Don Grimm-Cowboy and Ranch Manager

One of the Last of his Kind

Don in his early 20s.

Don in his mid-50s.

Don Grimm, our 276 ranch manager, worked and lived on the ranch for about thirty years with his wife, Martha, until his mid 80s when he retired. On a doctor’s scale, the only time he said he ever weighed himself, he might have hit 120 pounds. His jeans, most often tucked into rubber boots, were held up by a weathered belt with a horse head buckle that he kept carefully polished.

Up before sunrise in the spring and summer, a little later in the cold of winter, Don scurried over the ranch in his gas-powered Gator with a couple of flakes of hay in the back bed just in case. Scooter, his blue-eyed, black and white Australian Shepherd, rode in the bucket seat next to him. Don was not one for small talk. On approach, his smile served as the wordless hello, and he got right to it: “Low on chicken feed.” “Creek pump tripped again.”

He had grown up on a chicken ranch in Petaluma and took good care of our chickens—letting them out in the morning, putting them in at night so they wouldn’t get eaten by a coyote or a raccoon. On more than one occasion, he shot a raccoon or three with his rifle as they sat up in the oak tree in the middle of the chicken coop at dusk ready to pounce as soon as they could find an opportunity. Don never gave them one. But he drew the line of his chicken chores at cleaning the chicken coop. He was such a hard worker that I never asked him why he wouldn’t. I just assumed he had to do it so much growing up he just couldn’t put up with the smell and mess anymore.

Don was an animal whisperer for all the animals on the ranch—lambs, llamas, pigs, steers, goats, and chickens. It wasn’t just because they knew he was the one who fed them every day. He could tell when they were sick practically before any symptoms appear. Alone in his Gator, he could bring in a hundred head of cattle from the pasture into the corral. They followed as docilly as kittens. He would eat the meat from the lambs, goats, and steer we stockpiled in the freezer but he wouldn’t take part in the butchering. When it was slaughter day, he’d stay in his house or on the other side of the ranch.

During one particularly big wildfire, Cal Fire, the state agency, came to ask him to help them find all the roads over the neighboring Guenoc Winery’s 23,000 acres where he had previously worked. No one else knew. Don wasn’t educated past high school but had an encyclopedic brain of ranch knowledge—how to pull barbed wire for a fence that won’t collapse after a year, how long it takes the water on each irrigated check to run across the pasture. After he tightly and evenly pulled hog wire across a row of t-posts, he’d exclaim, “Just like downtown.” One of the few moments he would acknowledge is work.

He loved Friday Del Giorno frozen pizza night, a trip to Subway for a sandwich, and Three Musketeers bars. In the shed in the old refrigerator where we stored the chicken eggs, I used to leave him treats. A few slices of lemon poundcake, some gingersnaps, a blueberry pie. At the end of his day, he’d walk into his house through the mud room and carefully place the plate on top of the washing machine. After removing his boots, he’d slip on his slippers and, plate in hand, enter the kitchen where he would rest it on the edge of the table where it would wait until after dinner, which Martha served promptly at 5:30.