Chapter Three: First Steps and Second Guesses
Owning land sounds romantic until you realize you have to do something with it.
The morning after I signed the papers, I woke up before dawn, not because I was eager to start my new life, but because my body still hadn’t adjusted to the quiet. Years of emails, phone calls, and early meetings had conditioned me to wake up with a sense of urgency. Now, there was nothing demanding my attention except an empty stretch of dirt and the distant sound of the wind rattling through dry brush.
I stepped outside my temporary setup—a small camper I had parked near the edge of the property. The air was crisp, and the first light of the day painted the landscape in muted oranges and browns. This was mine now. Every rock, every inch of cracked soil, every stubborn weed. It was a realization that carried both excitement and a creeping sense of dread.
I had no idea what I was doing.
A Crash Course in Reality
The first order of business was figuring out how to make the land work for me. I had read books, watched YouTube videos, even taken a few online courses on farming and ranching, but none of that prepared me for the reality of standing in the middle of nowhere, trying to decide where to start.
Water. That was the first thing every resource told me to focus on. Without it, nothing else mattered.
I grabbed a notepad from the camper and started listing everything I knew about the land’s water situation:
There was an old well on the property, but I had no idea if it was functional.
A seasonal creek ran through the far end of the acreage, but it hadn’t seen water in months.
I had exactly zero experience with irrigation, plumbing, or well maintenance.
Perfect.
After a quick breakfast of instant coffee and a granola bar, I drove into town to talk to the locals. If I was going to make this work, I needed advice from people who had been doing it for years.
The Local Welcome
Walking into the only feed store in town felt like stepping onto the set of an old western. A couple of older men sat near the entrance, drinking coffee out of paper cups and watching me like I was the new sheriff who had just wandered in.
Behind the counter, a woman in her fifties—tanned, strong-looking, and clearly someone who didn’t take shit from anyone—eyed me with mild curiosity.
“Help you with something?” she asked.
“Yeah, actually. I just bought the old ranch a few miles out, Rancho del Chivo. Looking to see if anyone knows about the well on the property.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You the city guy that just bought that place?”
I sighed. So word traveled fast. “Yeah, that’d be me.”
One of the old men near the door chuckled. “Guess we got ourselves another dreamer.”
I forced a smile. “Something like that.”
The woman, who introduced herself as Karen, leaned against the counter. “Well, you’ll want to talk to Jim. He’s been working on wells around here for decades. If yours has any life left in it, he’d know.”
She scribbled down a number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. “And if you’re serious about this, you might want to stick around. We’ve seen plenty of folks come through thinking they’re gonna live off the land. Most don’t last a year.”
I pocketed the number. “I guess we’ll see if I’m different.”
Karen gave me a knowing smirk. “Guess we will.”
As I walked back to my truck, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just been given my first real test.
I had taken the first steps. Now, I just had to prove—both to myself and to them—that I wasn’t just another dreamer passing through.
