Monday, May 5, 2014

Lighting out for the Territories, 6: Wranglers and other anomalies of "The Forest"

The continued stand-off between the Interior Department and range moochers ignorant of history reminds me of how cows are prodded on the slopes of New Mexico and other intermountain states.                                                                     


I headed north, toward Santa Fe. I had seen rangeland as it is popularly envisioned, too dry and difficult for anything but livestock, and often too dry for that. There are 300 million acres of public range in the West. Slightly more than half of that domain is administered by the BLM and supports 4 million head of livestock. In fiscal 1985 the BLM took in about $15 million in grazing fees. That is a fraction of what the land would generate if competitive rates were charged, but the range has other functions, some of them subtle. Much of America's breeding stock is not confined to feedlots but roams the range instead; and there are people who depend upon the vastness of the range to support ways of life that would otherwise evaporate — some of them distinctly odd by urban standards.
The Forest Service is also in the range business. Some people in the West think the heifer is a more fitting symbol of the FS than the black bear. Bud Eppers had shown me BLM range, and now I wanted to see some belonging to its sister agency.
The land rose gently, the emerging mesas promising bigger things to come. Outside Vaughn ("Home of the Mattaburger") I passed a boy wobbling along on a ten-speed beside the highway, reminding me of home. Sundays in strange places inspire a peculiar sort of loneliness. I stopped at an isolated gas station where a woman sold Coors to men in pickups, on their way to somewhere else. I wanted a beer, but she couldn't change my hundred-dollar bill — Washington money. In the van I had nothing stronger than chicory coffee and some garlic hanging in a mesh bag from the roof, so I had to settle for water from my tin Sierra cup.
To the north I could make out the tail end of the high Rockies, what early explorers had called the Shining Mountains, snow-drenched and too distant to be real. Blue sky lay flat against the western horizon. Islands of juniper and piñon pine stretched beneath flat-bottomed cumulus kiting at the end of high-tension wires, in a clarity that destroyed all depth perception. This part of New Mexico had linked the plains and the mountain West since prehistory. Cibola, the mythical cities of gold, had brought the conquest through. "Romantic, histrionic, cruel, and trance-bound," Bernard De Voto wrote of the Spanish in The Course of Empire, "they marched in rusty medieval armor toward the nonexistent." This portion of New Mexico had been a trading route for Indians, home to Spanish settlers, and later became part of the Santa Fe Trail.
The Santa Fe National Forest is the source not only of recreation but also of forage, firewood, and old blood claims. I could see that much of this national "forest" was in fact high, open range. It surrounded whole towns, among them Pecos, which was older than nearby Santa Fe and had been bypassed by the picture framers and blue corn tortilla entrepreneurs who had turned Santa Fe into another tourist stop.
Pecos lay a few miles off the Interstate. I passed through after everyone had gone to sleep and drove on up the canyon. The Pecos River rose in the wilderness not far away, fat with snow melt, roaring in the darkness. I spent the night in a Forest Service picnic area and the next day returned to town. Pecos's little rancheros were planted with overturned jalopies preserved in the clear mountain air. The eaves of the houses were hung with strings of chiles. Two girls in tight jeans waved at backfiring low-riders passing on the main street. There were a post office, a dry goods store, two bars, including one with a sign, "No knives allowed on premises."
"Pecos had more than its share of dark legends," Willa Cather wrote in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Coronado came through in the sixteenth century. At the Pecos pueblo he picked up the Turk, an artful Indian liar later garroted in what is now Kansas for failing to produce cities of gold. Before the Plains Indians had horses, they came to Pecos on foot to trade with the Indians of the desert West and with Spanish settlers out of Mexico. They had alternately violent and affectionate relationships, the latter apparent in most of the faces on Pecos's main drag.
