February 2010
A Place in the Enchanted Sun
by Craig Springer
Banks of low clouds color a thousand shades of pale as they pass overhead, on the fittingly named Berrenda Creek Ranch in Sierra County. The clouds are a variegated gray like glazier’s putty, and dark like soot. Fingers of light streak through openings and spatter light, over an awe-inspiring landscape of craggy canyons and grassy hillsides. Like the Spanish word Berrenda implies, the hills are stained the color of wheat, like the pelage of the pronghorn that scuttle over the nearby flats. And so it is—the sights to be seen from John Cornell’s home perched on a hill south of Hillsboro.
In a land of much sunshine, a winter storm is a welcome diversion. Of course, the rain and snow a storm brings is welcome by ranchers for the grass it grows, and the precipitation is welcome, too, by wildlife. And that concerns Cornell. Cornell is a part-time employee of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, a sportsman-based organization founded in 1914 by a now-famous former New Mexico resident, Aldo Leopold.
Cornell works to ensure wildlife habitat and clean water are protected for New Mexico’s current and future generations. He follows on earlier successes of the Federation—conservationists who saved pronghorn from walking into the abyss of extinction; they helped return elk to New Mexico.
Cornell is a recent arrival to rural New Mexico. He was born and raised in Oklahoma City. Mark Twain said “southerners talk music,” and you can hear the Sooner music as soon as Cornell speaks. He earned a degree in forest management from Oklahoma State University. The degree prepared him for a successful 30-year career in the lumber wholesale industry. That career first took him from Stillwater to New Orleans where he worked for the Southern Forest Products Association, then on to Arlington, Texas where he worked in lumber production and sales.
By 1992, he launched his own Dallas-Fort Worth-based lumber company, and had a business interest in Albuquerque. A magazine ad for land near Hillsboro secured his circuitous route home. Cornell and wife, Cindy, moved there in 2003.
When asked about the attraction to rural living, Cornell says he enjoys the remoteness, and being close to wildlife—quail, and pronghorn, the deer. But what’s on the positive side of the ledger works also on the negative. It’s a long way to goods and services. And in a strange irony, Cornell says back in Dallas, he hardly knew his next-door neighbors, but here he knows all his vecinos, despite their being far in between.
Cornell is immersed in the community; he and Cindy are members of the Hillsboro Union Church, and he is the president of the Berrenda Creek Ranch Homeowners’ Association, and the Hillsboro Community Library Board.
Cornell is also employed part-time with a Colorado-based mortgage company as a broker, representing southern New Mexico. His services help secure financing for rural New Mexicans.
Cornell seems to have found his place in the sun—or under gray clouds as the case may be—doing meaningful work while at home in rural southern New Mexico.
If you know anyone who'd make a good profile for this column—including yourself—let us know at sespinoza@enchantment.coop.
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