My Ranch

By Tom Reed

 

She first came west in a 1914 Cadillac. She was an eight year-old girl with two little sisters crammed into an open car, the hot, oppressive flatland wind in their hair. Their father changed a tire every few hundred miles, stewing in prairie heat. The mountain air must have been sweet relief and it carried a desire to be part of something bigger.

 

Land. Connecting. Earth. It was as important as life to her. A piece of land to live that life. She needed that.

We called her Ginna.

 

She never wanted to be called Grandma. “It makes me sound so old,” she said. “Call me by my name.”

One fall day in 1967, Ginna and her son, my uncle, drove up a tangled road on the shoulder of a western mountain. They shut off the truck and got out stretching and slammed doors and turned around in a slow, dizzying circle and looked everywhere—out across the wide sweep of grass, and back to the timbered mountain, and around to the open expanse that swelled to a far off peak. And they turned to each other in that cold air and the letters of their words were ragged plumes of simultaneous breath: “This is it.”

Some called it the ranch, but I knew it simply as Ginna's.

 

In the first years, we slept in a huge wall tent, smelling the fertile ground and the pine needles beneath our sleeping bags. After the house was built in a stand of quakies on the slope of the mountain, my short stays stretched became longer, weeks at a time. The land became my home. My place to explore and adventure, to dream of mule deer and elk and trout in the clear stream. She was not a hunter, but she was what every sportsman needs to be—a naturalist. She knew wildflowers and bird song and weather patterns and where to look in the deep woods for fairy slipper orchids or on what slopes of the old logging road the fattest raspberries grew.

 

We knew we were lucky to be there, blessed by what we drank, breathed, saw and ate.

 

Ginna taught me that humans should have an ethical and moral attachment to ground. It’s more than the sigh of wind-stripped trees in an October blizzard, it’s more than the prickle of tall grass against your back as you lie staring up at the ceiling of the world, it’s more than the sharp tang of fringed sage washed in the pounding rains of July, and it’s more than that taste—crystal and cold and perfect—of a mountain spring. Perhaps it is a combination of all of these, of sights and sounds and smells and tastes that gives us a connection, that allows us to dismount and listen and smell for a moment.

 

In the late 1970s, mineral exploration came to the West. It always has. It was a time of change and everybody trusted, before Three Mile Island, that surely uranium would wean us from our thirst for oil. Ginna walked the land, but she didn’t own what was beneath it—the mineral rights. It was hard for her and I to understand that a mining company could go through the gate between the twin ponderosas, past the No Trespassing sign and start tearing at the ground, looking for uranium.

 

But they did.

 

Big trucks bounced past her house. Machines clawed the earth, and in so doing, clawed at Ginna’s heart. Geiger counters swept the soil, then moved on. Company men shoved aside the huge log where Ginna and I had sat on the ridge, watching the nighthawks dive. They tore a hole in the southeast meadow and they battered the bark off aspens along the road where I’d shot my first deer when I was 14. The neighbors started selling and finally she did too. She lost her ranch.

 

It was then that I became a public lands sportsman, and it was then that my “ranch” was wherever I could find it.

 

Today my ranch is up a canyon in Colorado, on a peak in New Mexico, on the oak steppe of southeastern Arizona, on a Montana plateau. I fish for cutthroat trout, hunt for chukar partridge, Coues deer and Mearns quail. On my ranch I can catch a half dozen pure native trout of different subspecies, shoot a six point bull elk, a trophy moose, a blue grouse or even a bighorn ram. I can drive up a road in the middle of nowhere, unfurl my sleeping bag and watch stars in the night sky, smell that fertile soil and those pine needles. My ranch isn’t a piece of ground that an old lady sold out because she was scared. My ranch is millions of acres. My ranch is everywhere. My ranch has it all. My ranch is public land.

 

Tom Reed is the director of the Northwest Region of the Sportsmen’s Conservation Project. He lives in Pony, Montana.