The Pecos pueblo had moved en masse to Jemez, about fifty miles west, in 1837, leaving the land to the Spanish settlers. The Indians had also left an old masterpiece given to them by the viceroy; it still hangs in the church, La Iglesia de San Antonio de los Pecos. Supposedly it's a Caravaggio.
I walked past the open windows of the parochial school, where a confirmation class was in progress. Young voices sang hallelujah while birds piped in the fallow field opposite. Catkins had appeared on the willows. Inside the church, the lacquered white altar seemed to glow. Elaborate carved santos offered an abbreviated religious and secular history: Christ with a crown of thorns, an hidalgo, and what I presumed was a Franciscan friar. High above the altar, suspended by chains, hung an oil painting of Christ with angels at his feet, and a firmament of gold and gorgeous blues.
I found the young priest in a room with whitewashed walls, his black beard neatly trimmed, on his way to visit shut-ins. "I don't know if it's a Caravaggio," he said. The painting, he noted, represented one of the few material possessions the descendants of the original settlers had managed to keep. "After the Mexican-American war, New Mexico became independent. The treaty said the property of settlers would remain theirs. Much of it was communal and that's anathema in the United States."
The government said they had to fence the land. Most refused. Many people moved into town to live, still considering the outlying land theirs. But it was later confiscated by the U.S. government and put into the national forest
The priest said, "These people have been living off what they consider theirs ever since.

The headquarters for the Pecos District of the Santa Fe National Forest was an amalgam of concrete and glass recently sunk in the red earth and ringed by green pickups. There I met a large and friendly range conservation officer —"range con" — named Pete. He explained that the Pecos District consisted of 350,000 acres out of 1.5 million acres in the Santa Fe National Forest and included the Pecos Wilderness and the snowy peak of Pecos Baldy, visible from the main street.
Two thousand souls lived in Pecos, according to Pete, most of them dependent in some way on La Foresta, as the Forest Service was known in those parts, and occasionally at war with it. The forest was used for grazing only from spring through early autumn; permittees were at that moment preparing to drive their herds onto public pasture. Two thousand cattle ran on the Pecos District, owned by fifty-six permittees, most of them of Spanish descent, some owning only a few animals. "There are lots of petty rivalries," he said. "They're always trying to get permission to run more cows on the forest. They've got problems, mind you. There's no protection on government land. People will kill one of their cows, throw it into a pickup, and butcher it at home. Somebody just stole a permittee's new corral. The whole damn thing!"
Most were poor, but not all. "I've got a rich one who lives in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and comes out for a month every summer. He's not a rancher — it's a tax deduction. He wants Uncle Sugar to take a little less of his daddy's money. When he's out here he buys up every cow in sight and then lets somebody else take care of them. He wears a safari jacket and little khaki shorts, but he's good people."
The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management share a common mandate and common problems, although the Forest Service's 130 million acres of graze are comparatively well watered, and their use is more restricted. Both agencies grew out of the old General Land Office set up in 1812 to deal with federal lands. Settlers and others got their land free — or almost free — but the most valuable parcels often went to those with the best political connections. By the turn of the century fraud was so pervasive in the GLO that Gifford Pinchot, founder of the modern Forest Service, convinced his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who was then the U.S. president, to move the forest reserves out of the GLO and into the Department of Agriculture. That is where they have remained.
For almost thirty years after the breakup, the GLO functioned defensively, a paradigm of inefficient bureaucracy. The Taylor Grazing Act, written under the guidance of Secretary of the Interior Ickes, put an end to what was known as the "public domain" by assigning exclusive rights and creating grazing districts administered by the Grazing Service — and later the BLM — which issued permits to users of record. The act favored ranchers who owned some land and already had the habit of using public land. It eliminated itinerant sheepherders and limited the entry of new ranchers in an attempt to correct overgrazing, which has not abated in more than a century.
The Forest Service, insulated and politically nurtured in Agriculture, became a more professional agency, complete with uniforms and rule books. FS grazing allotments aren't interspersed with private or state land, as BLM parcels are, so FS lands can be more effectively supervised. FS grazing regulations are stricter than those on BLM land, and the FS doesn't have to face grazing advisory boards made up of local ranchers.
