02/11/2007
By Ramón Rentería
El Paso Times
Maybe it is the image -- a solitary woman dressed in cowboy boots and a sombrero and riding a donkey -- that made us wish we, too, could exit the rat race.
To most of us, she was simply the "burro lady," a free spirit minding her own business, a fiercely independent woman who -- with her donkey and bundles of blankets and trinkets -- became as much a part of the far West Texas landscape as picture-perfect mountain vistas.
Judy Ann Magers drifted with the seasons and rode at least a couple of generations of donkeys along Interstate 10 and the isolated back roads of the Big Bend country.
Magers, 65, died Jan. 26 of natural causes while camping out in Sierra Blanca. An estimated 200 mourners said adios Monday in Terlingua to the woman they hardly knew except as a roadside icon.
Fort Hancock artist John MacKenzie had never encountered anyone else so visually well-known to so many people in the region.
"She seemed just as hardy as a piece of mesquite wood," MacKenzie said. "She represented another world that's disappearing."
Chris Calvin, the owner of a guest ranch 52 miles south of Alpine, always felt he kind of knew the burro lady, maybe spiritually.
"She did it her way and never complained," Calvin said. "That touched all of us."
Calvin composed these verses in honor of the woman he and his wife, Rita, admired for finding inner peace:
She moved about like the wind
the mountains was her mantle
the desert her bed
she took no pity or alms
her burdens she bore in silence
hot or cold, thin or flush, her faithful burro was all she would trust
she took the trail not taken and she's out there still.
Magers rarely talked to others and never accepted charity. Most people never knew her name, but she was friendly with those she trusted. In recent years, she started accepting rides from motorists pulling a horse trailer.
Ron Segura, a retired Air Force master sergeant from San Antonio, took Magers' picture in 1996 on Highway 90, about six miles east of Valentine, where he maintains a vacation home. The burro lady often camped out in front of an old Texaco station near Segura's property.
Segura offered her bottled water, sodas and sometimes food.
"She always insisted on paying and would not take what was offered if I didn't take her money," Segura said.
Not much is known about Magers except that she was born in Nebraska and that she once traveled the rodeo circuit as a bareback bronc rider and lived the ranch life. Three daughters and two sons showed up at her funeral.
Bill Ivey, the owner of Ivey's Emporium in Alpine and the ghost town of Terlingua, first met Magers in Lajitas in the early 1980s. He later became her guardian and made sure she had spurs, a hat and boots in her coffin like she requested.
"We had deep compassion for her and wanted to feel sorry for her, but she wouldn't let us," Ivey said. "So, that compassion turned into respect for her and her privacy and her lifestyle."
Marfa native Jake Brisbin of El Paso met the burro lady years ago.
"I have enormous respect for her for having the courage to do exactly what she wanted to do," Brisbin said. "That's what America is -- a place where that can still be done."
Hudspeth County Judge Becky Dean-Walker knew the burro lady for 20 years and often left a barrel of water outside her ranch gate near the freeway so Magers could water her burro. Magers always left some change to pay for the water.
"She was one of a kind. I never knew why she was doing what she was doing. I never asked," she said.
Returning from Magers' funeral, Dean-Walker caught herself looking for the burro lady, who was always somewhere along the way, sometimes miles and miles from where you last saw her.
"It's going to be really strange without her," Dean-Walker said. "I'll be looking for her for a long, long time."
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