Rancho Del Fuego

Owning land can do strange things to a person. We had been living in our country home for just two weeks when a new and unseemly side to my usually openhanded nature showed itself. I was in the driveway, and I heard the distant sound of engines. I looked up in time to see three ATVs cutting the corner of my property and disappearing over a hill. I seldom rode in that corner because it was an inhospitable area of poison oak with a rutted dirt path too steep for my lazy, pampered horses. Nevertheless, I seethed like an irate cattle rancher besieged by sheep herders. A git-my-gun attitude swept over me and for a moment I understood the feverish territorial barking of dogs. The next day I did the human version of peeing on bushes: I posted NO TRESPASSING signs.

My husband, Brian, had never before lived on land either and he wanted to assign a name to our 92 acre parcel. “How about the Lazy S?” he asked.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Lazy S, Lazy Ass, get it?”

“Appropriate, but no.”

“The guys at the OFBC think we should call it The Compound?” Brian had coffee six mornings a week with a gossipy group of codgers who referred to themselves as the Old Flyers Breakfast Club.

“The Compound! It sounds like we’ll be posting gun turrets and brainwashing followers. I don’t think so.” I stood my ground. "When people name their property it's always either hokey or pretentious. It's bad enough our road is Needmore Drive. The Lazy S on Needmore Drive. Yeah, that’s the address I want."
We dropped the subject until two years later when my son’s Volkswagen bug sparked a fire that burned 70 acres and Rancho Del Fuego named itself.

Fires are an annual summer threat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada near Sacramento. Forests are often kindling dry by June. The fire blazed up a grassy hill past a small stand of tall pine trees and the knoll I had chosen as my preferred building site if we were ever to build our dream home.

A neighbor from a mile away saw the smoke and called. Seth, our thirteen year old, answered the phone. “Yeah, the fire department is on the way,” he said.

“Are your dad and mom home?”

“No, but my brother’s here.”

“Are you boys okay? How close is the fire to the house?”

“The fire’s about 50 feet away,” Seth said.

Twenty-two year old Josh sprang across the kitchen and grabbed the phone from Seth. “It’s okay,” he said, “The fire is 500 feet away on the other side of the driveway and heading away from the house.” When he hung up the phone Josh turned to his young brother. “How far is your bedroom from where we’re standing?”

“About ten feet,” Seth said.

“Right. Now how far is the back door?”

”About twenty feet.”

“So that makes the shop what?”

“A hundred feet?”

“More like a hundred and fifty, but you get the idea, right?”

The last thing Josh had taught Seth, aside from the fact that you can’t put out a summer grass fire with a bucket of water, was how to turn a pen and rubber band into a spit-wad gun. Brothers can be substantially useful teachers.

After the air tanker and helicopters had flown away, the fire trucks rumbled off, and the twenty member work release crew was counted and escorted back to where ever they came from, the firefighter in charge wrapped-up with us. He wore the same yellow shirt and green cargo pants as the crew. His graying hair was closely cropped and scarcely showed beneath his yellow helmet. A wide mustache formed a black arch over his mouth. He was as stoic as we were emotional, and he listened patiently as we babbled.

“We’re really sorry about this,” Brian and I said.

“Thank you so much,” I said.

“You guys are great. We appreciate everything,” Brian said, “Who do we call if we see smoke?”

“Do you think those pine trees will live?” I asked.

“We’ve got really great water pressure in our wells.” Brian loved to talk about our water pressure, he could work the gallons-per-minute statistics into any conversation within ninety seconds.

The firefighter waited for an opening then said, “It looks like we got it all, but I’ll have a crew out tomorrow to check for hot-spots. Don’t know about the pines.” He gave us a number to call, and as he climbed into the cab of his truck he looked up toward the burned area and said, “I’ve lived here all my life and that’s the tallest poison oak I’ve ever seen.”

We stared mutely after him as he drove away chased by a cloud of dust. Then slowly turned our gaze toward what we would now call charcoal hill.
The pine trees did survive, and the forest of poison oak came back menacingly red the following spring.

Besides poison oak and about a dozen ponderosa pines, Ranch Del Fuego had 20 or 30 acres of meadows blanketed in oat grass and invasive star thistle. There were two seasonal ponds covering an acre each, and the hillsides were ornamented with nearly every kind of oak tree that grew in California. Year round the oak trees invited us to study them. In winter when the blue, California, valley and other deciduous oaks had dropped their leaves, a variety of evergreen live oaks colored our hills.

To make conversations simpler I tried naming places. I called a grassy slope where Brian and I saw a bobcat Bobcat Hill which was easier than saying, the hill over there east of the lower pond where we saw the bobcat. A large, rough boulder in an oak-shaded draw west of the house became Horseshoe Rock; and a secluded corner where my dad said he’d build a house became Dad’s Meadow.

But Brian’s brain retained different information than mine. He could tell you how much power we saved in a month by switching to energy-saving light bulbs, whereas I couldn’t tell you if we were saving kilograms or nanoseconds. But, he never remembered the names I gave places. So conversation with him was generally made more difficult.

“I saw a coyote today in the middle of the racetrack?” I’d say.

“Where?”

“The racetrack. By the upper pond.”

“What racetrack?”

This was hopeless. “The path around the upper pond where it was so muddy last time we rode. I’ve been calling it the racetrack. I thought you knew.”

“Maybe I did. I don’t know. What about it?”

“Nevermind.”