Pete the range con said, "Recreationists are just like cows. They shit where they sleep."
The previous year, fifteen thousand cords of firewood had been cut on the Pecos District, including two thousand cords of green pinon posts. But most of it was "dead and down," meaning expendable. Cutters came from as far away as Albuquerque, annoying the Pecosans. "They tend to think of it as theirs," said the ranger.
In Santa Fe two dozen range cons and the range technicians had gathered in a modern office building beside the highway, most of them with the telltale disk of Skoal or Copenhagen in their hip pockets. They discussed a controversial new grazing procedure known as the Savory method, after a Rhodesian expatriate whose holistic approach to resource management had swept through the ranching establishment.
The Savory method contradicted exponents of the old rotation system upon which many a federal program and reputation had been built. The rotation system, which called for short periods of disuse so the range could recuperate, though never fully, was to the West what the V-eight once was to Detroit. It had been used for so long that no one wanted to change it.
Savory advocated "time-control" grazing instead. Simply put, that meant moving cows regularly, rather than allowing them to stand and eat most of the ground cover at any given place. Savory's controversial wagon-wheel fencing allowed cows to gradually circle a water source like the hands of a clock, macerating the soil with their hooves and increasing seed germination, and then moving on.
It was difficult to see how the Savory method or the rotation system related to the small ranches near the rugged Pecos District. There wasn't enough grass, period, to justify the academics or the cows. I wondered how a rancher with a handful of cows and no trust fund could make it, when big operations were going bust.
Driving back to Pecos, the irrepressible Pete said, "We're supporting a huge infrastructure by spending taxpayers' money on 'management.' Range management has turned into producing grass for livestock. That's ass-backwards. We should be using livestock as a tool to create the landscape we want."
I told Pete I was looking for a small ranch, to check out the economics of the small-scale operation firsthand. He knew of what was surely one of the smallest in the West; it belonged to an old Spanish rancher named Juan, who owned nineteen cows. He was nicknamed Sapanda — a Spanish word meaning a car with a broken spring — because he had injured a leg in a riding accident and walked with a limp.
Juan's cows used the grazing allotment known as the San Luis-El Barro, forty thousand acres of steep P-J country with a rough dirt road crawling the ridges. The San Luis-El Barro supports the grand total of eighty-three cows. They feed in tiny, well-watered valleys that in April collect the sun like quicksilver and only then are lush with Kentucky bluegrass, redtop, grama, and crested wheat grass.
I rode out the next morning in the FS pickup with a range technician named Gonzalo, and Juan, a taciturn old man with a long, mournful face who was working temporarily for the FS. His gray hair was mashed flat by a straw cowboy hat, and his Levi's were worn almost to transparency. The faded denim jacket was buttoned to the neck. He carried a black lunch bucket, and when he spoke it was with a slight stutter.
"There's no future in cows," Juan said, soon after we had set out. "The government controls our land."
Gonzalo, the agent of that government, drove with great intimacy, massaging the steering wheel, fondling the gearshift lever, raising and lowering the window in an ever-changing accommodation of dust and fresh air. He was a GS 9, a low-ranking civil servant. The silver conchos on his hatband had been made by a lady friend, he said. Another lady friend had made the silver watchband. Gonzalo had the reputation as Pecos's local stud. He pastured two Arabians and an appaloosa higher up and used them occasionally to chase other men's cattle trespassing on La Foresta.
Gonzalo ran the show, but Juan and ranchers like him were the reason jobs such as range technician existed. Together the two men — rancher and regulator — were after a bull that had wandered onto Forest Service land before grazing season officially began. We passed the tiny hamlet of Colonias, where Juan lived — all dust and rock and three-legged dogs. He paid the U.S. government $1.35 per month for each of his nineteen cows grazing on public land. That amounted to a total of $149.34 for the approximately six months a year that the range was open to grazing.
