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10 SANTA CRUZ WOMAN | SPRING 2016 Diane Porter Cooley grew up a country girl and an only child with horses and dogs instead of siblings; she reveled in a deep knowledge of her home turf. "I grew up with this sense of the land being there, just like a great gift for my enjoyment," she says. When she wanted to see friends, she'd saddle up her mare and ride from her family's two-bedroom farmhouse on Hall Road to Kelly Lake on the eastern edge of Watsonville, skirting the paved streets to save the horse's feet. She knew back roads, creeks and the ways of animals. The Pájaro hills—emerald in winter, gold in summer—functioned as North Star, a constant presence providing direction, location, company, belonging. "The hills were the first thing I grew up on," says Cooley, now 87. Petite, vigorous and possessed of a clear eye and keen wit, she lives with her husband Don Cooley at the base of those hills overlooking a sloping flank of green and fields beyond. "Walking and riding through these hills in late spring when the oat grasses are so high they brush the horse's stirrups, when the lupine is so blue and brilliant and fragrant that you inhale it into your memory—it goes way beyond your nose—and the thrill of saying, 'Oh, the buttercups are out!' Cooley graduated from Watsonville High, where bankers' daughters sat next to irrigation workers' sons in one of the state's best high schools and she joined Stanford's first postwar freshman class. She met a group of girls who would become lifelong friends, including a serious student from Arizona named Sandra Day (later O'Connor). Cooley moved to Colorado and, after marrying Don, moved to Connecticut and Southern California, where her love of the outdoors led her to work on The Nature Conservancy's preservation efforts in the Santa Monica Mountains. In 1980 she and Don, then at IBM headquarters in San Francisco, returned to the Pájaro Valley. Three decades had transformed it radically, from sleepy farming community to a populous, stratified industry town. "Socially, ethically, aspirationally, economically—everything had changed," she says. "The only thing that had stayed the same was the beautiful hills." Following the Porter family tradition of community giving—her parents had left their farm to the Elkhorn Slough Foundation, and cousins had donated property to UC Santa Cruz and to state parks for Nisene Marks—the Cooleys have donated a 680-acre conservation easement on their Circle P Ranch in the hills and a 360-acre easement on prime agricultural land on the valley floor. "I thought the best thing I can do is to leave this for people," says Cooley, gesturing toward the verdant scene outside her window. "The joy that I had in these hills is still here for any child to glory in." The 2007 donation jump-started preservation in the Pájaro hills, says, Stephen Slade, deputy director of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. "Diane is a true pioneer spirit, and she leads by example," he says. "Where she goes, others follow." Girl from The Country The natural beauty of Pájaro Valley shapes Diane Porter Cooley's philanthropy "The joy that I had in these hills is still here for any child to glory in." By Traci Hukill Diane Porter Cooley Nature-Loving Philanthropist Photo by Jennifer Pittman