D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
February
2008
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Voice of a Ranch Woman Fourth in a Series |
Showing Your Love All the Time
A rancher's wife talks about her husband, his family and love that doesn't need Valentine's Day gifts.
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.
"Look around, look around, it's not as cloudy as you think! Open up your eyes, open up your eyes!" Jerry will tell you that out when you're working cattle. If you're rounding up cattle you need to be able to see 'em, and you need to be looking around and seeing what's going on.
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Jerry and Linda McDonald, who together
run one of the oldest continuously working ranches in Grant County. |
I'd been out helping him enough that he'd told me that a few times, and so one time the chicken got out. It was out here in the yard, and Jerry was trying to get it in — which is unusual because usually I was the one getting the chickens in.
Anyway, he was out trying to get that chicken, so I opened up the door and yelled, "Look around, look around, think like a chicken. Think like a chicken!"
Because he was always telling us, "Think like a cow! Think like a cow!"
Maybe it's a man thing, or maybe it's a cowboy thing. But I learned it from my dad, too — don't be asking too many questions.
Jerry wants you to pay attention to what's going on. Don't be saying, "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?"
He'll just say, "Look around. Pay attention."
I think it's good to teach people to be observant, rather than have somebody tell them what's going to happen.
But when you're out working with the cattle he'll go, "I want that cow, the red one."
And you shout, "They're all red!"
Jerry pays real close attention to things that are going on around him as far as nature's concerned. He's always paying attention to the moon and what phase it's in.
And, according to the old ranchers that I've talked to, when the moon is laying on its back, it's holding up the moisture, but when it's tipped up on its side, it's letting the rain out. So it'll rain.
He's always watching the sun to see where it is in relationship to Cooke's Peak. He's out in nature all the time and he's paying attention to what's out there. He was raised that way. When you learn things when you're a kid, you're just better at them.
Jerry didn't do this so much when I had the babies, but he started paying attention to the fact that babies seem to be born more during the change of a moon. The nurses in the hospital verify this, because they say you go a long time and there won't be any babies, then all of a sudden there's lots of babies. And as well as babies being born, the calves being born. You'll have a cow have her calf, and a lot of times it's on the change of a moon.
But anyway, our daughter-in-laws, he's made believers out of them. They'll call up and say, "When's the change of the moon?" They could look on their own calendar but I think they like to humor him a little bit.
He'll say, "It's gonna be on such and such a day, you're gonna have that baby, and if you don't have it then, it'll be the next change of the moon."
Jerry watches all the animals. Just over the hill here is a den of kit foxes. He'll come in and tell me, "Well, they're back. They've come back." I don't know where they go but they must have several homes. And he'll watch those kit foxes. "Well, there's two little pups."
He watches the coyote tracks, and if the coyotes cross the road they usually go to the bathroom on the road, and he calls that "their calling card."
Saturday I met a huge bull snake coming up my hall. It got away from us and we don't know where it is in this house. I've been carrying my square-tip shovel every place I go here. So Jerry goes off to Granny's and I ask, "You're gonna leave me here in this house with that snake?"
He just doesn't say anything — he just walks off.
Anyway, what are you going to do — are you going to move to town?
My dream when I was a young girl was to live in Ireland, where there weren't any snakes. Then I moved down to this place. Those guys on the rodeo team — who told Jerry I'd make a pretty good wife — should have bet how long I'd live in this snake-infested country instead of in this "pile of rocks."
The snakes never end.
I think this is kind of typical of cowboys — that they live out in nature, and they want us to learn to cope with it. It helps us become tougher, so that we can deal with things we don't think we can deal with.
We learn how to deal with what we have. We learn how to use a shovel. We learn how to use a crowbar. And we learn how to survive.
At first I got my feelings hurt a little bit, but Jerry doesn't get tied into all these holidays. The most special things he's given to me have been the things he's found out in the pasture. Things that he thinks I would like, because I have all this junk in this house — all these "antiques." So if he finds an old coffeepot, or an old piece of wood, or a rock he thinks is pretty, he'll bring it in and give it to me.
Sometimes he'll find a horseshoe. He found one horseshoe he figured was left there by the cowboys when the Diamond A's had this country. That was a cattle company that owned nearly all this country down here.
So when your birthday comes, or it's Mother's Day, or something like that, you don't necessarily expect to get anything. If he gets you something, that's a plesant surprise.
I think it's been a wonderful thing, because it's been teaching me and is still teaching me not to be thinking about myself and what I'm going to get.
I was comforted, too, when I talked to a friend of mine and she said, "Oh, Tommy and I quit giving each other presents a long time ago. Because people waste so much money trying to show their love."