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"When my parents first saw the 688-acre ranch that sits between the Santa Ynez Valley and the Pacific Ocean, with sweeping views of both, they fell in love with it. It was 1973, and my father&amp;#039;s two terms as California governor would soon be coming to an end. At that time it was called Tip Top Ranch. In an odd twist of fate, it was owned by the parents of a girl named Glenda Cornelius, who had been my roommate at Orme, the coed boarding school in Arizona where I spent my high school years. Glenda was a rodeo rider, a tall, sturdy girl who could rope a cow, tame a wild horse, and chew tobacco with the best of them. Her parents, Roy and Rosalie Cornelius, had always planned to leave the ranch to her, but when Glenda was killed in a head-on collision one New Year&amp;#039;s Eve, they decided to sell the land that would have been her inheritance. In 1974 my parents became the new owners, and they renamed it Rancho del Cielo: Ranch in the Sky. To get there you have to make your way up a narrow mountain road that&amp;#039;s basically a series of switchbacks. Being in a vehicle that&amp;#039;s passing another coming in the opposite direction on one of those curves has probably inspired more than a few religious conversions. My father redid the floors of the small adobe house with adhesive tiles meant to look like terra-cotta pavers. He was so enthusiastic about them. &amp;quot;A fraction of what the real ones would cost!&amp;quot; he exclaimed. &amp;quot;And they look so real!&amp;quot; Of course, they didn&amp;#039;t. They looked exactly like what they were: vinyl tiles, colored to look like faux-brick, with adhesive on the back. It was kind of charming, though, to witness his enthusiasm, and only when you got around to realizing that he could have afforded the real thing did you touch upon the tender heart of who he was underneath: a young boy who grew up poor in Illinois, often wondering if there would be enough money for food. None of us stray too far from our beginnings, even if you end up becoming the Leader of the Free World.  The same frugality led him to install prefab showers in the two bathrooms, and he was quite excited about them, too \u2014 so easy, you don&amp;#039;t have to build a thing! It made him keep the old Jeep that hadn&amp;#039;t exactly been new when I was a teenager. He taught me to drive stick shift on it at our old ranch in Agoura. Somehow he kept it going, seeing no reason to replace the thing if it would still start (which took a few tries). He didn&amp;#039;t hesitate to put Barbara Walters in the passenger seat for an interview, the leather taped and retaped where it had ripped over the years. The ranch was my father&amp;#039;s refuge, his sanctuary; it fed his soul. He knew the trails and the names of all the various trees and shrubs. He trimmed back the branches of oak trees so the vista of the Pacific Ocean was more dramatic. The branches he cut \u2014 from both oak and madrone trees \u2014 would become logs for the fire, which often burned all day, since that was the only source of heat in the house. The sight of smoke curling up from the chimney was a familiar one whenever I went to the ranch. Eventually he started a cemetery, called Boot Hill, for beloved animals who had come to the end of their lives, complete with stones on which he carved the pets&amp;#039; names. He built fences from old telephone poles, offering the horses wide pastures on which to roam while still keeping them from wandering off across hundreds of acres. He&amp;#039;d saddle up two horses after breakfast, call for my mother, and help her onto her horse, always a slow one since she was hardly an equestrian. And off they&amp;#039;d go into the hills. I remember the ranch in those early days, before my father&amp;#039;s presidency, before a guard shack was installed at the main gate and prefab buildings to house the Secret Service were assembled from pieces air lifted in. Before extra lighting was installed outside the house, as well as a few electric eyes. There is no question that it changed when it became the Western White House. My parents hosted Queen Elizabeth and Mikhail Gorbachev; important bills were signed there. But there was always a magic to that land \u2014 a peacefulness \u2014 that nothing could intrude upon. To feel what the ranch is, you have to imagine no sound except wind, the calls of birds, and the thud of horses&amp;#039; hooves as they amble up hillsides. There is no background noise of the city; within minutes you forget the city exists. The night sky is flecked with so many stars, even moonless nights seem bright. On damp days, fog wraps around the highest hilltops and settles into the valleys, soft as forgiveness. Hours pass more slowly there, and once upon a time a father and daughter could mend whatever fissures had opened between them simply by saddling up horses and riding along the trails. My father said about the ranch, &amp;quot;If it&amp;#039;s not heaven, it&amp;#039;s at least in the same zip code.