|
The sun struggles to break
through the fog hanging over the historic ranch--a typical March day,
the locals say. Gat cattle and curious burros crowd around mineral
blocks, oblivious to the passing car. The dirt toad winds like a serpent
for more than a half mile, then crosses a cattle guard flanked by sugar
pines. a red, weathered barn stands out against the foothills behind it.
A sound--like a woman's cry--catches me off guard, and I see a peacock
fly down from an ancient oak to join its companions. I park in front of
a modest Spanish-style ranch house and walk up to the porch guarded by
5-foot tall bronzes of cowboys and Indians. The door squeaks open and I
sense something is about to happen. And then it does. Jack Palance
himself greets me in the hall. "Come on in," he says. As I follow him
into another room past hand-hewn shelves of covered wagons, 20 mule
teams and other miniature treasures, I understand that this is more than
a house where a Western icon lives...this is a house where the Wild West
lives.
Palance must have thought so, too, back in the min-'60s when
he went looking for respite from his busy acting life. He followed his
very distinguishable nose and drove north out of Los Angeles to the
Tehachapi Mountains--the bear going over the mountain to see what he
could see. He was taken with the area--the miles upon miles of rolling
hills, the stands of oak trees and the blue, smog-free skies--, but the
roads were baffling. They zigged and zagged, twisted and turned, and few
of them had names. He was lost. Hopelessly lost. Looking for someone who
could give him directions, he turned off the road onto private property
and drove toward a ranch house tucked deep into the landscape. After
introducing himself to the owner, a Basque rancher, Palance commented
that he had been looking for a piece of property to buy and had gotten
lost. "This place is for sale," the owner said. And that's the end of
that story.
Holly-Brooke Ranch is named after Palance's two daughters
Holly and Brooke. It's 1,200 acres of scenic grandeur--of the Old West
kind. an old adobe, said to have been a trading post for cattlemen
moving their herds north to San Francisco, stands away from the main
house, a rare survivor of Tehachapi's 1952 earthquake. "I love this
place," says Palance. "It struck me when I first saw it and it still
does." Perhaps the reason he was so taken with the property was that it
reminded him of Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, where he was born
Voladimir Ivanovich Palahnuik, the third of five children for Ukrainian
immigrants John and Feshka, on February 18, 1920.
In Palance's personal memoir, which chronicles the events
leading to his only son's death from melanoma in 1998, the actor writes
poetically about his father......................... |