I asked if he made money on cattle. Juan said, "I hope to break even."
The total of eighty-three cattle on the San Luis-El Barro had brought the Forest Service the grand sum of $650 in grazing fees the year before. Ten percent of that went to the county. When all administrative costs were tallied, the federal government estimated that it lost an average of $2.29 a month for every cow on public land. Grazing fees were too low, but raising them would cause a war, according to Juan.
Ten years before, he had served as a lieutenant for a radical Chicano named Tijerina, who had tried to claim large chunks of New Mexico for the descendants of Indians and Spanish settlers. Juan had taken part in the occupation of Echo Amphitheater campground and had traveled with a contingent of protesters to Mexico City, to plead with the Mexican president for support of claims based on old Spanish grants. Juan seemed an unlikely revolutionary, working part-time as he did in the Forest Service's Older Americans Program, cleaning up campsites and doing odd chores with Gonzalo.
Our road climbed into ponderosa pine, crossing and recrossing a broad avenue left by fire. The country greened up with aspen, the leaves quaking in the breeze — good cover for elk and deer. Grass clung to the exposed slopes, where the cows had to work to get it. A red-tailed hawk broke from a snag above the road, and wild turkeys scratched on the far hillside, moving warily up among the trees. An old ranch house sat abandoned. Gonzalo looked after the place and brought his sons up weekends to work on the fences. They regularly ran off motorcyclists from Santa Fe, who had torched one of the outbuildings and performed wheelies all over the lot.
Gonzalo honked his horn; the horses came running. We could see the bull standing unpleasantly among the willows, up to its knees in water. It had been captured twice and twice escaped.
Gonzalo saddled the appaloosa, tossed a braided lariat over the horn, and strapped on silver spurs. "I'm going to drive him through the gate," he said, "and into the paddock by the barn."
"I doubt it seriously," said Juan.
After Gonzalo had cantered off, Juan added, "I knew that bull's daddy. He was one mean son of a bitch."
The bull was a black Angus, hornless but large. Gonzalo approached it from behind, whistling and beating the lariat against the saddle. The bull turned on horse and rider, then changed its mind and lumbered across the meadow and into the trees. The sound of breaking timber suggested a marauding tank. The bull re-emerged, trailing a foot of slobber, and was skillfully driven into the paddock by Gonzalo.
"These young bulls won't stay with the cows," he said. "They wander. No sabe."
We sat down next to the house, in the sun. Juan opened his black box and ceremoniously removed a bologna sandwich; Gonzalo contented himself with a cigarette. He didn't use chewing tobacco, he said, because the ladies didn't like the taste.

A handful of FS men stood outside the Pecos headquarters when we returned. Juan got out of the truck and asked the Anglo range con for a chew of tobacco. "You been pulling afterbirth with that old hand?" the range con asked, but gave him the packet anyway. Juan stuffed a bird's nest of tobacco into his mouth, and carried his lunch bucket off toward the post office, on his way home. He could have gotten out of Gonzalo's truck when we passed through Colonias, but he would have lost two extra dollars in pay and an opportunity to visit in town. He didn't say goodbye.
We had covered one hundred miles of dirt road to put a bull in a paddock so a distant permittee could come and claim it. The cost for the day's work would include Gonzalo's salary and Juan's minimum wage; also gasoline, and vehicular wear and tear. The government would lose more than $2.29 on that little bull.
I joined Gonzalo at his favorite saloon, appropriately named the Casanova. It had high ceilings, dark beams called vigas, rough-hewn tables, and a phalanx of Boone's Farm Wild Mountain Wine bottles behind the long wooden bar. Gonzalo stood at one end of the bar, facing the door, pouring beer into his leather-girded bulk with a facility I couldn't match. He and the big Anglo range con were a team, he said, but they never drank together. "He's a good man. He's respected around here because he stays. He can communicate," he added, "but he can't negotiate."
