A Pragmatic Maverick Takes a Stand in the Heart of Carson Valley Story

by Jon Christensen

Seeing a grown man cry changed Jacques Etchegoyhen's life.

The man was Duane "Scotchie" Mack.

Scotchie was around 80 at the time. Jacques was in his early 30s and had been working for the Macks since he was 11.

Jacques lived just down the road from the entrance to the Mack Land and Cattle Co. ranch in Minden when he was growing up. He was playing on the lawn one day when Scotchie drove by in his pickup. Scotchie stopped. He said Jacques looked big enough to drive a tractor and asked if he wanted a job.

Jacques is 40 now. He still works on the ranch. Scotchie is gone.

But Jacques said he thought about him in the early morning recently as the sun angled across the waist-high hay on the Mack ranch. Jacques was out "chasing water," as he called it. He fished two boards from the tall grass near an irrigation ditch and placed them in slots in a head gate. Water from the Carson River flowed swiftly down the ditch toward the fields of timothy grass and alfalfa.

Scotchie taught Jacques the ways of water and pretty much everything else he knew about ranching. There wasn't a man Jacques looked up to more than Scotchie Mack, except, of course, his own father, who was also the high school principal when Jacques was growing up. And Jacques had never seen him cry.

It was the day the bulldozers came. The fences on the north field nearest town were dragged into a heap, twisted and beaten down. Scotchie knew it was coming. His family had to sell some of the ranch to pay estate taxes so his children could hold on to the rest.

Today, 10 years later, houses are crowded cheek by jowl on the subdivision.

When the water from the river leaves the ranch now it rushes into a pipe and through the darkness under the houses and streets.

"It hurts," Jacques said. "But you have to be pragmatic. If they hadn't done this, they wouldn't have the ranch."

Still when Jacques Etchegoyhen looks back over the ranch and his own life, that stands out as the moment he knew somebody had to do something: seeing Scotchie break down in tears when the bulldozers came for a piece of the ranch.

It took Jacques a while to realize that that somebody was him. It took a little cajoling, too, down at French's Bar from an old high school teacher who remembered the joy Jacques took in debating.

Jacques applied for a seat on the planning commission. Then he was elected to the county commission running on a campaign to protect ranches and open space. Last year he ran for re-election and was unopposed.

He is now the chairman of the Douglas County Commission and the county is well into an ambitious effort to preserve family ranches in Carson Valley by buying conservation easements that will allow ranchers to continue ranching but not to subdivide or build on their land.

It almost sounds like a movie: Mr. Smith goes to Minden. But that's how Jacques got into politics. His wife, Cris, said she always knew he would. It was in his blood. He grew up in an Irish-Basque family. They used to clear the table after dinner and get into heated conversations. Jacques would be the Devil's advocate if it kept the debate going. No subject was off limits in their house as long as it was civil. His mom made sure of that.

Photo by Kit Miller

Then there were the rowdy conversations around supper with the working men at the ranch. "It's those folk's fault I got into politics," he said. "That's where my debating skills began, around that table. Cowboys love to sit and talk because there's no other stimulation. I kind of miss those days. It was an idyllic time. Beef prices were good. Hay prices were good. Dairy was good. The margin has become so slim now that making a living is very tenuous."

There used to be six men working on the Mack ranch. Now there are only three: Jacques, Brian Parks, the owner's son, and Juan Munoz, a laborer from Mexico.

Working on a ranch also gives a man lots of time to think. Jacques spends most of his days alone, out in the fields, chasing water, mowing and raking hay, bucking bales, fixing broken-down farm machinery. "You develop the art of daydreaming," he said, "which I'm very good at."

Jacques ponders books he has read and speeches he could make. He jots down ideas in a little notebook that he carries in his shirt pocket. "Some of my best speeches were written on the baler," he said.

It turned out he liked politics. And he was good at it. Politics was his only vice, he liked to say now. "My wife tells me it would be cheaper to buy a Harley," he joked.

In some ways, Jacques Etchegoyhen is the unlikely political heir to Thomas Jefferson's ideal of the yeoman farmer, citizen politician, except Jacques never owned his own ranch; he just worked on one his whole life.

But he loves it like a home nonetheless. His own house on a quiet suburban street looks out on the Mack ranch fields, just like his parents' home just down the street where he grew up.

