Not very far from where I live, there's a ranch tucked
under the shoulder of a great mountain.
They call it the Cox Place.
It’s out of the way: across the valley, down a long dirt road, past some
hot springs. The house gazes out
over hay meadows. It’s a
two-story building with a slanting roof that sprouts a squat red chimney. Just beyond the kitchen window, a windmill straddles a well. All around the house grow well-established
trees; one of them, a Bartlett pear, is loaded with fruit in late summer. The construction on the Cox Place is a
bit old school, but enduring. No
Powder River panels here. Lodge
poll gates hang on stout juniper logs, which form the uprights in the corrals
and shop. In all, this is a modest
place, big enough to run maybe two hundred cows. It’s what you’d call a small family ranch: a place where you could raise your kids
close to animals and land. A place to live quietly.
But no one lives here any more.
The Cox Place is an empty gutted
bone yard. Abandoned for over
twenty years, the house is home to nothing but packrats and empty beer bottles
that roll and clink against each other when the wind moans through the
shattered windows. The fences are
down, and the yard strewn with buckets, burn barrels, beer cans, shotgun
shells, corrugated metal scraps, expired farm equipment, coffee cans, nails,
ancient hoses, and barbed wire.
The pears fall and rot, or are carried off by birds. The hay meadows, once green and fertile,
are choked with greasewood and rabbit brush.
What happened here? Good intentions gone astray, possibly. An environmental
organization bought the Cox Place some two decades ago, and since then it has
been gradually sinking into ruin.
I have no doubt that the leaders of this group intended to do something
good for the land: to “return it
to nature,” perhaps. But is this really a
return to nature? And by letting this ranch die, what has been lost? Good people who take care of the land because they depend on it and live
off of it. Irrigated meadows that
attract passing migratory birds. Children who grow up with daily chores and animals depending on their
care. A lighted window in the dark
when a traveler is lost or broke down.
But not at the Cox Place. The windows are dark, the fire’s gone
out, and no one lives here any more.
