Captain’s Log – The Great Pinenut Caper

Leanna and I got to go on a High Adventure Saturday.

We left town in the dead of the night – 3 a.m., to be exact, and watched the sun rise over Silver Peak as we dropped down into Fish Lake Valley. We were headed for Lida Summit, where industry had run straight into NIMBY. Or better put, the Not-In-My-Back-Yard Karen had brought the industry of pinenut picking to a screaming halt.

For the past 42 years, an enterprising entrepreneur from El Paso and his family have had a side gig picking pinenuts. They sell them and sock away the money, and that is their retirement plan. These people have nine children, and they work hard all year round at their regular business. Then, in the late summer, they go to where the pinenuts are, with permission from private landowners, and they harvest the pinenuts.

They are familiar with and regularly use the H-2A Temporary Farm Worker Visas. This year, they had 30 Venezuelans with them to do the work. They stayed out for several weeks, feeding their crew better than they ate in their homes and paying better wages than they could make anywhere else until the neighbor lady down the mountain saw them. She called the sheriff because she didn’t want them coming into her yard to pick her pinenuts. 

The sheriff decided there would be no more pinenut picking and ordered the operation to move out and shut down. There had been a lengthy negotiation that resulted in a 5 p.m. on Friday deadline for everything to be off the private ground. The remains of the operation were staged on the summit, waiting to clear the last bags of pinenuts before the sheriff said he would be back. He was expected at high noon on Saturday for a final inspection.

The old rancher, who had originally permitted the picking on his private land, had tried all week to save the operation. Producers stick together. But when he stood with his cane in hand facing a half-moon semi-circle of lawmen, armed and apparently ready to follow their leader in his interpretation of real estate law, it became clear there would be no winning this battle.

When one of the deputies shouted a warning that there was a gun in the truck – a little .38 pistol lying on the console of the empty truck while the rancher talked to his lawyer on the phone, he yelled back, “Of course, there’s a gun, what did you expect?” 

When he got off the phone, he told the sheriff and his posse they were crazy. There may have been cane-shaking.

And then, as we sat Saturday morning at the top of the summit and visited with the owner, watched his crew fill the last moving van with burlap bags, and ate a picnic lunch with the rancher, I could hear spaghetti western music in the background of my imagination anticipating a run-in with the small-town lawman. Black Bart, if you will.

But he never showed. Probably for the best, but it was a bit of a letdown. Big build up, good story, flop of an ending. Except everyone was safe, and the Sagebrush Rebellion remains dormant.

Sometimes it goes like that, I guess. Stupidity prevails, and the good guys lose. This is strange for a place like Esmeralda County, which exists at the hands of natural resource production and the harvesting of gold, alfalfa, solar energy, cattle, and yes, pinenuts, which has always been a way of life.

But the winds of change whistle across the summit, and the nosy NIMBY neighbors have a strange influence.

So while we work to grow our own industry, we’ll expose that crooked sheriff every chance we get and still be right here… 

… Keeping you Posted. 

Rach