D e s e r t E x p o s u r e 
January
2008
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Voice of a Ranch
Woman Third in a Series |
The First Track in the Snow
Living and ranching out in nature, as stewards of the land.
By Linda McDonald, as told to Victoria Tester
This first-person reminiscence is excerpted from recordings of Linda Nielson McDonald at her home on the McDonald Ranch. Established in 1903, the McDonald Ranch is among the five oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. Linda McDonald, born in Moab, Utah, in 1942, is the wife of Jerry McDonald, the son of Jonnie McDonald and Evelyn McCauley. These recordings are a collaboration between McDonald and author Victoria Tester, whose book Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press) won the nationally recognized Willa Cather Literary Award. Their efforts mark the beginning of a project by the two women to record and publish a book of oral histories of ranch women in southern New Mexico.
As I think back about my own childhood, and even before, I remember my parents telling me the story that we lived in a tent at the Yellow Circle Mine up from Moab. We lived there for a winter after I was born.
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The author and her family at the
Nielson ranch in Colorado about 1950. |
My mom and dad would go down to Moab, to the dances, in a dump truck. And they had my buggy. So they'd put me in my buggy, up in the back of that dump truck. From that very time I felt close to nature. Because there I was in that buggy, looking up in those stars. Looking up at those beautiful red rocks in Moab.
Maybe I didn't. I was just a little ol' baby. But I do think that started me feeling close to nature.
They'd be in at the dance, and come out and check on me, and go, "Well, she's not crying." So they'd go back in and dance a few more sets, and come back out and check on me again.
In the meantime I was getting close to nature. They didn't know what a favor they were doing me.
When I was a child, I used to love to smell the rain on the manure down at my granddad's ranch. The smell of rain is my very, very favorite smell.
They've never duplicated it. There's no perfume. Even though they say it smells like rain, it doesn't smell like rain. Nothing can duplicate Mother Nature.
I don't think I appreciated rain up in Colorado. You got a lot more moisture up there. In New Mexico, you really appreciate the rain. Because it doesn't always rain. I remember going a whole winter and we got no moisture. So when it does rain, you're so thankful for it.
Because that's our livelihood. Out here on this ranch we depend on the rain for the feed for the cattle.
Of course, when I married Jerry, he'd been raised out on this ranch all his life, and he was in tune to nature. He'd watch the moon and see what phase the moon was in, and he'd watch tracks and things like that.
When Jerry and I lived at the Cienega, there was a screened-in porch with a bed out there. He'd slept out there all his life, and so he decided we were going to sleep there, summer and winter.
In winter time, he'd put a tarp over us. It kept us warmer, and, in case it started raining or something like that, it would keep the rain and the snow off. There was a time or two that we'd wake up in the morning and there would be snow on that tarp.
That was the best of both worlds. Because you could stay on the porch, and not have to take your bed inside, and you could still be out among nature.
Then, after we moved up here, we got an old bedstead and set it up back here under an apricot tree. And we'd put a mattress out there and sleep out on that old bedstead.
He said, "Oh, if your college roommates could see you now! Here you are sleeping out under the stars!"
But we just love sleeping out like that.
Later, he'd pull his flatbed trailer up here by the house and we'd take this little light mattress, just a piece of foam, and we'd take it out there.
And it was the funnest thing, the funnest thing — to be out there under the stars, and to hear those birds chirping early in the morning — but the funnest thing of all was you'd be sleeping and all of a sudden you'd feel these raindrops on your face. And I'd go, "Jerry, it's raining." So we'd gather up our bed. He'd get the mattress and I'd get the covers and we'd run back to the house — and about that time it would quit raining.
Now that we're staying at Granny's, we go down there late at night and we leave early in the morning.
But the funnest thing for me when I step off her porch is to feel raindrops on my face, and it's raining early in the morning. Or you run down in the night with your raincoat on because it's raining.
When I moved to New Mexico, I didn't know about flash floods. We didn't have that in Colorado. And I didn't know how to deal with them. But I learned real quick.
Because Jerry and his mom and dad would tell me the stories, like in the 1950s they had this huge flood. It had rained, and there was so much water in that flood that when they would stand out in front of their house they could feel the ground shaking, from the power of the water of that flood. They were just blessed that it didn't rain so much that it washed the house away.
They began to teach me about these flash floods and what you do with them, and how you deal with them. And I learned right off, you don't ever drive off into a canyon when it's flooding.
They told me a story about a Mexican family that had driven off into a flood, and it had drowned a lot of them, and how they'd come in to Jerry's grandparents' house, and they'd revived this little baby. The poor little baby had leaves and mud all over it and everything.
So it scared you. You just didn't drive off in those floods. And those floods could come anytime. You think: Get to town early, before the floods in the afternoon. But the rain will come early in the mornings, too. Then sometimes it will rain all night.
It doesn't take long for the canyons to run down usually, but when they're running, you don't go off in 'em. It's not a place to play or anything, because there might be a canyon that hasn't come down yet, and it'll make a rise in that flood. So it might not be that much at one time, but there might come a rise in it because there's the water coming in from the other tributaries, coming into that.
So we have a real respect for the floods. Fortunately, we've never had anything serious happen, other than just it taking the electricity out and messing up the roads.