People have sentimental ideas about life out west on a ranch.

There always is a, you know, a man and a woman, and they fall in love, and they're on a ranch, and they make a cattle drive.

And, you know, it's just a romantic thing.

That's Chachi Hawkins.

She's a cattle rancher in southwest Texas.

And she says, the reality is less romantic than that.

The bottom line is it's a lot of work and you're tired, you know, you get up at daylight

and, you know, you go to bed, you know, when it's dark, and you work your ass off in the interim. And I think people

really don't realize that that worked when they, you know, when they're branding and when

they're riding their horse and they're rope and a calf and all that stuff, that's hard.

As a rancher, there are a lot of things that are simply out of your control, like the weather.

You know, you don't see the drought situations and the, you know, the windmill busted and you'd have to fix it. And pulling a windmill and getting all of the pipe out of the well so that you can fix it.

That's hard. Ranching life is not easy.

But it's, it's great. It's really great.

I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of somebody from a different profession, a high school principal, a couples

therapist, a forensic accountant. We want to know about the highs of their jobs, the lows, the

stress points. Today we ask Chachi Hawkins what it's like to be a cattle rancher. We'll talk

about how she went from selling clothes to selling cattle, what it's like to

carry on a family legacy, and whether she gets attached to any of her calves, stay with us. Chachi Hawkins grew up in the city of Odessa in West Texas.

As a kid, she often visited the family ranch, south of Alpine, Texas, where three generations of her family had lived and worked, dating back to the early 1900s.

And so we always came here and always loved it.

And I, when I was a kid, I always knew that ultimately I wanted to be at the ranch.

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