"Down deep I know that's the soul of Carson Valley," he said. "It won't be the place we all knew when the green is gone."

"If home is not worth fighting for, what is?" has become his campaign motto and his mission statement.

Luckily, Jacques told himself, bucking bales brings him back down to earth.

"It beats the hell out of county stuff," he said.

Memos from the county were scattered around the cab of his pickup. "My office," he called it.

In the back were the tools of his trade - hay hooks, rubber boots, a shovel, and a "pickaroon," a crude pick-like tool hand-welded from an axe. He used it for grabbing boards from head gates. It had a ruler carved on the handle for measuring the amount of water flowing in irrigation ditches. On the back bumper of the truck a sticker said "Cows not condos."

Jacques met Brian at the hay barn and they loaded a flatbed truck for a delivery across the valley. They worked in silence. The sweet smell of fresh grass filled the air.

Crossing the valley, Jacques drove by an old cottonwood grove where he and his friends drank beer when they were in high school. The trees are still there in the midst of houses on five and 10 acres.

In Carson Valley, the rhythm of farming is now surrounded by the rhythm of suburbia. Can they coexist? In fact, they are blending together. Ranch-style homes with corrals now dot the sagebrush hills on the eastern edge of the valley.

Jacques liked to see them building there, out of the productive green farmland. Besides, the horse owners were his best customers.

He and Brian stacked the load of hay under an old twisted juniper tree. Then they went to the JT Restaurant in Gardnerville for their weekly lunch with their ranching friends.

Jacques found them at a long table by the kitchen door: Danny Nalder, Eric Rieman, Arnold Settlemeyer and his son James, and David Hussman.

"Whoever's not here we know is stealing water," Jacques joked.

"So where's my damn water?" said Danny, who farms just down the river from the Mack ranch.

"It's in the mail," said Jacques.

In between bites of hearty steak sandwiches, the ranchers talked about the weather, when they would be cutting their second crop of hay, and water.

Somebody brought up a controversial proposal to designate the Carson River a wild and scenic river.

"I think it means no Basque guy can float down the river in a tube," Jacques joked.

"Yeah, he'd leave a ring around it," said Nalder.

Jacques laughed a soft high chuckle that bubbled out of him like water out of a lively spring. These are not just friends, but some of the people most deeply concerned about what Jacques is up to politically. And they are supporters.

The Settlemeyers have been active participants in an open space committee the county set up to recommend ways to protect ranches in Carson Valley. David Hussman and his wife, Kathi, have offered to sell a conservation easement on their ranch when the program gets under way.

After lunch, Jacques drove through Gardnerville. He passed a billboard for the new Chichester Estates. Not so long ago, it was a 220-acre farm field.

Soon it will be filled with 985 houses.

"That's the fate of most of Carson Valley if we don't do anything different," said Jacques.

"It's not going to be easy," he admitted. He had learned that much early on. Politics, like bucking bales, was harder than it looked at first. But Jacques had jumped in with both feet, as Basques are wont to do, he said.

Soon after he was elected to the county commission in 1994, the old Dangberg ranch went up for sale. It was 1,000 acres in the heart of Carson Valley.

Douglas County was growing quickly and the ranch was right in the path of development.

Jacques thought the county should buy it, put a conservation easement on it, and then sell it to ranchers.

"I thought it was a great idea and I bulled forward," he said. "I found out that it's not done that way in politics in a small county."

The whole thing happened too fast, he said. It was the first time most people had ever heard of conservation easements. It smelled of big government and money the county couldn't afford. There were rumors that Jacques had some kind of personal stake in the deal. There was even an effort to gather signatures to recall his election. It was a tough lesson.

"That taught me government is fairly decent at nurturing good things," Jacques said, "but never very good at forcing good things to happen. You want to be a little bit out in front of the people, like Thomas Jefferson said, maybe five steps, not more."

Or put another way, as his uncle in Paradise Valley once told him, there's only one way to move cows: slowly. "The same is true for communities," said Jacques. The Dangberg ranch was eventually bought by local landowners and has yet to be developed. However, the threat that it could be subdivided educated the community about what was at stake.

