"None of this was here when we first came," Valer says, her voice as light and emphatic as a girl's. As we drive on, we see fields of native grasses, a sunshiny yellow now in midwinter. Cottonwood, white-barked sycamore, and juniper line the banks. We climb out of her truck to look at a meandering stream. "See the water there?" Valer and I are driving through El Coronado, the first ranch that she and Josiah bought, on a lark, 31 years ago. Just mesquite and rocks, rocks and mesquite. None of these ranches were healthy and productive, though San Bernardino was the most degraded of them all. Valer and her husband, Josiah, had just purchased the ranch, adding it to the several they already owned in the borderlands of Sonora and Arizona.
This was what was left of the San Bernardino ranch in Sonora, Mexico, after everything that could be taken from it had been taken, after all the previous owners, the ranchers and the farmers, had wrung it dry. She was 59 years old, and one can imagine her walking swiftly over the hard land, dressed in jeans, white button-down shirt, a bushwhacker hat cinched at the chin, puffs of dust, fine as talcum powder, rising with her footsteps her scanning an arroyo, violet-blue eyes narrowed over the sharp cheekbones, noting the depth of the thing and then gazing out over the vast stretch of dry, red earth. This was the terrain Valer Austin saw 13 years ago. Some were 20, even 30 feet deep, their beds barren of vegetation, dry as a bone, but strewn colorfully with litter.
Creosote bushes fanned out from their mounds of chalky dirt and arroyos twisted this way and that, like immense snakes gouging the earth. Small, thorny mesquites dotted the landscape, their taproots tunneling far beneath the soil to suck whatever water lay there. The land was parched and cracked and scattered with stones, as if the clouds had rained rocks in this part of the world.
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