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A Dude By Any Other Name
Gourmet, February 2000
Verlyn Klinkenborg
 Meditate for a moment on the word dude, as it was used long before it became a one-word anthem for the slacker generation. Dude was an insider's term in the working West, the name you gave someone from outside – an easterner, as the dictionaries say, or a person wearing a new, store-bought outfit or cowboy clothes that were fancier, perhaps, than their owner's ability to ride. But somewhere out West, years ago, some dude with a sly, self-effacing optimism called himself a dude and took the sting right out of the name. He walked up to a horse he had never met, hitched up his pants, which were too short to begin with, stuck a shiny boot into a weathered stirrup, and hauled himself aboard as though he were climbing out of running seas onto a moving yacht. Then he clapped his hat to his skull and sat there like a newly minted penny in a handful of old change, too amazed at himself to notice the wranglers' reactions or the look in the eye of the horse, who was entertaining thoughts of Old Virginny.
And so, to wrap up this brief history, the dude ranch was born. Almost a century later the institution is still going strong all across the West, though you'll notice that few dude ranches use the word dude in their names now, even though they may be members of a dude ranch association. This allows a little latitude to the paying guests, some of whom are dudes but won't admit it – stopping just short of, say, the true Walter Mitty mind-set – or who really only want to relax Out West without riding anything more animated than a wooden porch railing with the sound of water and the smell of cottonwoods nearby. Some people go west on ranch vacations in search of a stockman's authenticity, and others do so hoping to end up at a place no more genuine than Cody College, the western boys' school in the 1943 musical Girl Crazy, where the cacti are cardboard, the girl is Judy Garland, the bandleader is Tommy Dorsey, and the score is by George and Ira Gershwin. Not many guest ranches will give you a Busby Berkeley finale the way Cody College does, but they can nearly all muster a singing cowboy, the smell of sagebrush and wood smoke, and enough wide-open space to sustain the illusion of the West the way it once was or at least the way it once was in the daydreams of dudes.
There has always been a therapeutic quality attached to the notion of a ranch vacation, a Teddy Roosevelt faith that outdoor living and a certain amount of self-reliance would toughen up the soft city dweller. But these days the last thing a city dweller needs is toughening up. He or she is more likely to require a little punching down, like risen dough, and a chance to leave the self-reliance to someone else, like the housekeeping staff, the chef, and the masseuse. As a result, many guest ranches now feel more like spas than high-country cow camps, and they offer a range of activities – fly-fishing, sporting clays, bird-watching, hiking – that stops just short of golf, which would confuse everyone. The only things spartan about a modern guest ranch are the thin mountain air and the cool summer evenings and the fact that the ranch lies back of beyond, where the cattle moan at night and the cell phones all say "no service." The horses may be an afterthought, but the beds are not. The scenery may be exceptional, but not as exceptional as the menu and the wine list.
Fourteen degrees of latitude south of Teton Ridge lies Cibolo Creek Ranch, within the shadow of the Chinati Mountains and only a Texas eyeshot away from the mountains of Big Bend National Park. Cibolo Creek Ranch is a historic reconstruction of El Fortin del Cibolo, an adobe redoubt built in the late 1850s by Milton Faver, a trader and farmer whose two smaller forts – La Morita and La Cienega – are also part of the Cibolo Creek property, which extends for 25,000 acres. The largest of these forts, the Hacienda at Cibolo Creek, has eleven guest rooms, and the smallest – La Morita, some 15 miles away over gravel roads – has only a single bedroom, for guests who want to retreat even further from the press of daily life and human company. Each fort feels like – and is – an oasis in the midst of the harsh but beautiful south Texas desert.
Cibolo Creek is managed by Lisa and Artie Ahier, a young couple of almost indescribable generosity. Lisa is the ranch chef, and she opens her kitchen to guests who want to take cooking classes with her or who, perhaps, desire only to watch, a glass of wine in hand, while one of her specialties – Broken Arrow venison osso buco or Cibolo shrimp salad – materializes before their taste buds.
Lisa's food is marked by a sense of adventure that alludes to the vocabulary of western ranch cooking but that speaks more naturally of her global intuitions, her willingness, for instance, to lay before her guests perfectly steamed Chilean sea bass wrapped in banana leaves. Lisa's food would be remarkable anywhere, but it is especially so when you consider that the nearest city and not a sophisticated one when it comes to foodstuffs is El Paso, about four hours away. Lisa relies heavily on her organic garden, as do the peccaries that live in the neighborhood.
Artie Ahier is curator of the ranch's historical rooms and of its guests' comfort. He is an apostle of service, as well as the ranch's chief naturalist. Even if you can't tell a chicken from a duck, except when arrayed on a plate before you, it's worth spending half a day birding with Artie. Cibolo Creek is really a ranch for naturalists, and naturalist dudes, of course. In this unpopulated part of Presidio County, Texas, the landscape shifts swiftly and dramatically. A half-day search for birds will take you from the peach orchard near the Hacienda across a plateau with the dark ash remnants of Indian fire pits, and high into the rugged hills above it. It's hard not to notice, when driving to the ranch at night, the absence of any lights on the horizon. From the hills above the ranch during the afternoon, the sparseness of settlement in this part of the world becomes perfectly plain. The falling sun seems to peel away layer after layer of the landscape, well across the Rio Grande and into Mexico, and there is scarcely a sign of human habitation to be seen, only the stern elegance of yucca and cacti and the infrequent seclusion offered by a stand of live oaks clinging to a shaded slope. |
