Let me tell you about Margaret Holloway, because nothing she did next makes sense unless you know where she came from. Margaret was born Margaret Castellanos in 1942 in San Antonio. Her father, Eduardo Castellanos, had come to Texas in 1929 from the province of Corrientes in northeastern Argentina. He came on a cattle buying contract that was supposed to last six months. He stayed fifty-one years.
Eduardo Castellanos had grown up on his uncle’s estancia, a cattle ranch, twelve thousand acres of native grass and scattered hardwood trees on the banks of the Paraná River. He had been working cattle since he was nine years old. In Texas, he worked first as a foreman on a ranch near Pearsall, then as a livestock buyer for a company that serviced feedlots across South Texas. He married a Tejana woman named Adela in 1940. Margaret was their only child.
Adela ran a small café in San Antonio through Margaret’s whole childhood. Eduardo was gone for weeks at a time buying cattle. Margaret grew up in the café on weekdays and on a series of borrowed ranches on weekends when Eduardo was home and wanted to show his daughter where the money came from. She could castrate a calf by age ten. She could mix the mineral supplement by age twelve. She kept the café’s books by age fourteen because Adela had a strong opinion that a woman who couldn’t keep books was a woman who couldn’t eat.
In 1961, when Margaret was nineteen, Eduardo took her to Argentina for three summers in a row. Corrientes province. The same estancia he had grown up on. His cousin Hector was running it by then. Hector had rebuilt the operation after the war and was experimenting with something Eduardo had never seen in Texas. Cattle pastures with deliberately planted trees spread across them at measured intervals. Eucalyptus. Grevillea. A few native hardwoods.
The trees had been planted in 1954. By 1961, they were twenty feet tall, casting intermittent shade across grass that was greener and thicker than the unshaded pastures on the neighboring ranches. Hector showed Margaret the records. His cattle weighed between eleven and fourteen percent more at the same age, on less water, with less supplemental feed.
And he had shown her something else, something Margaret would remember sixteen years later when the skies over South Texas stayed empty through a whole summer. Hector told her that in the drought year of 1958, when every ranch around his had lost thirty to forty percent of their herds, his had lost six percent. Because the trees had kept the soil moisture under the canopies. Because the shade had kept the cattle from overheating. Because the leaf litter had kept feeding the grass roots when the rain stopped.
“Trees in a pasture,” Hector said, “are an insurance policy against the years when everything else fails.” Margaret wrote it all down in a composition notebook she had bought at a pharmacy in San Antonio. She came back to Texas in August of 1963 and asked her father why nobody did this in South Texas. Eduardo told her the truth. Texas ranchers don’t plant trees. Texas ranchers clear trees. It’s a cultural thing. You could show them the numbers and they’d still call you crazy. Some things a man believes with his spine, not his head.
Margaret kept the notebook. She married Frank Holloway in 1965 when she was twenty-three. Frank had a three-hundred-forty-acre ranch outside Nixon that he had inherited from his father. Brangus cattle. Good grass. No trees except the ones along the creek bottoms. Margaret brought the notebook with her. She showed it to Frank once in 1968. He read it carefully. He looked at her and said, “Maggie, if I plant trees in that pasture, my brother Ray will never speak