinking, is what I call news!

Although they are all called “cows” out here, most of the open range grazers are steers. They come in all breeds, colors, and sizes. Some have horns. Most seem to be very curious, almost as curious as a dog seeing them up close for the first time.

After our exciting expedition up into the nearby Chiricahuas the other day, I’d gotten from the library and read through a little nature memoir, The Chiricahua Mountains, by Weldon F. Heald. One interesting passage I read aloud to David, to fix it in our minds so that neither of us would make a terrible regional faux pas.

It’s embarrassing, if not downright impertinent, to ask a rancher how many head he runs. That’s similar to inquiring about his bank balance. This was inevitably the first question our friends put to us at the Flying H, and we would answer vaguely, “Oh, quite a few.” Then sometimes I parried the query by saying that I wore the biggest Stetson and had the smallest herd of any rancher at Harold Thurber’s annual cattle sale and barbecue.

Without reading this bit of regional etiquette advice, I wouldn’t have thought of the question in that light and might well have asked it. Saved by a book! And when the author explains, I understand the reasoning, too. In my bookstore back in northern Michigan, I’ve parried plenty of impertinently curious questions over the years. Even when merely people ask anxiously if the bookstore is “doing all right,” I’ve got my answer ready: “Over 20 years in business without a trust fund,” I tell them. “It has to pay its own way, or it wouldn’t survive.”

What question might be appropriate to put to a rancher? David wondered about asking how many acres a ranch might contain, but I thought that inquiry would be just as unwelcome. For one thing, it’s similar to asking how many cows, in that it asks, “How wealthy are you?” Besides, most ranchers don’t own more than a small fraction of the land on which they run cattle. The larger part is Bureau of Land Management land, leased by the year-- leases, however, passing down through the generations like land, which explains why ranchers usually feel the land is theirs and resent having to deal annually with the BLM.

With all this new information coming at me, including reading, with David, The Story of Dos Cabezas, by Phyllis de la Garza, and Basin and Range, by John McPhee, is it any wonder I’ve taken up a more familiar book the last few nights for my bedtime reading? But Mma Ramotswe of the Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency, too, owned cattle, inherited from her father, far off in Botswana where cattle equal wealth. There is no escaping the “cows,” it seems, and that’s all right by me.