The phone on the wall rang. "No aqui," Gonzalo said, without looking at it.
The bartender answered and, sure enough, it was a woman calling for Gonzalo.
"No aqui, " said the bartender.
I said I couldn't understand how Juan made a living, with his tiny bit of land and a few cows; Gonzalo said he knew ranchers in worse shape. "I know one whose wife died in childbirth. He's trying to raise seven kids. Some of them are illiterate. The father's had a couple of strokes, and an operation. There's a big lump on his neck. He's trying to hold things together, to cook and get these kids thirty-five miles to school every day. When his ten-year renewal came up I went to see him, and I could see the fear on his face. I explained that I had to see his ownership papers. He went up in the attic and brought down a box full of deeds, some of them in Spanish. He said, 'Here, take what you need.' I could have taken his land and nobody would have known the difference. It's a big responsibility.''
The phone rang. This female caller had seen Gonzalo's pickup out front.
"No aqui!"
"The ladies," Gonzalo said wearily.
"You always hurt the one you love," said the bartender, and a dozen men nodded assent without taking their eyes from the rerun of the 1973 Ali-Norton fight.
I was introduced to a bearded young Easterner, the only other Anglo in the Casanova. His hands were black from loading pinon. He had dropped out of school in New Jersey and was a self-confessed raquitaria la Foresta — a wood poacher.
"Everybody does it," he said, of poaching. "You get a permit to cut a cord, and you cut six cords. You're not going to get checked. Everybody knows there's not a Forest Service employee up on that mesa between four-thirty in the afternoon and eight in the morning."
Gonzalo looked uncomfortable. "We're putting sensors up there," he said. "Infrared, and magnetic. From now on we'll know who's trespassing where."
"But who's going to catch them? You don't have the manpower." The raquitaria turned to me. "You notice that the Forest Service never uses the word 'steal'? It's 'trespass' or 'violation,' but not stealing. At night, there's everything from firewood to cedar posts coming off the mesa."
"I could go up and bust somebody right now," Gonzalo said, "if that was part of my job. But I have to live here, too."
When the woodcutter had left, Gonzalo said, "I know that boy's mother real well."
The telephone was ringing.
The way to Colonias angled steeply up from the San Luis-El Barro road. I drove it the next day, to see Juan's ranch. I had no way of calling him since there were no telephones in Colonias. Half a dozen log and adobe structures stood out starkly against the wasted hillside. Ancient deadwood corrals leaned in various directions, empty, surrounded by the most spectacularly wrecked cars I had ever seen. More wrecks than dogs, although several of the latter came to look me over. A spotted dingo, accustomed to trouble, jumped when I slammed the van door.
I had no idea which house was Juan's. Nothing human moved on Colonias's littered plain; the entrance to the tin-roofed church had been nailed shut. A dust-shrouded compact with an open hatch stood outside a tiny house. Goats escorted me to the gate; inside, the packed dirt looked hard as brick. Deep shadow lay beneath the porch eaves, half the posts rotten and dangling in the wind. I called out and a woman answered. She stepped out into the sunlight, tall and dingy blond, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt that displayed a surprising amount of Anglo amplitude.
"Who are you?" she asked.
I started to tell her, but she interrupted, "Juan's gone after the cows. Help me bring in these baby chicks."
She brushed past and took a carton of mail-order chicks from the car. She handed it to me and picked up another. I obediently followed her into the house, under low eaves. The kitchen had a dirt floor covered with flagstones. There was no electricity or plumbing, and basic supplies stood in disarray on shelves made of crates. "I ordered araucanas from South America, but they sent me Rhode Island reds, too." She placed a pan of water among the crying chicks. "Araucanas lay green eggs. Aren't they cute? My name's Brigitta."
