Search for the T Lazy D

You Can Go Home Again

In the winter of 1941, when I was six, a doctor mistakenly declared that my older brother and I had rheumatic fever and should be removed from the East to a warm, dry climate. Mother saw in this prescription a chance to become the cowgirl she had always wanted to be and wasted no time acting on it.

By January we were baking in the Arizona sun at a Wickenburg dude ranch called Remuda. The country had just gone to war, but our minds were on the beginning of a great adventure. By the time Father arrived in March, the notion of buying a cattle ranch had taken root in Mother's mind. Equally romantic, he liked the idea immediately, and so it took off like Jack's famous beanstalk.

In pursuit of this dream, they went to a real estate agent in Phoenix, who accurately sized them up as dudes who knew absolutely nothing about cattle ranching. Father hardly even knew how to ride a horse. But they had hired Tex Adair, a Remuda wrangler, to be their foreman, and he at least knew something about the business. They figured they could learn the rest as they went along, so the agent's gloomy warnings went unheeded.

He sent them to see a ranch called the T Lazy D near the town of Sanders in northeastern Arizona, where the owner, a man named Crawford, escorted them on an exhilarating horseback tour up a steep and arduous trail. Having attained the summit without disgracing himself by falling off, Father paused in the saddle and surveyed the vast expanse of silent, empty land. "Well, if a man can't find peace of mind here," he said, "he probably can't find it anywhere." And that, as they say, was that.

In less than two months, we had moved west, and my parents were plunging vigorously into their dream, rounding up cattle at a remote line camp fittingly called High Lonesome. We now presided over 42,820 magnificent acres with maybe 500 herefords grazing on them. We were cattle barons.

Mother's letters to her family in Connecticut contained edifying vignettes of ranch life. An early one explained: "The only vehicle we possess now is our bright orange pickup truck. It doesn't ride like the Cadillac, but it does the work. We have a very handsome sorrel stallion that I rode for the first time today - he's really a honey and should produce some lovely colts." Probably a good thing because on another day Mother wrote she "almost killed Tex's horse by leaving the barn door open, and he got in and ate about 25 pounds of laying mash! He is slowly recovering but hasn't laid anything yet! Cost me $15 for a vet."

The distance from my mother's former Eastern haunts to the T Lazy D was approximately 100 years. Living conditions were primitive. We had no electricity, only kerosene lanterns whose chimneys had a disconcerting habit of exploding whenever the flame accidentally got too high. Our icebox was just that - a box in which a one hundred-pound block of ice lasted a week. The wood stove burned almost constantly, even in hot weather, because a pipe passing through it was the only water heater.

Cooking on this contraption took stamina, especially when pan-frying a freshly killed chicken for dinner. Still, no chicken that I've eaten since has tasted half as good as that prepared by Mother.

For my brother Steve and me, this life came close to paradise. We spent our days in endless adventure: wading through the cattails in the water tank, trundling off with sandwiches and Kool-Aid to the nearby hill we named Little Roundy Mountain, building makeshift cabins from scrap lumber.

One memorable morning, my father and Tex were battling a mysterious adversary in the little pump house at the foot of the windmill. As I looked in to see what was going on, Father victoriously held aloft a hunting knife. Impaled on the blade was a monstrous black spider about the size of a golf ball. Ordinary things often appear huge to small children, but that was a BIG spider.

More common - and indeed far more hazardous - were the red ants whose hills were everywhere. We knew how vicious and sneaky these insects were, but we were often caught off guard anyway and savagely attacked.

Searching for the T Lazy D Text and Photographs by David R. Bridge

rainsqualls hanging along the distant horizon like huge gray curtains. Sometimes we passed right through one, and the boundary between sun and rain was as sharp as a fence line.

Unfortunately, the squalls seldom passed over the ranch. The grass didn't grow, and the cattle didn't fatten. An anxious note appeared in Mother's letters home: "The situation is beginning to look a little grim. We are really praying for some rain." But prayers for an end to the drought weren't answered, even though an occasional delHuge did turn the road from Sanders into a truck-trapping quagmire. Such a calamity befell us Mother, my brother, me, and Tex's pregnant wife Lola one night on the way home from a shopping trip. The pickup sank to its axles in goo. We had to lug bags of groceries in the soggy darkness expecting Lola's labor to begin any minute - several miles to the ranch. But the drought was remorseless, and time finally ran out.

In the fall of 1943, pressured by the war and harsh economic reality, Father was compelled to trade the rigors of branding steers at High Lonesome for those of Army training at Fort McClellan, Alabama. The peace of mind he was so sure he could find had eluded him after all. Mother's dream of being a cowgirl slipped irretrievably away. We left for Connecticut on a dark, snowy morning, and the T Lazy D passed into memory.

Forty-six years later, Mother and I returned to Arizona to see if we could find it, or whatever remained of it. Only the two of us were left to relive this idyllic chapter of our lives.

We were prepared to discover that nothing was left but the land itself. What we actually found was more of what we remembered than we had ever dared to hope.

Upon arriving, we found Sanders originally just a wide spot on old U.S. Route 66 spreading slowly south along Route 666. A bridge absent the day Mother stalled the orange pickup in the path of an eastbound freight, now spans the Santa Fe Railroad and the Puerco River. We drove across it and promptly spotted a dirt road that seemed to fit our memories and an old hand-drawn map Mother had made in 1942. Without even pausing, we struck off in a swirling cloud of dust. We saw the great mesa that had dominated the southern horizon, then came upon the only other major landmark near the old ranch. "Little Roundy Mountain!" I bellowed gleefully. Beyond it the road bent sharply left and there, suddenly, were the things we had come so far to find: the adobe ranch house, the hogans, the windmill the T Lazy D still standing after nearly half a century.

Well, almost. Our wild jubilation dimmed when we saw that the place was in ruins. It looked like an antelope carcass picked clean by buzzards. The barn had burned down. Our old adobe was a forlorn shell without roof or windows. Inside, all was rubble. The only sound was the creaking of a door blowing slowly back and forth in the breeze. On a post in front of the hogans hung a battered old hat, sweatstained and crumbling. A rusting bootscraper was still anchored in concrete by the door. The place was home to spiders, lizards, and weeds.

We still had to find High Lonesome, the old line camp we both remembered so vividly. It had never been much just a couple of log cabins, a windmill, some corrals, and the remains of a long-abandoned truck but, for some reason, the place gripped us. Maybe it was the name, or Mother's memories of round-ups there, or mine of playing on that old truck. Whatever the reason, we were determined to find it. The road up the mesa from the ranch was impassable, so we tried another route that came up the back way.

It was quite a journey. After what seemed like endless miles, we rounded a bend and, like Brigadoon, it appeared. High Lonesome. The trees were taller and the wooden windmill had lost its blades, but otherwise it might have been 1943. The truck was still there. Incredibly, its 1934 license plate was there, too, as it must have been when I last sat at its wheel, and it was already a decaying wreck. Mother found a tarantula by the cabins black with a hairy orange rump probably a distant relative of that pump-house monster Father had stabbed with his knife 46 years ago. The old windmill groaned in the fading light.

"Sometimes," I said to Mother, "for a little while anyway, you can go home again."