I’m a full-time reporter and part-time rancher. More precisely, I own mountain land in western Colorado, there are cows on it and I occasionally have to deal with them.
It’s about a 10-hour round-trip commute from Denver to my part-time ranching job, which I literally inherited.
My dog and I go whenever we can to this mountain acreage shared with my extended family.
I have a few rancherly responsibilities. I must keep an old log cabin from falling down. (So far, only the chimney has succumbed — three times — to heavy snows.)
The cousin’s cows and I also engage in a vendetta over fencing. I view fences as barriers to keep the cows out of certain places, such as the small solar array near my cabin that generates enough electricity to power a few lights.
The cows see fences as puzzling, yet surmountable, impediments to their progress. They constantly test my theory of barrier. And they are apparently committed to the destruction of solar panels and any unfamiliar technology.
The worst — and best — part about this place is its remoteness.
Under ideal conditions, it takes an hour of bumping along rutted, rocky, narrow roads to get here. With any rain, making it along the last 18 miles becomes a dicey proposition. The road gets so slick and my giant SUV tires so caked in clay I sometimes sail off the road into the aspens.
Whenever I do make it, and after I lock the main gate behind me, I feel euphoric and welcomed — by whom or what, I’m not sure. Sometimes it feels like the ancestors are embracing me. Sometimes the land, especially the spring behind the cabin, murmurs lovingly. Then again, sometimes this place tries to kill me.
I can sense the mood immediately. On my last visit, in late July, my SUV mysteriously died just as I drove through the last of three gates. I wouldn’t have minded carrying my grocery-filled coolers the last 40 yards to the cabin except for the lightning bolts and marble-size hail.
If I had a cellphone signal there, which I don’t, I still wouldn’t call a tow truck. Pricey. No, I have to fix my own vehicle.
Who am I kidding? I can fix almost nothing. Though once, after I drove over a rock the size of a typewriter and punctured my gas tank, I chewed up a package of Juicy Fruit gum and affixed the enormous wad to gashed metal. It got me off the mountain.
This time, I’m baffled, so I hunt for relatives.
I strike out for the closest two family cabins that might be occupied.
The cows, who don’t see many people, are crowding me. “Does she have salt?” they want to know. Then my dog, Claire, remembers she is a part-time cattle dog and herds them to a respectful distance.
And I realize, again, that any problem that would seem merely irritating, time-consuming and expensive in town is a big adventure on the mountain.
In my trek for help — hiking distance 2.5 miles — I gather 10 pounds of mud on my shoes. I also collect a 30-something cousin from Salt Lake City, his friend, an uncle, an aunt and a border collie.
My cousin is stymied. My uncle, a cardiologist from California, has many intellectual gifts, none of them mechanical. Uncle “X” could, as one cousin puts it, “break an anvil.” The border collie doesn’t have opposable thumbs.
But we all have to try to help one another up here because we’re so cut off from the world.
Together we charge a battery that doesn’t need charging. We do it in such a way that we blow up my 100-amp main fuse. Everything is really dead now.
My helpers, protected by various good Samaritan provisions presumably found in state law and the Bible, are not liable.
Eventually, a real-rancher cousin arrives. He finds the original problem, a wire I loosened driving at my usual breakneck speed on rough road.
He sticks a piece of aluminum foil in the SUV fuse box, and the engine turns over.
“That will get you off the mountain.”
He also informs me that, if I switched my cell-service provider to Such-and-Such, I, too, could have a signal up here and not be so cut off from the world.
But where’s the fun in that? I’m with the tech-hostile cows on that one.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
Tina Griego’s column resumes soon.
