Return to Chiricahua

So beautiful. So nearby. No excuse is needed to go back again and again. Despite my fixation on current fixation on geology and deep time, however, our agreed-upon destination for this trip was Faraway Ranch, which would mean getting out of the car and walking but neither an arduous hike nor a frightening drive high into the mountains.

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The name of Faraway Ranch should require no explanation. The name says it all. It was the first ranching homestead established in the Chiricahuas, and I believe the rancher was Swedish or Norwegian, but I’ll have to follow up on that question another time. What struck me more forcibly than his story was that after he died his wife lived on there – and she lived a long time. One of the signs at the trailhead gives this long quotation from her:

“The only sure thing, Lillian Erickson Riggs wrote in 1954, in the early days of her widowhood, “is that I love my home. And there is a feeling of safeness and security in the very walls and in the length and breadth of the spacious rooms.... Death will be far preferable to giving up my Faraway home.”

She lived on into her 90s, and this is her beautiful home as it appears today. I especially love the second-story veranda looking up into rocky hills.

But I also love the little cabins and outbuildings and corrals and windmill, everything about the place saying that all who lived here were well cared for, the cattle and horses as well as the humans. Above the saddle trees in the tack room are painted cans, each with the name of the horse whose saddle would be stored below. Were bridles looped over the cans?

And here are a couple of shots he suggested, the first for its composition, the second because it made him think of a fellow Michigan painter friend who winters in Florida. If that painter sees this, he will understand.

After soaking in the atmosphere of Faraway Ranch, including following the Bonita Canyon trail (trod very recently by horses, I observed) far enough to see evidence of a tree struck by lightning (above) and burned from the inside, we went on to find a shady picnic table for our late morning shack of nuts and dates and raisins. It was a surprise to find that the beautiful, elegant mountain bluebird is as greedy a beggar as blue jays back home in Michigan. The explanation came later, when I checked Peterson’s Western Birds and realized that the little beggars were gray-breasted jays, a species of jay lacking a crest. That identification made much more sense of their behavior.

(The pair I saw idown n the wash at home last week, however, were mountain bluebirds, I'm sure)

Leaving the park, we decided to follow 191 south by Turkey Creek ranch. Turkey Creek is an important name in the Chiricahuas, as the highest peaks in the Chiricahua National Monument are remaining sections of what geologists call the Turkey Creek caldera, formed during volcanic eruptions about 27 million years ago, depositing ash over an area of 1,200 square miles. The ash slowly compressed to form welded tuff that is 800 feet thick in the Monument.

The cooling ash deposits contracted, joints developed, and cracks in the rock became accessible to running water, frost, plant roots, and organic acid. It was this erosion that created the monumental pillars. It was after that, between five and twenty-five million years ago, that changes in the movement of tectonic plates pulled and stretched the earth’s crust, tilting fault systems to create the mountain ranges and basins we see today. The Chiricahuas, Dos Cabezas, and Dragoons were all formed in this way.

But that was long, long, long ago. What interested us more as we drove south through ranchland was the absence of water. We crossed one dry wash after another, dry, rocky streambeds nothing but dips in the road and empty meanders off through the trees, the trees a clear sign that water does sometimes flow here.

And then – and then – can it really be? Running water! It is amazing how one’s heart leaps at the sight of running water in this arid region. The joy is almost beyond belief. We shout and laugh and smile – and we imagine how the sight would have appeared to dusty pioneers in awkward wagons pulled by tired horses or oxen.

Turning west and then north, we crossed the huge basin bordered by the Dragoons, the Chiricahuas, and the Dos Cabezas. Farther north a bit later we had the huge Willcox Playa on our right (more about that another time), and ahead of us the snow-capped Pinalenos. A combination of constant map-reading, ever-present landforms, and long sight distances has oriented me pretty well to northern Cochise County, with the twin peaks of Dos Cabezas always leading home.

Familiar Diversions in an Unfamiliar Land

Tuesday was bookstore expedition day. Our first stop was out on the range, where we visited a bookstore that occupies three rooms of the ranch house. We didn't go immediately into the bookstore, as we were initially waylaid by two charming donkeys and another customer's border collie, Cody. After Cody left, David took Sarah over to meet the donkeys and reported to me (I was in the bookstore by then) that she found them very interesting. Not as intimidating as cattle, it sounded like.

Cody watching donkeys

Such a lot of books! All new, as it turned out, every last one, none old or out-or-print or even gently used, but a huge and fascinating selection nonetheless. 

And despite the distraction of yet another charming dog, I managed to look at books and select a couple for purchase. I also took time to admire the homemade mesquite bookshelves. 

Then we went back into the town of Benson for our second visit to a wonderful gem of a bookstore we'd been tipped off to by a friend. The little pink building set back from the main street of the town is only the beginning of it, with another, larger building connected behind. The books go on and on and on!

The proprietor, Lenore, has a wonderful selection, both new and used books. Everything is very well organized and labeled (even the stacks on the floor are in front of the shelves where they would go, if only there were room for them), and her prices are great. As this was our second visit, David and I knew immediately where we wanted to head when we got inside. I was relieved that the book I'd held back on buying the last time was still there waiting for me. Such is not always the case, as I know from my experience as a bookseller. 

Do you wonder about the name of this charming establishment? Lenore calls it, very modestly, Paperback Recycler. It's her name, and she's had the bookstore for 25 years, so that's that. I do want to tell anyone visiting southeast Arizona, though, that this store has much, much more than recycled paperbacks! I can't think of a subject category that is not well represented in this bookstore, and there are a lot of hardcover books in every section.

So now, here are my purchases from our bookstore day. Can you guess which books I bought where?

Days are still short, sunset and dark coming quickly at the end of every day, but the lovely expanse of time is a great luxury we do not take for granted.

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.