Tales of our Times
By JOHN BARTLIT
New Mexico Citizens
for Clean Air & Water
This sketch of Myra McCormick of Grant County, N.M., was first published in 1991. She passed away in 1999. As her lasting gift to The Nature Conservancy, this sturdy friend of the environment left to them the guest ranch she owned and operated for 41 years with the stipulation that they continue to operate it for a minimum of ten years. As soon as the Nature Conservancy closed the Lodge in 2009, the present owners began hatching plans to purchase and reopen this exquisite jewel on the edge of the Gila Wilderness. A visit to www.bearmountainlodge.com shows the lodge as it shines anew.
This month, 2022, is the 50th Anniversary of the Federal Clean Water Act. To celebrate the event, the New Mexico Environment Department invited stories remembering those earlier times, leaders, and successes. We send our story of Myra McCormick.
Today we praise Myra McCormick.
In a world of all sorts, she would sit in the section reserved for the good and the strong, when she took time to sit at all.
Ageless but not young, McCormick ran a guest ranch outside of Silver City. She was a citizen environmentalist before the concept existed. By the early 1970s, she was pulling water samples out of Whitewater Creek near the Kennecott smelter and sending them to state agencies in Santa Fe for pollution tests.
She was part Miss Marple, part Margaret Thatcher, and part Thelma Ritter, that old-time player in Western movies. And a master birdwatcher in the bargain. She was among the first to join and to speak for our citizens group in a corner of New Mexico where the big employer was the big polluter. Such feats define the intrepid.
That’s Myra.
Among the great treats of my life in the green cause are the three or four week ends spent at Myra’s Bear Mountain Ranch when environmental work took us her way. It is a five-star outing for anyone of like mind.
By the 1990s, twists of law and circumstances made her a prominent figure in our group’s water pollution lawsuit against her hometown copper company. The clean water laws say citizen groups have no rights in court unless they have a member harmed directly by proximity to the pollution violations. McCormick was such a member. Our chance to get into court hung by this thread for a year.
Believing her to be key, armies of corporate lawyers set out to prove her a fabrication, a mere puppet turned by foreign winds. This would take some doing. They might easier prove the first Navajo were carpetbaggers and the Apache were peddlers of band instruments.
The harsh legal interrogations she withstood led to my favorite story about her. A few days after her ordeal, three leaders of our group found ourselves with McCormick in the dwindling light in front of her great stone fireplace. The topic was Whitewater Creek—a popular bird hangout and the site of the pollution that forced our lawsuit. McCormick ticked off three or four prized species found there. In our chat, their vivid names struck us as precise and catching. In court, the names struck the opposing force as brutal and baffling.
Imagine: Two or three defense lawyers sit behind a grand table and quiz McCormick about her alleged use of the creek. Taking her sprightly lead, they are soon entangled with “…the chestnut-collared longspur, the horned lark, and the long-eared owl, maybe the sage thrasher.”
At rates near $150 an hour (equating now to ~$300 an hour), the questioners confer in a hush and scratch on pads, naked as jaybirds on McCormick’s turf. The court reporter struggles to spell the exotic names and keep a straight face. Thus, by a longspur was our arduous quest for legal standing won.
I laugh in waves. First, at the big team hunkered down against a rush of bird life. I howl at the dangers of overreach that lurk where the rote assails the real.
With rare simplicity, Myra McCormick showed us how to disenthrall ourselves. She did our species proud.