Her accent belonged in Scandinavia. Before I could ask, she was telling me that she came from a family of distinguished Stockholm architects, that she was an artist, a photographer, a crocheter of avant-garde women's clothes, and a wardrobe person for a crew that filmed television commercials. The rest of the time she milked goats, read Louis L'Amour, and talked to her neighbor Juan.
"What brought you here?" I asked.
"A car wreck." It was a joke. "I lived in Santa Fe for years. It never occurred to me that the city would turn into one big boutique. My rent there went from two hundred and fifty dollars a month to six-fifty. I had to sublet. I advertised it as an adobe with a Swedish maid and got somebody right away, but I still couldn't take living there."
A friend with a contract to cut shingles on the forest had hired her. She drove past Colonias every day with the crew. Then she met Rodolfo, an independent contractor who built houses with materials harvested on the forest. He bought the house and an acre for nine thousand dollars, she said. "He could have gotten it for six. They won't bargain here, it's considered undignified.''
He also owned the peeling yellow Lincoln outside, a yard-full of pullets, and the stove into which Brigitta shoved butt ends of juniper. Rodolfo was presently gathering stone on public lands to build a client's house. Like Juan, he depended upon La Foresta, and so did Brigitta — for inspiration.
We went back outside. "It's beautiful," she said, "but by classical European standards this place is a dump. Chicano wind chimes" — she nodded toward discarded beer cans. "They leave their garbage down below, on the edge of the forest. The public land is the public dump — it's heartbreaking."
Juan appeared, leading a bay mare with a rope bridle. The collar of his Levi's jacket had been turned up, and he wore wrangler's gloves. "Did you see the water running in the arroyo, Juan?" she called. "It's so beautiful to see. I want to build a little dam there, Juan, and plant potatoes."
A grin broke open that long, mournful face. He clicked at the horse like a young vaquero as we walked down to view the prospective potato field. Grass had sprouted among the Chicano wind chimes, and the water ran clear. "If I plant potatoes, Juan, they won't steal them." They were the neighbors, although Brigitta and Juan looked to be the only people in Colonias. "They don't know what potatoes are, Juan. They're ignorant," she told me. "They don't read anything here but license plates, and the obituaries, to see who killed who, and if they're related. They're obsessed with death."
Juan put the horse in his dilapidated corral and secured the gate with a discarded tire. The bleached barn siding looked ancient. He had grown up in the little adobe and was the only family member left. No chiles hung from the eaves, and the crumbling clay horno had roasted no corn in years.
Juan had delivered mail in Colonias on horseback, one of the last mounted postmen in the country, but now there were not enough people to justify it. He invited us into his house. Mexican coronets blared and skittered on the radio, one of his few possessions. A saddle sat on the floor at the foot of his frame bed — sign of a true cowboy. He owned a bit of land south of town where the cows wintered. The year before he had grossed twelve hundred dollars by selling beef to some friends and neighbors, and working in the Older Americans Program.
He had no coffee to offer, so we walked back to Brigitta's, where she stoked up the stove and moved blocks of government surplus cheese from the one chair, so Juan could sit. He watched her, transfixed.
"Now what shall I do?" she asked, hands on hips, taking in her jumbled domain. "Ah, yes, feed the goat."
"Wonderful woman," Juan said.
I thought he had a crush on her, and couldn't blame him. Brigitta liked hearing about his civil disobedience of twenty years before, he told me. The rumor in town had it that she was after his land and grazing permit, and they laughed together about that. I noticed that when Brigitta was present, Juan didn't stutter.
She returned and laded our coffee with mocha chocolate; then she led me into the back room. An album lay spread on a card table. In the photographs I saw Brigitta in elaborately crocheted shawls, bonnets, and gowns, leaping through the sunlit streets of Paris and Ibiza. "I used to think that was the normal way to dress. I sold it all with no effort. I came up here to start again, but now there's no reason to do anything."
