Why We Lived in Deeth

The events in our lives happen in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order…the continuous thread of revelation.  Eudora Welty

      Deeth, Nevada is about twenty miles west of Wells and thirty miles east of Elko.  That hasn't changed.  The Camelot that was the Marble Ranches headquarters in Deeth is long gone.

     One fall day in 2011, two years before she died, I took my ninety-six-year-old mother on a drive from Elko to Wells.  I chose the back road along the base of the Ruby Mountains.  We stopped in Deeth.  

     I parked in front of the abandoned ranch house.  A sheet of plywood was nailed over the bay window, a dog chained to a dead tree,  a gray travel trailer parked against the house.  The outbuildings were abandoned, doors gone, windows broken.  Someone left the corral gates open. 

     Deeth is considered a Nevada ghost town.  If you want to read up on the history or learn how it got its name, go to Wikipedia.   See that picture captioned “buildings in Deeth”?  That’s the ranch house.  At least the photo was taken before someone nailed the plywood over the window, before the dog was chained to the tree.

   We lived at the ranch headquarters from June of 1958 through the summer of 1959.  When they broke the news that we were moving from our home in Elko, I remember Mom’s explanation.  “It will be easier on your dad.”

     I hated the thought of moving to Deeth.  My ten-year-old sister and I would have to ride a school bus twenty-five miles to Wells, population about a thousand.  I would have to attend my junior year in a high school with eighty-nine students.  In retrospect, I wonder if I intuited, “It will be easier on your dad,” meant more than shortening his travel time from Elko to the ranch.  He had done that successfully for the previous six years.  I didn’t argue.  They were the parents.  We had moved many times before.  That’s the way it was.

     Managing the Marble Ranches was my dad’s dream job.  He was overseeing one of the largest ranching operations in northeastern Nevada:  sixty-five hundred  mother cows; sixty-five thousand  deeded acres.  There were six ranches in all:  the River Ranch along the Humboldt River to the west of Deeth; the Seventy-One Ranch, which was the showplace in Starr Valley; the ranch headquarters in Deeth.  The Cross Ranch, the Buena Vista and the Mala Vista were smaller ranches running up the graveled county road north of Deeth. Beyond were Charleston and Jarbidge, the open range where Marble Ranch buckaroos with their remuda and a chuckwagon took the cattle for the summers.

     Dad had near autonomy in decision-making.  John Marble, the owner, was from a wealthy family of San Francisco bankers.  He and his wife, Mary, divided their time between Rancho Tularecito, their deluxe spread in Carmel Valley and their home on Nob Hill in San Francisco.  They had two sons. I only remember Peter, a Stanford University business graduate.

     It’s amazing for me to remember how many buildings comprised the ranch headquarters.  We moved into the historic two-story Victorian house with high ceilings and a front parlor, the window facing the road.  Hollyhocks and yellow roses lined the fence.  

     A full-time carpenter lived with his crippled wife in a cabin on the west side of the ranch house.  Adjacent to the house on the east was a small office building where Dad kept the books in a roll top desk.  I remember a storage closet filled with canned goods and cartons of Camel cigarettes.  Across the road was a cook shack with a small house behind where the cook and her ranch foreman husband lived.  Next to the cookhouse was a long cinderblock bunkhouse.

     The barn included a tack room big enough to hold saddles and bridles as well as harnesses for the workhorses still used for haying.  A shop building, where the full-time mechanic worked on the ranch trucks, also stored the mechanized haying equipment--the tractors, mowing machines, buck rakes.  I remember a system of corrals with loading chutes.  In the fall, the dusty air filled with the sound of  bawling cattle waiting to be shipped.

     Here’s why we moved to Deeth.  We were living in Deeth so Dad could mentor the wealthy scion who was replacing him.  Peter Marble decided he wanted to take over the family holdings.  My dad had been made “redundant,” as the Brits say.

     “Leave good tracks.”  That was one of Mom and Dad’s sayings.  I know my father was an excellent and patient mentor to Peter Marble. I will never know of their late night or early morning conversations about their future.  Where would they go?  What would they do?

     That day in 2011 when Mom and I pulled up in front of the abandoned ranch house, she didn’t have much to say.  Their lives had gone well after the transitional year.  Ups and downs, of course, but they prospered. Dad built a successful business as a ranch broker and as a range consultant specializing in range management issues.  

      This is one of my favorite memories from that year.  Dad woke me up one January midnight and told me to get dressed.  As I stood shivering on the back porch, he pointed to the pulsating glow in the night sky.  “The northern lights,” he said.  The magical blue-green lights on the horizon were there.  Then they were gone.