Tucsonweekly.com
You couldn't find a better place to have lunch than this cramped, dusty Cochise County cook shack. It has every bit of ambience that Arizona ranch country can offer, including a wood-slat ceiling covered with strips of tin from a dismantled pigpen. In ranching, nothing goes to waste, so when Ruth Evelyn Cowan had the opportunity to collect some scrap from her parents' New Mexico ranch, she grabbed it.
The tin might rattle in the wind and drum in the rain, but those sounds create a symphony for Cowan, who loves this place and this life. She was born into it 57 years ago, and you can see that it suits her down to the mud on her boots. You don't have to listen hard to hear the contentment in her voice when she goes on about her American Brahman cattle--big, silver, hump-backed animals with floppy ears that she talks to as if they were her kids.
But this is Southern Arizona under siege, so there really is only one subject on the agenda, one issue that dominates all others here: the border with Mexico and the invasion of illegals who, every day and every night, rush to fill this yawning vacuum.
Posted by Suzanne at March 10, 2005