Recently– last winter- an odd mix of ranchers, cowboys, artists, medical workers, teachers, and even less classifiable types started having Sunday brunch at Tita Dixon’s brief version of the Bear Mountain Cafe. It was so much fun that when Linda Rael Mansell and Kelly Kent opened a good cafe at the old Magdalena Hotel it …
Tag: The West
Roman a Clef?
Two characters from John Moore’s Looking for Lynne reading about themselves:
Opening day, Dunhill Ranch, with New Mexico Miscellany…
2012 and 2014 (what were we doing in 2013?), both with no game in the bag, though this year we saw plenty and expect to get some doves, and with luck GOOD quail. Best grass in years, food plants everywhere, cottontails same, and probably more jacks. Deer sign. If we have a snowy winter we …
Real West
Novelist- rancher- horseman John L. Moore in his Querencia, many miles east of the chic part of Montana. If I were ever driven out of here, that is the first place I would go. These photos were taken by a New York filmmaker, Kelly Colbert, who is doing a documentary on a horse, working title …
Magdalena Old Timers Fiesta
Good week with the hawk and with guest Annie Hocker; bad week with my right hip, and not very productive. But once a year, local patriotism demands I pay some attention to Magdalena’s only event that brings out of towners in. Yeah, it’s hokey and country and so what? We missed it when water worries …
Serendipitous semi-random hound meeting
This is a very preliminary photo batch, as we are having dinner with Joel, and photos are not yet all in. But Dutch Salmon invited us to meet him at the Owl in San Antonio (our S A, NM not TX) where he was picking up a young female part- Azawakh from Marya. (I hadn’t …
High Lonesome
This one is for Chad Love, in response to this essay and in thanks for this one .
Observation
John Davila, one of my oldest NM friends, is an unreconstructed Catron county rancher, an unconventional soul who used to raise game chickens in the old days, not to mention cattle and stranger things. I bet he likes the quote from a distant relative, 20th century philosopher Nicolas Gomez Davila, courtesy of David Zincavage’s Never …
Local Color
Bar owner Darryl Pettis, new mayor Diego Montoya, and some library donations from Darryl — because I can, and because I support both. (I am on the library board). Not a secret, but I bet Libby and I are the only Magdalenians who have been there other than her: Diego’s mother came from Waltham, Mass. …
Branding at Deep Springs
Ranching is not just some archaic way of life practiced only by Neanderthal reactionaries, as some urban columnists have recently implied. The unique and innovative Deep Springs College is also a working cattle ranch, and always has been one. In a splendid photo essay, Jack Frishman captures the spring gathering and branding.