In 1996, the county passed a comprehensive plan that called for protecting open space in Carson Valley. Since then, the county has been slowly but steadily moving toward actually doing something. An open space committee has been holding public workshops and will be coming to the county commission August 5 with recommendations for paying for the plan.

Jacques stopped by the office of Ame Helman, a member of the county planning commission and the open space committee, to catch up on their recent meeting.

Ame also works for the American Land Conservancy, a private nonprofit environmental organization that works to preserve open space and wild lands.

The conservancy and the Bureau of Land Management are working on a plan to sell public lands in booming southern Nevada to buy conservation easements on farm land in Douglas County.

If open space is going to be protected, it will be through these kinds of "peculiar partnerships," Jacques said. "I think that's the future of the West. You're way more effective if you bring diversity to the table."

The federal land exchange will provide some funding for protecting open space, Ame said. But the committee had also decided to recommend three options for local funding: a 1/4 cent sales tax, a 1/10 percent tax on real estate transfers, or an increase of 1 cent per $100 in the assessed value of taxable property in the county.

"This is just a plan; you need the money to implement it," she said.

There would be time to talk about that when the committee brought its recommendations to the commission, Jacques said. "But the timing is wonderful," he said. "Everything is in place now for us to ask the people of Douglas what they want in their future."

Jacques went back to work at the ranch repairing a baler.

"Sometimes I feel more like a mechanic than a farmer," he said. Then he remembered he had a meeting of the Carson Water Subconservancy District in Fallon that night. He drove home to clean up.

He shed his blue jeans, tinged green with hay dust, his plaid shirt, bill cap and boots. He showered, shaved, and got dressed in black pants, shiny black cowboy boots, a silk suit and a bright tie.

He collected a file for the meeting in his office and listened to a phone message from his son, Dominique, who is applying to law school and working in Sen. Richard Bryan's office in Washington, D.C., this summer.

Jacques might have gone to law school himself. But he and his wife had Dominique when they were 17 and still in high school. Jacques and Chris toted Dominique along when they went to college at the University of California-Davis.

Jacques loved books and studying but he also realized he probably wasn't cut out for office work. And when Scotchie called and asked if he would come home and manage the ranch, Jacques jumped at the chance.

But the education of Jacques Etchegoyhen has never stopped. The 18-foot shelves in his office are full of books ranging from ancient classics to contemporary western nonfiction. Summertime is too busy for reading, but in the winter he reads a book a day.

Jacques picks through books and ideas looking for those that feel right and look good, like a well-tailored coat. He has a file filled with quotes and aphorisms from his reading. This thought was stuck to his desk on a blue Post-It: "For every complex problem there is a simple answer, and it's wrong," H.L. Mencken.

On the long drive out to Fallon, Jacques had more time to think. A couple of weeks ago, he joked at a public meeting that he was a close environmentalist. The local newspaper had picked it up. And when Jacques realized what he had said, he waited for the uproar. To his surprise, there was none. "We knew that," people told him.

Since then Jacques had been testing out different labels for himself in his head: a pragmatic environmentalist, a common sense conservationist. They all sounded good, if a little safe. He still got a kick out of stirring up debate, just like when he was young.

But as he walked into the meeting room in Fallon and sat behind the long dais with microphones, he seemed to age visibly. The corners of his mouth, usually turned up in easy smile, were turned down in a serious and slightly wary expression. He had on his game face now.

Still throughout the meeting, he joked pleasantly with Kay Bennett, a Carson City supervisor and fellow board member, about rivalries between their neighboring counties over water and tax revenue from new shopping malls.

On the way home he analyzed the meeting. He had gone along with the prevailing sentiment and voted against the wild and scenic designation for the Carson River. If the river is in fact wild and scenic that is good enough for him, he said, the federal government didn't need to declare it. He didn't really oppose the idea but he had to pick his battles.

"On some issues I'll go to war," he said. "But it has to be the right issue.

You have to fight the battle small enough to win and big enough to matter."

And he had a big one coming up. Douglas County would soon have to decide how it would actually pay to protect the open space that is its heart and soul.

"We spend so much time articulating what we're against and not what we're for," he said. That's what the open space plan was about.

As he crested the last hill and dropped into Carson Valley, Jacques let out a sigh of relief.

"I know coming up over that hill, I'm back in my safe zone," he said. "I remember as a little boy feeling the same way. We're home."

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