Don’t call Amy White a domestic violence victim. She’s a hardcore rancher now.

Amy White purses her glossy lips, plants her knee-high rubber boots shoulder-width apart and points an Ithaca rifle at a cactus paddle 100 yards away. Her boxer bulldog, Bubba Tickleshitz, and black Lab, Max, seem unphased by the blast, hovering protectively near her legs.

In the space of nine months, White has gone from fiancée, living with her partner and his children in downtown Gonzales, to solo homesteader of this sprawling ranch off River Road.

It’s been a non-linear journey. White owned a home in Seaside, then one in South Salinas, before moving in with her then-boyfriend.

Their relationship of two and a half years ended last July when, according to her victim statement filed with the Monterey County District Attorney’s office, he lost his temper, throwing her up against a door and fracturing a bone in her left hand.

She called 911, and he was arrested.

Less than two months later, he pleaded to a felony count of infliction of corporal injury on a spouse or cohabitant. He was sentenced to two months in jail and three years probation, with a restraining order to keep away from White.

She was out of the relationship, and out of a home.

“So much happened on that day,” she says. “As a woman, you can go in so many different directions.”

It wasn’t just her hand that was broken. Her heart was, too, and it threatened to take her sense of self-worth with it.

~ ~ ~

In August, White and Ruth Rachel started looking at the housing market in South Salinas.

After scoping a string of uninspiring houses in White’s $400,000 range, they began to lose faith she’d find the right home at the right price. And she couldn’t easily be a renter with 10 chickens, two dogs and a cat.

Rachel isn’t just White’s Realtor, but also her friend. They had met through professional networking: Rachel is a former development director at Planned Parenthood, and White is executive director of LandWatch Monterey County, a progressive land-use watchdog group that advocates for smart growth.

As they toured yet another home they felt cost too much for the TLC it needed, White sunk into a chair at the kitchen table. “She said, ‘I just don’t know what I’m going to do,’” Rachel recalls.

The friends hashed out a new strategy over a glass of wine, and that’s when Rachel suggested buying land. The Realtor had never done a land deal before, and White wasn’t sure how she’d run a ranch on her own, but they built up each other’s courage.

“It was always my dream to own land,” White reflects later. “I just didn’t think it would happen at 33.”

Meanwhile, White was pressing charges against her former fiancé. It helped that she had a long-time friend at the District Attorney’s office. Deputy DA Jimmy Panetta didn’t handle White’s case, but he helped explain how the process works and what she should expect.

“In many domestic violence sentences, fear drives people not to prosecute,” Panetta says. “Fortunately, Amy is a very tough woman.”

Prosecutor Kellin Dunne agrees. “[White] was very much involved and wanted to be aware of the process – more so than other people,” she says. “She clearly wanted to put [the incident] in her past and move on.”

Her ex-fiancé’s conviction was the final sentence in one chapter of White’s life. But she was already writing the next. Ruth Rachel flagged a just-listed parcel off River Road, a desirable rural area that doesn’t see much real estate inventory, and they went out to see it.

“It was love at first sight, frankly, for both of us,” Rachel says. “I believe what’s meant to be is meant to be, and it just worked out.”

White made an all-cash offer, using the profit from her home sale plus short-term loans from friends, which she later backfilled with a loan from Pacific Valley Bank. She closed on the property in September.

“The stars were aligned,” White says. “The universe said, ‘Amy gets this.’”

But White’s friend warned her of the costs still ahead. “I told her,” Rachel says, “‘do not underestimate the money it will take to get that place up to snuff.’”

~ ~ ~

Life on Two Girls Ranch (named for White and her mom, a Seasider who plans to retire on the property) runs on sweat, wine and neighborliness. Often all at once.

White’s property borders a vineyard. Its workers saved her new home, literally, when a delivery truck couldn’t make it up the dirt path to her parcel in January. The driver dropped three crates containing the pre-fabricated yurt White had ordered on the road below; the vineyard workers used a forklift to hoist it the rest of the way.

Yes, a yurt: a round tent over a wooden frame, invented by Central Asian nomads. White didn’t have much money left after buying the ranch, and she’d once loved sleeping in a yurt in the Virgin Islands.

But before she could have a yurt, she needed a deck to set it on. And before she could have a deck, she had to clear the land. “Two months of chainsawing fallen trees,” she says, “which is truly the best way to mend a broken heart.”

From there, White’s role became, in her words, “lumber mover, burrito and beer fetcher, county permit and architect dealings.” It took contractor John Gill a month to build the deck, which cost White $26,000, then just two days to set up the yurt, which had cost her $16,500. She celebrated with what she calls “an unruly party for the ‘erection.’”

As we chat, she suddenly jumps up, cups her hands over her mouth and calls to a neighbor rolling past in a pickup truck. He makes a sharp turn up her road, and she runs out to hand him a new bottle of bourbon – trade, she explains later, for tractor work.

