The dusk sky is awash in a furious, persistent orange blaze to the west. Its lesser glows of apricot and rose catch on the metal roofs, gates, and fence posts of the house pasture.
The spectacle is a glory that charges irrepressibly by rote to remind me how much a part I am of this wild landscape and it a part of me.
The stillness of the hour and the pungency of damp earth conjure a powerful nostalgia for the first days I came to this ranch in retreat from a broken heart and ruptured finances.
When I take that long look back, I understand that my life in Austin and Wimberley, even as a 40-year-old, was a protracted interlude in Never Never Land. I was poised to grow up, but didn’t until I came back here to meditations in the silence of sun seared work and contemplations lost to the creamy swath of the Milky Way and the star-pricked canopy of the vast indigo sky.
There were no phones, TV signals, or ambient light to distract me. Books and paper, the cattle, hearth fire coffee at daybreak, the work of gates and fences, and a quiet meal at nightfall — these ordered my days.
I never thought of this time as penance or boot camp, but indeed it was. In my solitude I cleaned this ranch, picked up the legacies of men — pull tabs, beer cans, and cigarette butts. I fixed plumbing and broken doors. I soaped and oiled saddles and tack. I sought the good company of horses. I built deluxe chicken coops with old wood and wire netting.
The sunrises called all of me to waking and carried on their beauty the heartbeat of my family’s two-century romance with this land on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.
I like to think I transformed my immediate surroundings to become worthy of the natural world beyond our fences. I hiked the arroyos in winter, losing myself to their stunted Botero-esque flora and occasional arrowhead finds. I drove the ranch at night, unafraid and so keenly aware of the movements of wildlife. I’ve yet to shake off the memory of edging curiously to the pond at night to scope out a mass in the water. The largest rattlesnake I’ve ever seen twanged off like a full fire hose across the water as I stumbled backward to the truck.
I got right with god, she of the monte, shooting stars, violent lightning, and the brush stroked sunsets that at last light dropped so quickly behind the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico.
I took my licks about squandering money that should have kept me comfortable a good while.
I made odd friends who drank in excess, told dirty jokes, and thought me strange because I neither drank nor joked and because they neither read books nor examined their lives. One of them ended up rustling cattle from us, and for a moment life read like a drama worthy of an old Western.
My mother came out once a month from the city to say, “I can’t believe you can live like this!” — a variation on the childhood refrain as I was about to reach for the door knob, “You’re going out like that?”
I played music in my truck — lots of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and sometimes Dwight Yoakum to rub the salve of righteous country western indignation on the broken heart, its once striated fissures healing mercifully to hairline cracks.
This evening as I make my way onto the blacktopped ranch road to drive back to the city, I take my cursory tour of nearby historic San Ygnacio — the pueblito of my great-great-great grandparents on the Río Grande. To my delight, Tom Ashbrook on NPR is remembering Leonard Cohen, playing his music and visiting with Alan Light who wrote The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of Hallelujah.
There by twilight, my heart —shaped again all these decades later by a life as a journalist on the borderlands and a recent two-year wrestle with mortality — finds itself wide open to Cohen’s lyrical grace that once struck so vital a chord in a younger, more vulnerable me, a chord that awakened and fostered the curiosity to find myself in the exploration of literature, powerful writing, longing and lament, and the distracting, over-rated complexities of love found and love damned.
The wend home tonight awakens memories of one of the richest times in my life when music was not so much a backdrop for the tumult of the sixties, as it was, too, an engaging challenge to conscience and to rise to action.
Almost home, I revel in thoughts that there might be enough time to get well, that I might be brave enough to commit new and dangerous words to paper, that I might live on the ranch again.