In January Seth and I bought a fistful of fir tree saplings from the Forestry Service for a dollar apiece. Our property elevation was lower than recommended for fir trees, but for $20 we took a shot at home grown Christmas trees. As we dug holes and patted muddy soil around their thread-like roots we gave them names too. For a while he and I knew parts of Rancho Del Fuego as by Michael Jordan, or near Ross, Joey and Chandler. Brian never seemed to remember what we were doing, and when the warm weather came and the saplings began to die, he simply rolled his eyes when we reported Bonnie and Clyde dead on Horse Poop Hill.

For three years we enjoyed country life on Rancho Del Fuego. I spent my time writing, riding, and learning wood-working. Before we even moved into the house, I bought two quarter horses. Nearly everyone I knew rode with me at one time or another. For some it was their first time on horseback, for my father-in-law it was the first time in nearly sixty years since he was a teenager on his family ranch in eastern Washington.

Our patio was the sight of as much activity as our living room. We ate breakfast there on weekends, and barbequed for friends. When the weather turned hot, Brian installed a misting system, and we swayed in a hammock under its refreshing mist on summer afternoons. In cool weather I slipped out to the spa on a daily basis.
I loved the quiet of the country, of hearing through open windows, the sound of acorns dropping through the leaves, and my horses shaking off dirt after a roll on the ground.

Rancho Del Fuego’s isolation encouraged wildlife visitors. Our front yard was on a route wild turkeys followed daily one summer. Each morning nine females and two toms appeared from the woods west of the pasture and passed by like neighbors out for a stroll. Even when deer ate apples from our trees I enjoyed their visits.

I didn’t, however, enjoy the three quarter mile rutted dirt road that was too long for our budget to pave, and we shared with neighbors who resented all traffic past the rubbish heap they burrowed into each day after work. I didn’t love the neighbor’s gate that crossed the road and had to be manually opened and closed behind us rain or shine, dust or mud.

Then the stock market plummeted, leaving us and many other stunned Americans, reviewing our unexpectedly meager options. The plans we’d had for improvements to the rutted road and the house at Rancho Del Fuego were no longer practical, and there was only so much we could do ourselves.

My son Josh stayed at the ranch while on breaks from school, and together he and I made improvements. Using rocks collected on the property, we built a wall that framed a back-yard from the large open meadow behind the house. I had concrete poured for a patio, and Josh built steps and a bar around our spa. He helped me create an herb garden, remodel a tool shed into a tack room, and build stalls for my quarter horses. My bond with Josh was strengthened with each rock we plastered into place and each nail he drove into a board I held.

Some projects were a group effort. In one weekend the kids and I transformed the barren space between the driveway and the house into a landscaped oasis of evergreen shrubs, stepping stones and blooming flowers nestled against a boulder Josh and Brian’s oldest son, Cameron, delivered in the tractor’s front loader.

Brian occasionally participated, but not often. His passion was flying and his time was spent at the airport. Our marriage was getting louder and rockier with his absences from home a primary subject of dispute. We made the difficult decision to sell Rancho Del Fuego.

When an offer came in on the property I was visiting my daughter Rose, a business major at San Diego State University. Brian called to tell me the news and share an idea he hatched to start another business together.

With a buyer for the ranch, we glanced at our lives and saw opportunity. Four of our five children had fled to college, and neither of us had a job. After selling our first business, Brian had been working for a start-up company; and I was enjoying an early retirement. But, the start-up failed, and with the stock market decline I slipped from the giddy position of forty-something retiree to jostling for space in the employment line alongside others wearing the same dismayed look. After a short, but intense period of studying Brian’s idea, we decided to make lemonade of our unemployment lemons and start another Internet business. This time we’d take it to the beach. We’d live on a boat and sell wireless Internet access at marinas in the Caribbean.

We announced our decision to mixed reaction from family and friends. Some offered enthusiastic congratulations then turned to spouses with a can-we-go-too look. These bold friends were married to less adventure-loving souls, and some to resolute wives who clung to their mortgage on a beautiful home like a Labrador hanging onto a sock. Some warned against a decision so obviously based on a foolhardy desire to enjoy the hell out of ourselves. And, the day we left California we learned of a pool wagering how long the two of us could live together on a boat.

Our friend, Dennis, was helping Brian weigh and stow boxes and luggage in our airplane. "If you're still in the islands in the spring maybe I'll fly down after the Florida Sun-n-Fun Air Show," Dennis said.

"Come!” Brian said, “We'll be there two or three years at least,"

Dennis paused a moment then said, "You're both my friends, but do you think...well, that's a long time...the two of you...on a boat,"

"I know," I said. "But, we're going to give it a try."

"The OFBC started a pool. I've got three months," Dennis winked at me. Brian was studying the aircraft weight and balance chart.

"Pool. There's a pool betting how long Brian and I- can I get in on that?"

Our friends had good reason to be skeptical about the durability of our relationship in the confines of a boat. We had created the marital equivalent of an iron-man triathlon, and our energy was giving out. After meeting and falling blindly in love we plunged headlong into what was the second marriage for both of us. Six months later we moved to a new house in a new town and gathered our blended family under one roof. Finally, to make things interesting, we started a business together. Statistically, we were more likely to find a Renoir in the attic than make this marriage work.

However, we had learned in our years together that starting a bold venture was what we did best. It was our strongest compatibility. This might just be the shot-in-the-arm our marriage needed.

Seth, hearing our plans to take him four thousand miles away to live on a boat, was beset by ambivalence. The boy was already confused as to whether life was an awesome journey filled with wrestling trophies and BMX bikes, or just one day after another that sucked of acne, burned-out teachers, and twice-daily hour-long rides on a school bus? His brothers and sister, however, were unreservedly envious.