Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

How To Trespass In the American West (The Land of the Sharp and Painful)

It’s a sad reality out of a Shel Silverstein fable: the West has been cordoned off. The great Kirk Douglas movie Lonely Are the Brave, based on an Edward Abbey novel, tackles this subject admirably. But the fact as I’m living it is, if I don’t want to hike up the Funky Butte Ranch’s Western Ridge to the tune of an extra mile, then accessing friends in the valley, the outside world, or even my morning run route means a steeplechase of barbed wire-hurdling and Limbo-ing. At least two fences, usually much more, are in my way every day.

Traversing barbed wire is thus a necessary part of trespassing in the 21st Century. And for me it’s always a very dangerous game of Twister. You have to decide on a fence-by-fence basis if you want to go over (stepping on bendy, rusty wires), under (I admire the way my puppy Sadie effortlessly Limbos underneath as if those Tatanus-filled spikes aren’t millimeters from her spine), or, as I usually wind up attempting, a wiggle-worm, shirt-gripping effort through the widest gap in the middle. Plenty of animals get fatally hung up in these nasty traps, and I see no reason why I’ll continue to be exempt simply due to my species’ Latin classification. That I’m usually lugging a laptop or dripping leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail of alfalfa hay crumbs (or both), and engaged in criminal trespass at the time of said Twister game, just compounds the pressure factor. I’m wearing a few scars already from this practice and I’ve ripped pretty much all my pants and shirts. But as yet I have not become an inextricable scarecrow.

I’ve prevailed because the ramifications of failure would be severe. In fact, that’d be an embarrassing cell phone call to make to my pistol-toting and less-than-friendly septuagenarian Southern neighbor Pedro Ortiz, a gazillionth generation farmer in this Valley.

“Hello, senor, yes, your new neighbor here, Doug. Yes. Yes. The Gringo from Alaska with the low-riding Subaru. Listen. Could you swing by your North fence with some shears? I’m a bit hung up.”

Senor Ortiz has apparently not yet acquiesced to Spain granting independence to Mexico.

Fortunately, most New Mexico fences are about 50 years into the decay process. Compounded, though, the restrictions imposed by God and Spanish Royal property law on my leaving my property turn my morning runs into something out of 70s movie chase scenes.

But the tail end of the Barbed Wire Age is really just more proof that a consciousness can get used to anything. I remember the day that I stopped even noticing that I was serpentining through barbed wire several times a day. Some consider this to be the day I became a Westerner.

It was on my way back from a morning run in early November, just as the memories of the monstrous August flood were fading. I was whistling as the sky mysteriously remained clear just when the day’s first lightning would, for much of the previous two and a half months, have taken out the grid power for Southwest New Mexico. During this time we generally had grid power with the reliability of, say, Baghdad.

I stopped my run at the river, surveying in wonder its eminently crossable depth. Sadie lowered her snout for a drink. Then I spun and started back up El Otro Lado Road. It was almost morning feeding time for the Goatlets. I skipped through the Von Tress (now Montessori School) sunflower field, turning left at the 140 year old acequia irrigation ditch that traversed my property at the boundary with the Ortizes, about a third of a mile from the river. Sadie, as usual, was nearly circling with excitement, just at being alive. As I hopped the Ortiz fence (Blue/Red/Blue in the Twister game), a woodpecker bonked in the same time signature I was humming.

I was over the fence before I even noticed it. I didn’t even recall extracting my usual right sleeve from the usual rusty barb. I could neither see nor feel any blood emerging from my thigh.

I was over the Bard Wire Issue, literally and spiritually. And I was coming to terms with the fact that I now lived in LOSAP: The Land of The Sharp And Painful. Almost everything around here is sharp. It could explain a lot of social interactions amongst local ranch owners.

As I grooved on the woodpecker’s rhythm, suddenly an idea came to me: maybe I’d plant alfalfa as a winter cover crop in the lower field, to cut back on the hay imports during flood times. I looked up at the bird and the world still smelled like a lemon grove care of the now eight-foot-tall decaying wildflower clusters that had taken over the FBR after the monsoon. At this point I still couldn’t even see the goat pen from the barn, which I took as a sign that neither could the coyotes. I had almost a quarter mile of land that I still couldn’t believe as my home to traverse to get to the barn and scoop up a hay for the Goatlets.

For a moment everything was olfactory. Then I made my way across the meadows of the Ranch canyon floor. As I was strolling through my favorite one – a tastefully laid-out balance of Century Plants, purple daisies and apache plume – I thought about how my whole world now has to match alfalfa, since I leave it in the pockets of even clean shorts, on bank teller counters, and lining the basin of washing machine and hot tub. I was just realizing what a confusing problem being in constant possession of perhaps an ounce of ambiguous green, leafy material could prove in any state other than New Mexico, when I heard the first “Mmbah?”

It was Melissa, who was approaching a hearty chubbiness and will always remind me when it’s a minute past feeding time.

“Mmbah!” I promised the Goatlets, as I snipped a daisy to put in the brim of my hat.

“Mmbah!” they called back, in a weird, off-key vibrato harmony this time.

This caprine/human conversation tended to get lost in repetition along the lines of the shampoo/rinse/repeat loop. Four months into my new, unintentional career as Goat Herder, I was speaking more goat than English. I thought my accent was passable. Nat and Missy understood me, in any event.

As my conversation with the Goats heated up, I for the first time recognized the beginning of my transformation. I realized that I loved the Flood. Not just having endured and survived it, but that it had occurred.

I loved that I had to make that trek to the community coffee klatch every other day, in order to replenish the hay supply.

I loved that I was set for the winter on fruit and I wouldn’t get scurvy, thanks the bounty of my immediate neighbors’ orchards. Now I needed to get to work on protein prior to the goats’ first kidding. Unless I was prepared to start eating the mice my kittens Robin and Maddie brought me every day. It was almost deer season.

I loved that the birds of prey were so numerous and large here that I frequently confused one for a plane. That every now and then I had to yell, “Hey Ms. Red-tailed Hawk, stay away from my chickens before I pull out the shotgun!” (A classic case of TINIWES. Things I Never Imagined I Would Ever Say.)

I loved when the loudest sound in my world was a raven’s wings hussing overhead.

I loved that I regularly heard deer and elk moving through the night outside my bedroom window. That when it was coyote who woke me, I was like a new father, bolting with Sadie down to the corral to check on the Goatlets, all of our snouts steaming.
I loved that I planned on being a provider to, not just a consumer at the new Mimbres Valley Farmer’s Market. Eggs, goat cheese, maybe some of my Special Reserve goat ice cream. I’d call it “Rawhide Chocolate.”

After the Goatlets ate that November morning, Natalie came to sit in my lap during my morning meditation. She, not surprisingly, had a little orange garland of wildflowers stuck in her left horn. The goats didn’t mind the weather either: I hardly needed to feed them hay. There were 41 acres of bursting forage for them to munch. It was like a dessert bar out there.

A full recovery from the overgrazing of the previous owner’s mules. This desert proved more resilient than many thought. In fact, many species of plant and fungus were evidently designed to wait out a drought, only to emerge a decade later when sufficiently watered.

I got to my own breakfast that day at the crack of 11 a.m., what with morning chores and meditation. I took great delight in eating an egg that one of my chickens had given me. It was a pretty big event to the chickens, anyway, by the sound of it. The least I could do was fry it up.