On their breaks, they like to sit high up on the dam and watch as the woman below them limps around her 7 acres with everything from potbellied pigs to peacocks lined up behind her.
Besides, the sign on the entrance to her place reads "The Ark Farm and Art Studio."
She herself prefers "the clay lady" - it's on her business cards - because clay is her medium of choice.
"I'm just an artist trying to be a rancher," she says with a shrug.
It's hard for an outsider to call Lonepine a community, now that the lonely Lonepine store out on Highway 38 is closed and up for sale. The store was downtown Lonepine, and there otherwise is no town to speak of, just scattered farms and ranches in this area a few miles north of Hot Springs.
But Lonepine is still a dot on highway maps, and there are still people who call it home.
This 61-year-old woman is one of them, and we thought maybe you'd like to put a name to her other than "ark," "goat" or "clay."
Meet Joan Nevarez. More than anything, as you'll learn, she is a survivor.
First, meet the menagerie that is the Ark Farm.
The truth is, Nevarez is several elephants, giraffes and crocodiles shy of ever being able to properly fill an ark. Indeed, you can find more varied, and exotic, animals kept on other places right here in Lonepine.
But you get a feeling the animals on the Ark Farm are almost like one large family, with Nevarez as the matriarch.
We say almost, because it is a working farm.
There are 42 goats, 15 chickens, 11 geese, 10 peacocks, five dogs, four potbellied pigs, four cats, three llamas and two donkeys.\\
Throw in three French hens and two turtle doves, and you'd almost have a Christmas carol.
A lot of them, Nevarez considers pets. One of the goats, a youngster named Spanky, has brown spots on one side of his white fur because he insists on curling up too close to the wood stove inside her house. Spanky loves people, likes to nibble gently on their clothing, and gets so tickled when visitors arrive he does a sideways dance around the farm.
But, as we said, it's still a working farm. Nevarez drinks goat milk and also makes yogurt and cheese from it, eats eggs from the chickens and geese, butchers goats for their meat and occasionally sells an animal or bird."The irony of life," she says with a smile, picking up one of two tiny goats born just that morning on the farm, as she carries a goatskin backpack she made after tanning the hide of one of the animals she had butchered for food. "People may think it's coldhearted, but I know where my food comes from."
Nevarez came to Lonepine a dozen years ago from Missoula, where she and her animals lived on the edge of an old ranch off Mullan Road.
"I had to leave," she says. "Missoula was getting too civilized."
Her mother and an aunt bought the property in Lonepine, just below the forested hills next to the reservoir.
"I had to be near water," she says. "I've got to be able to swim, and take my kayak out."
The water-side location does have one drawback in this otherwise arid country - mosquitoes, by the billions.
"Big clouds of them," Nevarez says, "so huge that I thought they were a tornado one day. At 6 p.m. in the summer you can hear them, it's a visible hum, and I need a mosquito net to sleep at night."
Except for the birds and animals and mosquitoes, Nevarez lives here alone, just beneath the dam. She doesn't own a vehicle, and makes the 14-mile round trip into Hot Springs on a bicycle.
She hasn't driven in years, hasn't felt she could, not since her former husband kicked her in the head while he was wearing logging boots.
Over the course of an afternoon, Nevarez's life story reveals itself in bits and pieces. She has survived not just a head injury incurred through domestic violence, but also a lightning strike, a near-drowning, a hit-and-run accident and the death of her only child.
The loss of 16-year-old Tonia, to an overdose of the antidepressant prescription drug Amitriptyline, was the hardest event, but the scariest occurred right here next to her farm.
Nevarez was walking along the Lonepine Dam five years ago when her foot slipped between two rocks, got caught, and she fell over backward.
The bone in her shin snapped, broke through the skin, and all but sliced her foot off as she went down.
"The bone came out and just cut off my foot," she says. "All that was attached was a piece of skin on one side. I screamed for 45 minutes, but no one heard me."
Nevarez moved the rocks, extracted her foot, and "put it back together, like a puzzle. I thought, 'This is one time you're not going to get up and walk away from something.' "
She slid down the dam and crawled home to call for help. An ambulance took her to Polson.
"They were pretty impressed I hadn't passed out," she says.
Doctors reattached the foot, but she was left with a severe limp.
Born in Orlando, Fla., Nevarez was raised in Arlington, Va., where her mother was a secretary for various congressmen in nearby Washington, D.C., and her father worked for the Department of Agriculture.
