Since Valentine’s Day is only a week or so away…

…this essay was supposed to be about romance, love, and the unexplainable glue that sticks two people together. It didn’t end up being about Valentine’s Day but it has a lot to do with romance, love, and the unexplainable glue that sticks, not only two people to each other, but also the stuff that sticks some people to the land.

Jill and I just got back from a few days in the borderlands – not only the country that runs along the border of Arizona and New Mexico but also the land that divides the United States from Mexico. We were guests of The Nature Conservancy and a dynamic collection of ranches controlling about a million acres of rough grazing land, wide valleys, and a couple mountain rages. The organization is called the Malpai Borderlands Group and their land is centered on the geographic borders between those states and countries. But, in a lot of ways the Malpai Borderlands Group occupies a border that is much more difficult to describe and more important than any physical geography. The Malpai Borderlands Group floats in the geography of the mind – somewhere between the past and the present – but not in the clichéd way you might think. It is not that the Malpai Borderlands Group is moving from the historic, open range days of the past into modern times. These people have been in modern times for many years. They are moving into the uncharted territory of the future.

The big landscape country of the American West has been in turmoil since just after the Civil War. If God himself had put out a call for folks with poor qualifications for cooperation, a motlier crew would not have turned out. Armed and angry Civil War veterans from both sides, greedy industrialists, arrogant European aristocrats, land hungry peasants, disenfranchised Native Americans, the lunatic fringe of religion, misanthropes, and desperadoes of every sort poured into the unclaimed lands of the West. At first the only character trait that they shared was an abiding acquisitive nature: they all seemed to be out to get as much as they could. To make things even worse, many people coveted and seized concessions and property to which they had little or no solid claim. Of course local, state, and the federal governments had there own set of claims and they ended up in the mix as the entity that everyone could hate.

The great gorilla on the prairie is the additional 250 million new Americans that have come on the scene since the Civil War. It seems like most of them have ATV’s, four wheel drive pickups, camouflaged clothes, bird books, hiking shoes, new ideas about the relationship between humans and animals. They have a sense of ownership in public land, even if they have never set foot on them or have any intimate knowledge of how they work. For my entire life I have watched this colossal scramble and after sixty-four years, I wondered if it is possible to sort it out.

I know that we in the Northern Plains have not done as good a job of juggling these pressures, as we should have. Most of us have spent time at contentious meetings, often on different sides of issues, and have seldom worked toward conscientious. In fact, our ineptitude and intransience may have made the tensions over land use worse. I believe that perhaps the saddest part of our failure is that almost all parties agree on the basics: the land and the horse culture that grew up here deserve to be conserved and protected, the animals and plants should be encouraged to thrive, it should somehow be available to be enjoyed, and solitude should be honored.

I am reminded of the Founding Fathers of America, who are held in such revere out in this country, and I wonder if other people ever think of the tension and acrimony in those hot, stuffy meeting rooms in Philadelphia. The differences of opinion between those delegates, and the life and death decisions they faced, make the problems of the American West seem like a squabble on a grade school playground. While we have argued for a hundred and fifty years and produced very little, they debated for a few years and came up with the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution. I fear that the difference between these two deliberations is in the wisdom, reason, and patience of the participants.

Of course there are few Jeffersons, Franklins, Washingtons, Jays, Calhouns, or Monroes driving pickups around the American West. But there may be enough to fill a hot, stuffy room. Even a cursory reading of the history of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention makes it clear that real change is not all roses and the feeling of brotherly love. Maybe the magic of the Founding Fathers came from the nexus of personalities, philosophy, and the pressure of crisis. Maybe such forces could never coalesce again. But there is no denying that something strange and unusual was in the air down there on the Malpai.

It could well be the first time that any of us ever traveled like tourists – pressed into a generic, white, ford van. The SD delegation was made up of Jill, me, and two other SD ranchers who we had met but really didn’t know. They were officers of different SD livestock organizations and were far from agreement on all agricultural policies.  They were not sure about Jill and me. We were not sure of them.  And none of us was sure of Bob Paulson, our Western South Dakota TNC representative, who had been after us for a year to go down and see the progress in co-operation that was taking place in the borderlands. Bob’s trust quotient had risen in recent years because he had proved to be a good neighbor, but it was still hard to believe his stories of disparate ranching families joining forces with government agencies, and non-governmental conservation groups. We barely took Bob seriously because all of us had experienced scores of meetings including such groups. The meeting usually dissolved into hyperbole, innuendo, accusations, and old fashion mean-spirited gossip. The idea that these groups could get together to insure reasonable public grazing, protection of threatened and endangered species, continuance of legal hunting, furtherance of rangeland health, and limits of development and urban sprawl seemed a little too much. But Bob had been persistent and done a great job of organizing a trip that, finally, made us take stock of what we understood about the American West.

On the border we were guided by an unassuming botanist who worked for the Nature Conservancy and had been advising the Malpai Borderlands Group since just after their inception in 1991. Like everyone we met that week, he was a straight shooter who laid out his ideas and understandings with a gentle methodology and listened to all other points of view.

We visited several of the members of the Malpai group at their widely dispersed ranches to get a flavor for the sort of people who made up the group. Of the dozen Malipai people that we talked to that week we found no grandstanders, no festering, insecure egos, no dilettante ranchers or environmentalist. What we found mostly were regular folks in dusty blue jeans with respect for each other, honest science, their land, and their heritage. All were ranchers: fathers or mothers. Most had other jobs. One was a well driller. Another was a lion hunter. One was a MacArthur Fellow. One was a border guard. All were brave and all had a worldly understanding of how problems concerning the connection between men and land might be solved.

On the last day we sat through their quarterly meeting and were awed by the friendly demeanor of administrators from the Forest Service, BLM, National Resource and Conservation Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Custom and Border Protection. A Department of Agriculture conservationist told me with deep emotion that, “it is a joy to work with people who WANT your help.” Everyone in the room seemed intent on achieving the goals of keeping the big country of Arizona and New Mexico open and healthy. For those of us from the SD, the experience was disorienting. We jabbered for three hours in the back of the van on the way back to our motel room in Tucson, where we would spend the night before flying back to Rapid City.

We knew damned well that we could never become a second Malpai Borderlands Group. Our problems were unique. The personalities, pressures, and economics were very different. But something had changed. We talked for hours in one of our motel rooms and we were three quarters of the way through a bottle of Crown Royal before it dawned on us that we were talking like we had never talked before.