Taking Over the Home Place

The first morning it was actually mine, I stood at the gate before sunup and counted sheep I didn’t yet know by sight. A hundred head, give or take, and every one of them smarter about this land than I was.

Where the Real Work Starts

By the second week I’d learned that everything out here runs on water, and water runs on paperwork. The romance of the thing lives right alongside the ledger.

You don’t take over a ranch so much as apprentice to it.

There’s a particular quiet to high-desert Lassen County that you don’t get anywhere else — the kind that makes you lower your voice even when there’s no one to hear it.