&amp;quot; Until recently, I hadn&amp;#039;t been back since a day in 1997, when I drove up with my mother. My father had slipped so deeply into Alzheimer&amp;#039;s by then that it frightened him to go to the ranch \u2014 all that open space, the wide, endless sky. His world was getting smaller and smaller. He needed walls around him, a ceiling above. He could no longer understand the green vastness that he once craved. My mother wouldn&amp;#039;t say that she was selling the ranch, but it was obvious to me. She was taking personal possessions from the house; the tack room was empty, the saddles and bridles already sent to the Reagan Library or given away. The horses were gone, also given away. The only animal that remained was one of the two Texas longhorns someone had given to my parents. They were named Duke and Duchess. Duke had died by then, and I saw duchess lying alone in the shade of an oak tree. That image of her became the emblem of my own sadness. The ranch will pass to someone else, I thought. I&amp;#039;ll probably never see it again. It was clear and windy that day. I sat on the slope of a hillside and felt my father everywhere on the land that spread out around me. I let myself cry, because no one was around to see. I watched the wind sweeping across the tall grasses, caressing them into velvet ripples. I heard a hawk&amp;#039;s cry high above, and I wondered what would happen to the fields and hills my father loved so much. What happened was that the Young America&amp;#039;s Foundation bought it in 1998. YAF is a nonprofit youth organization, tax-exempt because of its activities, which include lectures on college campuses, conferences, and internships. Its slogan is &amp;quot;the conservative movement starts here.&amp;quot; YAF announced that the house and the ranch would be preserved and the property would be &amp;quot;a living monument to Reagan&amp;#039;s ideas, values, and lasting accomplishments.&amp;quot; According to Ron Robinson, the president of the group, &amp;quot;Young America&amp;#039;s Foundation is committed to preserving and protecting both the Reagan legacy and the ranch itself, which will be maintained just as it was when President Reagan lived there.&amp;quot; I knew my mother (now 91) had returned one final time after the sale to bring back some remaining personal items from the house. I knew that, contrary to what many people think, the ranch was not used for big events or to showcase speakers. All of that, including Sarah Palin&amp;#039;s much publicized appearance in February 2011, happened at the Reagan Ranch Center that the YAF runs in Santa Barbara, about 45 minutes away. I also knew from photographs that the ranch did appear to have been preserved. Only small groups are allowed to visit, by invitation only. Still, I didn&amp;#039;t allow myself to think about going up there, even though the land often came into my dreams. Part of it was the fear of disappointment. What if, despite what the photographs showed, it didn&amp;#039;t seem the same? What if I felt again the overwhelming sadness that consumed me on my last visit, in 1997? Part of my reluctance, I have to admit, was the political identity of the group that owns it. They&amp;#039;re Republican; I&amp;#039;m not. Eventually, none of those seemed like good reasons. This is not a story about politics, despite the election season. It&amp;#039;s the story of a daughter returning to a place her father loved with all his soul. I&amp;#039;d read in some of YAF&amp;#039;s press releases that visitors to the ranch feel as though they&amp;#039;re on a &amp;quot;pilgrimage&amp;quot; to better understand Ronald Reagan. I decided it was time I made a pilgrimage of my own. I worked out a day with Andrew Coffin, the director of the Reagan Ranch, and early on a Tuesday morning my friend David, my dog Gracie, and I embarked on a road trip up from Los Angeles. The day was crisp and blue, with white, muscular clouds edging the sky \u2014 a stroke of luck, since climbing the steep mountain road in fog is vaguely suicidal. Once up there, I actually passed the entrance to the ranch twice; we were early and Andrew hadn&amp;#039;t arrived yet, and without the guard shack there, the gate looked different. &amp;quot;I lost the ranch!&amp;quot; I said, and I realized how apt that statement was, since it was how I&amp;#039;d felt for the past 15 years. As we passed through the gate, the land that unfolded before us took my breath away, as it always had. Far from being the desolate acreage of 1997, with no animals except wildlife and one lonely cow, I saw three white horses on the first wide hillside that catches the eye when you arrive, and two more horses in the smaller corral right in front of the house. I had to laugh at that, because my mother would never have allowed horses to live so close. Duchess, the Texas longhorn who tore at my heart on the last day I was there, died years ago and is buried in Boot Hill. There are now, however, six new longhorns roaming around the ranch. My father