A Distant View
Story and photgraphs by Judy Eron
t is no news to anyone who lives out
here on the Chihuahuan Desert that
it is next to impossible to own your
view. The land is just too vast. My
friends on the east coast stand in awe
when I say I own 40 acres—it sounds
palatial to them. So to help them under-
stand how miniscule that really is, I
point to a blade of grass on their lawn
and I say it’s like owning that—out here,
40 acres is just a tiny, tiny speck on the
immensity of this land.
And yet. . . and yet I’ve tried to pro-
tect my view as much as realistically pos-
sible by purchasing adjoining 40-acre
I
20
Cenizo
tracts. Of the thousands of acres within
my view, I’ve chosen to buy surrounding
pieces of land I thought might be most
likely to attract a new owner: land that
has easy access, land that has unusual
topography, land that has special fossils.
So, although I began with 40 acres and a
crude strawbale shack, I now have 320
acres and a house built around the
strawbale shack.
This is the story of lessons learned
along the way as I tackled the impossible
task of attempting to protect my view.
It’s a challenge, looking out over this
vast expanse of land, to figure out which
Fourth Quarter 2019
tract is which and who owns what. My
land being part of Terlingua Ranch has
eased the process. The Ranch has a map
room with topographical maps encom-
passing the entire 200,000 acres of the
Ranch, with all the tracts and their
numbers superimposed over this. I was
able to gather identifying information
on the tracts in my closest view.
Here is what I figured out: To the east
of me, there was no easily accessible
land, so no concern there. To the north
there was an inaccessible mountaintop
with only two tracts between it and my
house, tracts I managed to purchase over
the years. To the south, the land
dropped off rather suddenly about a
half-mile from my house, so only the
land before the drop-off was a concern.
I made sure to purchase the tracts in
front of my house, before the land drops
off.
That left only the west, which I did-
n’t feel I could realistically consider. Out
my west windows, I could see for sever-
al miles, hundreds of different tracts, far
more land than I could possibly buy. I
didn’t even try.
Well, I made a mistake. Actually, I
made two mistakes. One was to my west