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Lazy B

Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American SouthwestBy Sandra Day O'Connor

Random House

Copyright © 2002 Sandra Day O'Connor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780375431524

Chapter One

Early Memories

When Time, who steals our years away,
Shall steal our pleasure, too,
The Memory of the past will stay,
And half our joys renew.
?Thomas Moore, "Song"

The earliest memory is of sounds. In a place of all-encompassing silence, anysound is something to be noted and remembered. When the wind is not blowing, itis so quiet you can hear a beetle scurrying across the ground or a fly landingon a bush. Occasionally an airplane flies overhead-a high-tech intrusionpenetrating the agrarian peace.

When the wind blows, as it often does, there are no trees to rustle and moan.But the wind whistles through any loose siding on the barn and causes any loosegate to bang into the fence post. It starts the windmills moving, turning,creaking.

At night the sounds are magnified. Coyotes wail on the hillside, calling to eachother or to the moon-a sound that sends chills up the spine. We snuggle deeperin our beds. What prey have the coyotes spotted? Why are they howling? What arethey doing? Just before dawn the doves begin to call, with a soft cooing sound,starting the day with their endless search for food. The cattle nearby walkalong their trail near the house, their hooves crunching on the gravel. Anoccasional moo to a calf or to another cow can be heard, or the urgent bawl of acalf that has lost contact with its mother, or the low insistent grunt, almost agrowl, of a bull as it walks steadily along to the watering trough or back outto the pasture. The two huge windmills turn in the wind, creaking as theyrevolve to face the breeze, and producing the clank of the sucker rods as theyrise and fall with each turn of the huge fan of the mill.

The Lazy B Ranch straddles the border of Arizona and New Mexico along the GilaRiver. It is high desert country-dry, windswept, clear, often cloudless. Alongthe Gila the canyons are choked with cottonwoods and willows. The cliffs rise upsharply and are smooth beige sandstone. The water flowing down the riverbed fromthe Gila Wilderness to the northeast is usually only a trickle. But sometimes,after summer rains or a winter thaw in the mountains, the river becomes anangry, rushing, mud-colored flood, carrying trees, brush, rocks, and everythingelse in its path. Scraped into the sandstone bluffs are petroglyphs of theAnasazi of centuries past. Their lives and hardships left these visible tracesfor us to find, and we marvel at their ability to survive as long as they did inthis harsh environment. High up on one of the canyon walls is a small opening toa cave. A few ancient steps are cut out of the bluff leading to it. To reach itnow requires climbing apparatus-ropes and pitons. The cave's inner walls havebeen smoothed with mud plaster, and here and there is a handprint, hardened whenthe mud dried, centuries ago.

Every living thing in the desert has some kind of protective mechanism orcharacteristic to survive-thorns, teeth, horns, poison, or perhaps just beingtoo tough to kill and eat. A human living there quickly learns that anything inthe desert can hurt you if you are not careful and respectful. Whatever it iscan scratch you, bite you, or puncture you. When riding horseback, you have towatch where you are going. The branch of a hardy bush can knock you off; a holein the ground covered with grass can cause your horse to stumble or fall. Whenyou take a spill, it might be onto a rock or a cactus. When you get off yourhorse, it pays to look first to avoid stepping in an ant den, on a scorpion, orin the path of a snake. Over the years, Alan, Ann, and I each had our share offalls from a horse, insect bites, injuries, and other dangerous events, which welearned just came with the territory.

South of the Gila and to the east, the land is flat. For some ten miles it iscovered with short burro grass and hummocks of tabosa grass. There aresoapweeds-tall, hairy-looking yuccas, some with two or three trunks. In May theysend up tall stalks with clusters of off-white blossoms that last about a month.These dramatic sentinels in the flat landscape are weirdly beautiful. Thestalks, when dry, make good cattle prods, or fine lances for children's wargames. The dry pods from the blossoms are good additions in dried-flowerarrangements.

The mesa land is part of a large dry lake bed from an earlier time. It is hardto imagine this land covered with water. Places along the edge of it show signsof Indian camps. As children, we found many buff-colored pottery shards, anoccasional metate, or grindstone, sometimes a projectile point or pieces ofobsidian that had been flaked off in the process of making the projectiles. Iwould spend the hours waiting for DA to finish some work in that area lookingaround for some of these bits of Indian life and times. I would take them hometo show MO, who greatly enjoyed finding such treasures. We would talk about thelives these early inhabitants led.

Water was scarce and hard to find. Every drop counted. We built catchment basinsand dirt tanks to catch and store it. We pumped it from underground. We measuredit and used it sparingly. Life depended on it.

There were thirty-five wells and windmills on the Lazy B, and it was a big jobto keep them pumping. The windmills and pumps had to be oiled and servicedregularly. During periods of drought and dry weather-periods that seemed topredominate-the ranch crew spent most of their time keeping the wells workingand hauling supplemental feed to the cattle. When a well went bad or a pumpbroke down, it was a serious matter. There might be only a day's supply of waterin reserve in that area. The cattle could not survive more than a day ofdehydration. There were times when we had to work through the night to try toget the well or pump repaired, to supply the livestock with water.

I recall some grim, difficult times when DA and the cowboys would have to stopall other work to repair a well that had ceased producing water for the cattle.Work would begin at daylight and continue into the night. Sometimes the suckerrods had to be pulled out of the well and removed, one at a time, until theproblem was located and solved. It could be a broken sucker rod deep in thewell. It could be a corroded casing pipe that was allowing water to escape. Itcould be any number of things that took strength, time, skill, and energy torepair. There was little I could do to help. The work required more strengththan I had. I could serve like an operating-room nurse-I would get a wrench, ahammer, or another tool that was needed and put it into my father's outstretchedhand. More often, I read a book I had brought along or I watched the work andengaged in desultory conversation with the men.

If we failed to complete the repairs before the water tank was empty, we had togather all the cattle and move them to another location where there was enoughwater and grass for them to survive.

The east part of the Lazy B is on the Lordsburg Flat-a large, flat, desolatearea that is not the best grazing land on the ranch. The underground water isabout three hundred feet deep and in places does not taste very good, but theolder wells in that area all have splendid wooden windmill towers over them. Inthe 1920s a master craftsman constructed these towers on the site, withbeautiful, long, straight timbers all cut by hand and mitered to fit, and theyhave weathered over the years to a soft gray color.

Some of the names of these...