Review by Ed Quillen
Growth – November 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine
Old Fences, New Neighbors
by Peter R. Decker
Published in 1998 by the University of Arizona Press
ISBN 0-8165-1905-6
IN 1974, COLLEGE PROFESSOR PETER DECKER and his wife, Deedee, left New York City and headed west to try wresting a livelihood from a 600-acre cattle ranch near Ridgway in Ouray County.
“To call it a ranch is to suggest that the property was in some semblance of working order, which it most certainly was not. Half the barn roof had blown off toward Kansas; weeds and willows clogged the irrigation ditches; the fence and the corral stood up only out of habit; the meadows were sprinkled with bailing wire, prairie dog holes, and about a dozen Old Crow bottles; and the domestic water supply originated, as it does to this day, in a stream where cattle drank and left their deposits.”
From that inauspicious start, they made a go of it, and along the way, Decker served as Colorado commissioner of agriculture. Also, the Ridgway area got “discovered” by People of Money, and Decker chronicles the transformations that led him to move his cattle operations to the sandhills of Nebraska.
Decker tells this story with wit and a sharp eye for detail, always putting his ranch, those of the neighbors, and their community of Ridgway into a larger economic and social context that makes for excellent and informative reading.
RIDGWAY, LIKE SALIDA, began as a railroad town with some mining and agriculture nearby. Although Salida never plunged to the depths that Ridgway fell to in the 1960s, so much of Old Fences seemed so familiar that I suspect it will resonate in many other towns undergoing an uneasy transition from Old West to New West — a transition from neighbors who relied on each other to get through hard times to residents who moved there precisely because they don’t want neighbors and who remain isolated from the local economy.
This wonderful book begins with a brief history of how Ridgway and Ouray County came about after the American discovery of silver in the San Juans. Then Decker leads the reader through a year on a small mountain ranch: calving and branding in the spring, tending the pasture up high and irrigating the hayfields in the valley during the summer, the auction and maintenance in the fall, and getting through winters where the snowpack is measured in yards.
All this is told eloquently with many anecdotes that cover everything from cow tales to water disputes:
Another rancher friend of mine believed his neighbor, known for his strong religious views and pious nature, was stealing his water. Early one morning, hidden in a bunch of willows close to the headgate, my friend intoned in a deep, Godlike voice: “Remember one of my commandments, my son: `Thou shalt not steal from thy neighbor.'” Miraculously, my friend’s water was never again tampered with.
But the best comes at the end, with his descriptions of the arrival of the Trail Town tourist attraction, based on Hollywood’s West, rather than gritty old Ridgway:
Trail Town plays to the old Hollywood vision of the Romantic West — cowboys, cattle, and Comanches. Visitors enter shops designed to confirm the West, past and present, as a gigantic cattle kingdom filled with romantic cowboys who, when not riding the sagebrush or sitting around a campfire singing “Home on the Range,” shoot down bad guys and rye whiskey — usually simultaneously. That Ridgway was a community of farmers, dairymen, ranchers, and freighters serving the mines, not a cow town like Cheyenne, Ogallala, or Dodge City, seems never to have occurred to Trail Town’s creators — or if it did was ignored because an accurate history of the area did not conform to their romantic image.
Elsewhere, he observes that “There is a fascination with the memory of frontier violence, real or imagined, that attracts a constant pilgrimage of visitors, including many foreigners, to the American West … That visitors from the city seem always ready to accept, if not romanticize and embrace, nineteenth-century frontier gunplay while they simultaneously fear twentieth-century urban violence is not a logical inconsistency many rural Westerners recognize, much less wish to point out to tourists bearing Visa gold cards.”
The new tourists are different — they want to be entertained, rather than to explore and enjoy the mountains. And the economics of ranching changed in this decade:
It didn’t require a banker or an economist with a Ph.D. to understand that if a cow needed approximately three acres of irrigated meadow (with a current market value of approximately $4,000 per acre) for herself and her calf for a year, and if the value of the weaned calf in the best of times was $500, the return on the rancher’s investment was 4 percent before subtracting expenses.
That land got to be worth $4,000 an acre because a different economic system had arrived: “At first, the summer tourists had no wish to buy land; they wanted only to hike or camp on it, and then return home. Well into the late 1970s, the value of a ranch was determined by its water rights and hay-growing capacity…. Snow-capped mountains in the background and a babbling book in the foreground did not increase a ranch’s productive value, nor did the cows concern themselves with the visual amenities of a property, caring only that the grass and water were plentiful.”
Most notorious of the new landowners is Ralph Lauren, the fashion designer, but Decker offers a remarkably fair assessment, that Lauren does provide decent employment and preserve open space, even if he doesn’t rely on cows for his livelihood.
Space (and the copyright law provision about quoting too much in a review) prohibits me from continuing to cite from this book.
SIMPLY PUT, it’s the best examination I’ve seen about what happens to ramshackle but scenic towns when a new economy and culture arrives. And Decker is not some nostalgic pessimist; he offers some cautious optimism about the future:
Ridgway today is not a community in the traditional sense. It is a much noisier and more contentious place than it was before, and, ironically, a more homogeneous one in terms of language, ethnic background, and even religion. The issues that divide the citizenry — growth, the school curriculum, zoning, affordable housing — cause constant, some say interminable, discussions and debate. But the debates that sometimes engulf the town and seem to citizens so destructive to a `sense of community’ have, in fact, reinvigorated a democratic spirit. If a community is a place where people struggle in a climate of tolerant discourse toward a set of shared goals, then Ridgway is today a far stronger, more vibrant and democratic, and certainly more interesting place than ever before in its relatively short history.
As a writer, I’m jealous of Decker’s sharp eye for detail and talent with the language. As a reader and a citizen of a mountain town besieged by the same forces as his Ridgway, I’m glad this book crossed my path. You will be, too.
— Ed Quillen