"My dad was a cowboy from Texas who got me excited to live in the country," Nevarez says. "And we had a neighbor who was from East Glacier, and she'd tell us stories about growing up in Montana, and had a big painting of East Glacier hanging over her fireplace. Even when I was 6, 7, 8, I thought, 'I've got to go to Montana.' "
Married at the age of 19, she and her husband moved out West, to Bozeman, but after she became pregnant with Tonia, they returned to Virginia to be closer to family.
"After the baby was born, my husband got violent," she says. "I put up with hitting, kicking, spitting. But when he knocked me unconscious, after I woke up, I knew it was time to go."
Nevarez packed a suitcase, loaded two sacks full of baby food, and took a train to New York City, where a friend took her in. She and Tonia later returned to Bozeman, where "I worked in the kitchen at (Montana State University) and raised my child."
They also spent time in Alaska, and eventually settled in Missoula, where Nevarez studied art at the University of Montana.
It was there that Nevarez, pedaling her bicycle home in the dark, was struck by a truck.
Her bike had lights, the truck didn't.
"When I woke up I thought I was in heaven," she says, "because I was covered in snow, and so was everything else."
The lightning strike also happened in Missoula. The bolt hit a telephone pole, and the current traveled into her home, burned up her answering machine and exploded out of her television set, hitting her in the chest.
"I had a lot of energy for a week after that," she says with a laugh. "I'd ride home from work, clean, do laundry - I don't recommend it, but wow, it was powerful."
The near-drowning came when Nevarez was 18, and visiting Belgium. She came across a large boat that had washed up on the Atlantic Ocean shore, climbed on board to snoop around, and soon realized the tide had come in and was carrying her back out to sea.
"I jumped off, but I got caught in an undertow that pulled me a mile out to sea," she says. "A voice in my head told me to get on my back and just float - I was too tired to swim anymore - and I knew I'd either go farther out to sea, or end up back on shore."
She eventually washed back up on the beach.
"I'm a cat with nine lives, I guess," she goes on. "But the last one, the leg one, that was a bit much. I didn't walk away from that."
I have this little framed memory of two of my young students in springtime here, working in the back yard under a blooming crab apple tree. I left them and went into the house to get some soapy hand wash water.
As I stood in my friend's back door I heard the children singing together as they worked. It was hot that day and there was a little wind, so the flower petals were blowing in the wind down the street in little pink whirlwinds. And the wind was perfumed with the smell of the flowers swirling around the singing children sitting in the shade of the old apricot trees by the noisy creek one spring day in Hot Springs. How I wish I'd had a camera to record that scene. Maybe I'll paint it someday. This is why I teach children.
- Joan Nevarez
"She's an original," says Beth Lo, a professor of art at the University of Montana who has known Nevarez for years. "She's a wonderful, kind, generous person who has found a way to live out her dream, living close to the earth and sharing her art."Adept at both drawing and ceramics, Nevarez makes colorful masks and plates from clay, and will sketch a portrait from a photograph for the bargain-basement price of $22.
"When she lived on Mullan Road I used to take my classes out there to do pit-firing," Lo says. "The students loved it because it was this crazy little farm with potbellied pigs and peacocks and a donkey. Joan has a lot of skills. She's been making artwork around here for 35 or 40 years."
In her portfolio, Nevarez has photographs of some of her work. One piece, a ceramic fountain, is a nude woman. The water for the fountain streams out of the woman's eyes and down her breasts - but nearby sits an elf with a new heart for her.
Another picture shows one of her colorful ceramic masks that Nevarez accidentally dropped, then glued back together.
"I called it 'Ms. Battered Woman,' " Nevarez said. A woman who visited the Ark Farm and Studio loved it, and asked the price.
"I said, 'How much do you have?' " Nevarez says.
The woman counted out $66.20 from her purse. The price became $66.20.
"She used to baby-sit our son, and in the dead of winter she'd bike in from Mullan Road to our house in the Rattlesnake and then we'd take her and her bike back home," Lo says. "But she's always been great with kids. She used to work with Head Start here in Missoula, and I'll bet she's probably working with kids in Hot Springs now."
That she is. With the help of the Hot Springs Artists Society, Nevarez will again offer free clay classes to kids in the city park this summer.
"She feels passionate about bringing this media to our kids," society president Norah Potts reported to members. "She told me, 'There is a sad path that children can take into drugs and alcohol. If just one child takes the path of art, it is all worth it.' "
"Nothing replaces a child," Nevarez says, "but I love teaching pottery to the kids in Hot Springs."
And raising goats and potbellied pigs, and living out here in this isolated place. After two years of heavy equipment rumbling around just off her farm, the dam reconstruction should be finished soon.
The "ark lady" and her animals will have this space, and the solitude a place like Lonepine offers, back to themselves.
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