As much as she’s leaned on neighbors for extra hands, White has also relied on her friends. One pal brought a massive redwood slab to turn into an outdoor bar. Others have just kept her company. She has lots of parties that, by her account, get pretty wild. “Buy a piece of land out in the middle of nowhere,” she says, “and you’ll find out who your friends are.”

Still, most days, it’s just her. She’s learned to operate heavy farm machinery and split firewood. All the hauling and lifting has burned off 10 pounds, she says.

As a woman living alone, she also felt it was important to stockpile some guns. She buys ammo at the gas station and keeps snake shot around for rattlers – blasting one that was poised to strike her dog just after our visit. It was her first animal kill.

“When the neighbors come out here, we have big parties and eventually we bring out the guns,” she says. “Shootin’s fun.”

~ ~ ~

Some people decorate their porch railings with potted flowers. White accented hers with a skull from a 320-pound wild boar.

A neighbor shot this one, she says, but a motion-detector video camera has recorded dozens more, plus a fox, a bobcat and a skunk, rooting around on her trails. (Visit this story online to see some of her trail-cam videos.)

Just a few yards away, Stella the goat bleats insistently on her tether. Two fuzzy kids, Billy and Boots, eventually amble back to nurse.

The goats are lawnmowers, White says, not for meat or milk, though some Mexican friends once milked Stella – mixing the warm goat milk with tequila, powdered chocolate and sugar to make a drink called el parajete.

White still works full-time for LandWatch, but she has ambitions to grow some money from her land, too. She’s planted a test orchard of 30 fruit trees, including plum, blood orange, apricot and Meyer lemon saplings fed by springs. She’s growing tomatoes, onions, greens and herbs in a fresh garden plot, and her chickens are about ready to be relocated to their new coop. When White gets everything planted, she says, she’ll be farming about 6 of her 100-plus acres.

She’s never owned rural land before, but over the years she’s honed some homesteading skills. While living in Seaside and Salinas, she canned marinara and plum sauces and bartered her hens’ eggs.

Now she has more options. She talks about culturing portobello and shiitake mushrooms in old oak logs and making fruit-juice concentrates out of her orchard harvests. She’s also marinating a few other entrepreneurial schemes she’s not ready to share publicly yet.

“It’s my passion, some would say obsession, to grow food,” she says as she bustles around her kitchenette, preparing a lunch of kale salad and curried chicken wrapped in freshly clipped garden chard. “Nothing makes me happier than to go out in the garden and clip my greens.”

With her back toward him, White’s tuxedo cat, Mr. Motherfucker, settles into the kitchen sink.

The roughly 500-square-foot yurt is one big room with areas for making food, sleeping, getting dressed and lounging. Just outside the back door is a tiny outhouse with a composting toilet. A clutch of rifles leans against a clawfoot bathtub. White has hung a lot of art, including a black-and-white photo of the old ranch house that was here once; she heard it had burned down. Her favorite piece is a cartoony oil painting of a startled-looking deer with headlight eyes.

It’s a small space to use as a house, but White says she doesn’t feel cramped because the yurt’s cornerless walls lead seamlessly to the outdoors. “The whole property is my living room,” she says.

In the daytime, crickets keep up a steady hum. At night, coyotes and owls put her to sleep. Sometimes the full moon wakes her up, beaming through the skylight.

~ ~ ~

We swirl Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir in juice glasses on White’s front deck and look east across a valley patchwork of asparagus and grape fields at the Gabilan Mountains.

The sun is now a blazing bulb hung from the center of a spotless blue dome, illuminating her new home at the feet of the Santa Lucia Mountains.

“The sun rises each morning behind Pinnacles [National Monument], and it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she says. “This is the best quality of life I’ve ever had.”

Before moving here, White had only lived in cities: San Diego, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, New York City, Cairo, Boulder, Seaside and Salinas. None, she says, felt as much like home as this one-stoplight town, where farmers watch the 4 o’clock news at Carlito’s Steakhouse & Bar.

Though work requires her to commute to Salinas and other parts of the county, White’s become country. “I don’t like going to the Peninsula [anymore],” she says. “Everyone’s high strung. And there’s traffic.”

Her thought is interrupted by a scrabbling of canine claws. Bubba Tickleshitz tumbles off the platform and falls a few feet onto the dirt below. He quickly clambers back up to the porch and looks at us with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. He seems fine, maybe just a little embarrassed.

Two weeks later, White called in tears with terrible news: She’d woken up to find Max, her Lab, dead and Bubba in serious distress. They had gotten into some rat poison, she said. As the Weekly went to press, Bubba was hanging on for his life.

But nine months after becoming a victim of violence, White has embraced a survival mindset. “What’s fascinating about domestic abuse is, it’s so rarely brought to light,” she says.

She has no plans to retreat. She’s traded square walls for a round yurt, city grids for open space. Her rolling ranch encompasses an oak canyon, where she plans to build a camping platform, and a sturdy coop where she’s about to relocate her chickens.

With hand healed and heart whole, White sees only possibilities.