A wild-eyed man with a bandana tied round his head stared out of a Polaroid. "Rodolfo," she said. "My wild Apache. He calls himself Spanish, but he's got to be a Jicarilla Apache. They all are around here. He and his so-called friends get drunk and he passes out and then they steal from us. When I go to California on a shoot I have to lock up all my stuff. I always come back, though. He'll do anything to keep me here."
Juan stood up when she returned to the kitchen. She folded down the old man's collar and smoothed the faded denim tips — the wardrobe mistress. Then she flipped the collar up again.
"Continuity," she said.

Pickups crowded the lot outside the Pecos high school the next morning, a Saturday. Weatherworn men gathered in the refectory to hear about an FS study to raise grazing fees. There was not a pair of tie shoes among them, and not much spoken English. Gonzalo and his colleagues moved gingerly among the ranchers and officials, "being responsive" — FS argot for politicking.
The range con told the mayor of Pecos, "The forest and the people have to be friends," to which the mayor responded, "They should be family."
The day before, I had asked his opinion of grazing fee increases and enforced quotas on woodcutting, which would mean fewer sales of Skoal, baking powder, and salsa. The mayor had said, "Chinga la Foresta," a less delicate sentiment.
Juan arrived late, wearing his best wrangler's jacket and two-tone boots. He sat at the back of the room, alone, the picture of skepticism. He might own the smallest ranch in the West, and what seemed to be the least profitable one, but his passion for range and his "rights" was as great as that of the patriarchs of the big spreads, and their corporate equivalents. Juan Sapanda's connection to the land was considerably more solid than that of the administrators or, for that matter, most ranchers. It went back to the conquest.
The president of the cattlemen's association, an Anglo, stood up to address the group. His belt buckle was engraved '"73 Tri-State Rodeo Steer Wrestling Champion." He held aloft a copy of the FS grazing study and said in a modest drawl, "This is four million dollars' worth of mush. It looks like Greek. They spent five years to produce a political document. The assumption that you can stand an eight-to-ten-dollar increase is not correct, as we all know. Basically they decided they were going to raise fees and then backed the data out to justify it."
Gonzalo, the district ranger, and the range con sat shoulder to shoulder in silence. The president of the cattlemen's association asked the ranchers to write to their congressmen, then handed out demo response forms. None of them had spoken. I asked the district ranger why the FS didn't respond to the rancher's criticism. "We're not here to defend the study," he said. "Grazing fees are too low. If we advertised tomorrow that we had land available for a dollar thirty-five an AUM, we'd have a line of applicants from here to Albuquerque."
"This is 'informational’ only," said the range con. "When it gets down to choices over exactly how the fees will be raised, then we'll hear from these guys. Well, I guess we'd better socialize."
Juan Sapanda was leaving. "They just held this meeting to be safe," he said of the FS. The president of the cattlemen's organization, Juan added, "should have said, 'Nobody leaves this room without signing a piece of paper and giving his address.' Then they could have shoved it under the noses of Congress, the BLM, and the Foresta."
Even if the ranchers signed such a petition, it would be filtered through the local FS office, the forest supervisor, and eventually the regional office in Albuquerque. In some altered form it might find its way to a management orifice in the Department of Agriculture, and maybe in yet another form to an undersecretary. Legislation might eventually be written that contained some kernel of the ranchers' opinions and might or might not be considered by Congress in a city far away. The chances of the studies, meetings, workshops, reports, and deliberations significantly improving Juan's fortunes were exceedingly thin.
There was something pathetic about the whole business: insufficient grass; insufficient cows to make a decent living; small ranchers at the mercy of the system and their own history. At the same time, they had the use of the land, and a shadow government in the guise of the Forest Service for recourse. Juan was making a living, such as it was. I watched him limp out into the sunlight. He and Brigitta were going for tortillas and green chiles at the bus station, in splendid view of Pecos Baldy. Small mercies, I thought.                       

To read more go to: See earlier Nose post:                     

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