The U.S. Forest Service Threatens Rancher Norman Hale With Ruin. By Jeff Smith I LIVE OUT in the sticks, where I'm surrounded by the scenery, the trappings, the feel of the Western frontier of a century or more ago. There's a black horse in the corral, a saddle slung across a bench in the parlor, a Colt six-gun within easy reach. The surrounding hills are innocent of the signs of civilization or human habitation. Cattle graze the grassy bottoms and wildlife browses the slopes. Nature abides, as raw and unspoiled as it was created. Thanks 21st-century computer communications technology, I can live my 19th-century fantasies and still make the 20th-century rent and bean money. To quote Louis Armstrong, "What a wonderful world." But lately I'm disquieted by trends I see developing in this wonderful world. My urban brethren seem to have decided their country cousins, people like me, but more pertinently, folks who preceded me here, some by many generations, don't understand what nature is for, that we don't deserve so much of it, that unless we can content ourselves with serving as weekend hosts to a horde of world-weary city dwellers fleeing the reality of the workday urban world for the fantasy of a country weekend, then we'd better pack up and move to Eloy. The worst of this gulf of misunderstanding is exemplified by the weekend hikers and birders on one hand, arrayed against the cattle ranchers on the other. Bitching about so-called robber baron cattle kings, getting fat and rich off the public dole by grazing huge herds on vast tracts of public land for cheap grazing fees, is the sport of choice amongst the greenies. And muttering about The Nature Conservancy taking over the entire West is the favorite paranoid fantasy of conservative country folk. Both sides are way off the mark and have blinded themselves to the real threat, the dangerous enemy, the real estate developer. Greenies like to dream about a home where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play. Ranchers like to dream about tall grass and high beef prices. Land sharks don't have to dream: they know the buffalo are gone, the deer and antelope dwindling and hiding out, and tall grass and high stock prices only memories...and they know the land will fall in their laps and that its price will only rise. So when I see ranchers like Norman Hale threatened with ruin, it pisses me off. Because no purpose is being served other than to destroy a family, potentially leading to the destruction of an entire way of life that once was thought to symbolize the best and most self-reliant in the American character, and unwittingly to speed the destruction of America's western wild lands. The Forest Service manages the public lands on which most western cattle are grazed. Their charge is to see that the leases are properly maintained as far as plant and animal habitat are concerned. These same needs are foremost in the minds of ranchers too; after all, worked-out ranchland won't put much meat on the cattle nor money in the bank. You'd think ranchers and foresters would get along, but then you'd think folks who live and work in the great outdoors would get along with people who like to escape the city to visit the great outdoors on weekends. You'd be wrong on both counts. With foresters and ranchers the antipathy is aggravated by drought conditions lately, and by current political pressure from people who misunderstand and distrust cattle-growers. Which results in situations like the one facing Norman Hale and his family. After four generations of Hales ranching in the Patagonia Mountains, and six or eight years of drought, Norman is down to less than 50 mother cows on his small family homestead and forest lease. Before this season's rains brought relief, the Forest Service rode parts of the ranch and decided it was overgrazed and needed a rest. They ordered the Hales--Norman and daughter Mary are the Hales most directly involved in the cattle operation--to get all their cattle off the lease and onto the small private holding, this despite the recent 10-year-renewal of the lease. Do you know what this means to the Hales? It means buying hay to feed the cattle. It means money out of family savings. It means, unless relief is granted by the Forest Service, ruin. The end of four generations of ranching. No tomorrow to an 82-year-old rancher who couldn't have been called rich on his best Sunday after a Saturday night poker game, and no next year for his daughter, who has spent her life on horseback and dedicated it to the family. What will the Forest Service gain by driving the Hales and other small, subsistence ranchers like them off their leases and out of business? Ironically, very little, since late-summer rains have helped the grasslands, because nobody else will want to go into cattle ranching, and nobody but an Arab oil sheik will be able to afford the purchase price, the property taxes and then the estate taxes on a western ranch. So all that home where the buffalo roam will be divided into itty-bitty lots, with trailers and ticky-tacky little boxes, and the environmental movement will finally realize it shot itself in the foot, trying to put one between the cattleman's eyes... ...And we'll all be sorry, but it'll be too late. Unless we save the Norman Hales of this world--and most particularly the one Norman Hale of Santa Cruz County--right now.

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