had a ritual for burying the larger animals \u2014 horses and cows \u2014 in the pet cemetery, one that the current owners have faithfully honored and carried on. Duchess&amp;#039;s body was driven out to one of the far fields and left there for predators like vultures, coyotes, and bobcats \u2014 the ones who survive because other animals die. It&amp;#039;s simply &amp;quot;letting nature take its course,&amp;quot; my father used to say. Then her bones were collected, brought back to the cemetery, and buried in the earth, and a carved stone marker was placed on her grave. When my parents&amp;#039; last dog, Rex, died years after the ranch had been sold, my mother asked that he be buried there as well. I found his stone marker close to those of other dogs who had graced our lives and then passed on. The house has been maintained exactly as it was when my parents owned it, although carpet runners have been placed strategically across the adhesive tile floor. Marilyn Fisher, the curator of the ranch, said she wasn&amp;#039;t sure if they could still find those tiles, should any of them need to be replaced. Apparently other consumers weren&amp;#039;t as smitten with them as my father was, and they&amp;#039;ve been discontinued. It&amp;#039;s well known that the circa 1872 house is small\u2014only 1,800 square feet\u2014but I was surprised, seeing it again, by how much smaller it felt than before. Like when you revisit a home you lived in as a child, except I was hardly a child when I spent time there. The furniture looked undersize to me; I wondered if my father was ever really comfortable sitting in the living room chairs. Where he was comfortable, and where I wanted to investigate, was in the tack room. The smell of saddles was an elixir for him, the task of grooming horses something he delighted in and would never rush through. When I was there in 1997, the tack room was dusty and empty; it felt as though ghosts had already taken it over. But now it&amp;#039;s full of saddles, bridles hang neatly on pegs, and photographs I recognize from my childhood \u2014 past horses, our old ranch in Malibu \u2014 decorate the walls. One thing that&amp;#039;s completely new is a flat-screen TV off to the side. Within minutes I understood why it&amp;#039;s there. Andrew switched it on, and there was footage of my father brushing out a horse&amp;#039;s mane, cleaning the hooves, talking casually to whoever was behind the camera about how the goldfish he&amp;#039;d put in the lake got too big and bred too much. There hadn&amp;#039;t been enough oxygen, so some had died. He was proudly describing how he&amp;#039;d put an aerator in the center of the lake so the fish could survive. This is how he comes into my dreams, I thought \u2014 in ranch clothes, whistling softly while he tends to the horses. I almost believed I could walk out the door of the tack room and find him there, boots crunching on the gravel, horses tethered to the railings. In the garage behind the tack room, the old Jeep is still there, although the seats have finally been recovered. I remember him piling us into the Jeep on Thanksgivings; no one wanted a worn-out seat. Four deer watched us calmly as we drove along one of the rutted ranch roads. The deer on this land know that people pose no threat to them, my father always pointed out. That&amp;#039;s why they&amp;#039;re so docile and serene. There&amp;#039;s no need for them to be skittish. On a high trail, two vultures hung on air currents, searching the ground, and a hawk soared above us. Where the helicopter pad used to be there&amp;#039;s a view of the Santa Ynez Valley \u2014 green swaths of open land and a deep blue lake, a scene that looks as if it were painted by the hand of God. When it was time to leave, I remembered what I&amp;#039;d always known about the ranch, and what my father knew as well: It goes with you. It&amp;#039;s impossible to leave it behind and not hold fast to it in your memory and your heart. The wind blows strong here. It shears away the past, but it also lifts from the grasses and rocks all that can never be lost. My father left his story on these acres. I came back to find him, but in doing so I also had to gently let him go. He belongs to the world; he always did. And this land now belongs to people who long to know him better, just as his children longed to be closer to him. We&amp;#039;ve all been on a pilgrimage to find him, and it brought us to the same place: to the sweep of wind through grasses and the soft eyes of deer, to the cycle of life and death that nature has exquisitely designed and that he believed should be respected. To the brightness of stars that can happen only far from the city, and the brightest one in the heavens \u2014 the North Star \u2014 that my father pointed out to me when I was a child. &amp;quot;If you know where that is,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;you can always find your way home.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a846/patti-davis-on-reagan-family-rancho-del-cielo/>