The Traveling Midwife
Dawn Cockrell worried she wouldn’t make it in time.
It was the middle of the night when the call came, and she sprung out of bed and threw on the scrubs she’d hung up the day before. She piled boxes with oxygen tanks, medications, and other supplies into the trunk of her gray Hyundai and set off from her home in Alpine. The road opened up once she left the boundaries of the small West Texas town; the stars turned the sky to blue-gray, silhouetting the mountains in the distance. The dry desert air blew in through the front windows. Even in hurried moments like this, she could appreciate why she did this work, in this place.
The vast desert region is a stark example of the dearth of maternity care in rural areas around the state. More than half of Texas’ 254 counties have no OB-GYN.
She pressed on the gas. Past the Marfa Lights viewing stop off Highway 90, through the center of town, south past the inland Border Patrol checkpoint. Then the directions become more opaque: Twenty miles or so after the “Y” in the road, turn onto the winding dirt path; careful over the cattle guards; keep an eye out for wild hogs. If you’ve passed the creek, you’ve gone too far.
It’s just over an hour drive from Cockrell’s home to the white house on a hill that sits in the vast, empty space between Marfa and Big Bend State Park, where Rachel Mellard had woken that night to forceful contractions. She’d spent the past couple days in latent labor, walking around the ranch where she and her family live and work—tending cattle, raising horses, and home-schooling her four young boys. The Mellards make the hourlong drive into Alpine for church on Sundays; occasionally, they stop in Marfa, about 40 minutes away, to visit the post office or feed store. The family doesn’t have much in common with the visitors who’ve transformed the longtime ranching community into an unlikely arts hub, Mellard says. “It’s like two different worlds. We live in our own little world and they live in theirs.”
When her contractions became more consistent overnight, Mellard’s husband called Cockrell to tell her the baby would be there soon.
The 49-year-old traveling midwife is used to speeding—she figures it’s better her than the person in labor. Sometimes, when police saw the bumper sticker Cockrell had on an old van, “Midwives help people
