On the homefront: In-laws combine talents for book on Northern Nevada

Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2001 | 8:27 a.m.

Some of us are compelled to travel the world looking for places of beauty, while others merely look out their windows.

Writer Carolyn Dufurrena and her mother-in-law, photographer Linda Dufurrena, did not have to go far to find inspirational words and photographs for a book. They looked at the world around them and produced "Fifty Miles From Home: Riding the Long Circle on a Nevada Family Ranch" (University of Nevada Press, $34.95).

As Carolyn Dufurrena wrote in the opening pages of the collaboration:

"Sometimes, on the right kind of morning, Nevada looks like waves frozen in rock.

Long ridges roll away to the horizon. Broad stretches of sage and playa form paler troughs between them. From a distance, it all looks barren, lifeless, banking. But within it hide riches for the senses and the spirit."

The Dufurrenas live on ranch land in the vast, deceptively empty spaces of northwestern Nevada, about 230 miles from Reno, where the state meets California and Oregon.

The spaces are only empty if you don't have a discerning eye that can capture the essence of the landscape through the lens of a camera or with the turn of a phrase.

"Just on the cusp of summer, we have ridden into a rocky, snake-infested, beautiful green crease in the shoulder of a granite mountain. Mountain mahogany and snowberry fill the draw up high. Six-foot water hemlock spreads its deceptively lovely leaves below the meadow of the canyon homestead we call the Dutchman."

Carolyn, 48, is married to Linda's son, Tim, who manages the Quinn River Ranch. She teaches in a two-room school house in a nearby valley. Her 21 students are the sons and daughters of ranchers and ranch hands.

"I'm new to this school, started in October," Carolyn said from her home during a phone interview. "I had been in a different rural school but there weren't enough kids. There were only three students when it was closed."

The Dufurrenas combine their talents to show the world that there is as much beauty in their seemingly barren countryside as there is on an exotic island.

"My husband's father came here from the Basque country (of France and Spain) in 1906," 64-year-old Linda Dufurrena said. "I was born in California but I went to high school here. I had always been a housewife and mother, but I wanted to do something creative. I'd never been able to paint, but photography was something that just took off with me."

She became a professional when her sons were rodeo athletes in high school and the school's rodeo photographer quit. She took some pictures, they turned out well and she spent eight years photographing school rodeos.

Since then Linda has expanded her subjects to include landscapes and life in the rural areas of the state. Her photos adorn hotels and offices around the state and appear in such publications as Range magazine.

Carolyn Dufurrena is a relative newcomer to northern Nevada, not moving here permanently until the mid-1980s.

"We moved around a lot when I was a kid," Carolyn said. "Dad's family was from Connecticut and Mom was from Iowa. My father was a corporate nomad. We spent part of the time on the east coast and then we moved to Chicago, where I graduated from high school."

She studied archeology and geology at Wesleyan College in Boston. In the summer of 1973 she took a graduate course in ancient art at Harvard University, and the class included field work in Nevada.

"We went to Ruby Valley to look for arrowheads," Carolyn said. "I fell in love with Nevada that summer."

At the end of the summer, however, she returned east to complete her studies and to eventually begin her career in geology. She returned to northern Nevada in the early '80s.

"I came here to work for a mining company, looking for uranium," Carolyn said.

Instead, she fell in love with the man she eventually would marry and with the land where his family had lived for generations.

"I fell in love with the middle of nowhere," Carolyn said.

After Carolyn and Tim married they lived in Denver for awhile and then Texas -- wherever her job as a geologist took her.

"We were in West Texas for three years, during the oil boom, but that was awfully flat country for my husband," she said. "After about three years we decided our future was here (in Northern Nevada), so we came back in 1984."

In 1987 she got her teaching certificate, began teaching in rural schools and writing free-lance articles for such publications as Nevada magazine.

It took the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law team almost eight years to compile their book.

"All along I had been writing little vignettes that cowboys told me, about my husband's family history, about things that would happen," Carolyn said. "I wrote essays that were not appropriate for magazines, but things I liked.

"Eventually, Linda and I thought this would be a good project, to chronicle things that happen on a ranch through the year, how we work between the generations -- there are not a lot of places where kids can work with the parents and grandparents."

Combining photographs and words, the women paint a picture of a world that almost has become an anachronism in this age of interstate highways, Palm Pilots, cell phones and e-mail.

"People, like me, who live in rural Nevada appreciate it," Linda said. "I know the feeling people here have about our rural country."

And after reading "Fifty Miles from Home," outsiders may appreciate it also.